Written by Ceriae on June 4, 2025
In popular culture, lawyers take on an almost mythical role as…some kind of important person, but not many people really know what lawyers do. It can be argued that legal institutions would like to keep it that way, to preserve a class of the elite that can interpret the law in their favor at the detriment of laypeople who don’t understand - but that’s a Spicy topic for a different day. Today, I’m going to demystify the concept of lawyering a bit - hopefully by dispelling some myths about what lawyers actually do.
One of the most prevalent (and understandable, but also funny) misconceptions that laypeople have about lawyers is that they know the law. There’s this idea that once you tell a lawyer about how you were sued for copyright infringement by taking a picture off of the internet, they’re going to immediately know which laws were broken and recite 17 U.S.C.A. § 102 back to you like some kind of walking encyclopedia of the entire body of law in the country that they practice in. Lawyers know the law, right? That’s what they’re there for.
Well, I’m here to set the record straight for all you folks out there - we don’t know or memorize jack or shit about the law. We Google, just like you - or, we use legal search engines that are better than Google, but the concept is the same. Sure, once you practice in one area of law long enough, you’re bound to memorize lots of things just from passive osmosis. However, that’s not the main goal of being good at practicing law. A seasoned housing attorney can probably tell you immediately whether the distance of electrical outlets in a building are up to code, but they don’t need to be able to do that to be an excellent lawyer. In fact, most excellent lawyers can pick up an entirely novel issue in an area of law that they’ve never encountered, with zero prior knowledge of any laws in that area, and knock their defenses out of the fucking park.
This goes double for when you’re just starting out. Sometimes your supervisor will just tell you, “hey, write me a memo about what kinds of ramps aren’t ADA accessible,” and you’re just going to have to do that, with having no idea beforehand what the fuck the ADA is, what kind of ramps there even are, and what counts as ‘accessible.’ Accessible to who? Accessible by what definition? What laws talk about this?? Well, you better scoot your little ass up to the monitor and get searching, because you’re about to find out all of that. And if you’re good at legal research writing, you’re going to pump out an amazing memo that tells your supervisor exactly what kind of ramps are ADA accessible and whether or not the ramps they’re considering in their case can be sued over.
Yep, that’s right - attorneys aren’t paid to know things. They’re paid to research and write - and that is the bread and butter of our job. Part of what makes a great attorney is the ability to operate off of very few direct instructions - I mean, your entire job is to search up what instructions (laws) apply to your case and how they’re relevant. There’s no Voice of God telling you which laws have been violated when someone fucks up installing your washer and floods your basement and flees. You search up that shit, and you put together an argument that says that you’re right.
A lot of the time, your research involves double-checking things that seem incredibly, stupidly obvious. At one point in my summer job, an attorney Googled ‘what is a tort’ - and while that is conceptually hilarious, it is also a perfectly valid and useful way to do things. Sure, lawyers most likely know what the general concept of a tort is, but probably not the exact meaning off the top of their head. Reciting definitions of legal terms isn’t what we do. If we want a specific plain and ordinary meaning of a word, we Google - because Google search engines are great at giving the most commonly used definition of a term.
(Also, what counts or doesn’t count as a tort isn’t actually strictly defined in the way that you think it would be. Just like everything in the law, it is something that is argued over in a myriad of situations and fact patterns.)
The bottom line is - lawyers aren’t paid to know the law. They’re paid to research (sometimes Google) the law and write arguments about how such and such law they found applies to their client’s situation. To be quite fucking honest, before I came to law school, I had no idea that was what lawyers actually did - and neither do most people. There’s a lot of confusion and lack of information about what lawyers actually do, but hopefully my blog post can contribute a little bit to telling more people about that. I am personally of the belief that everyone benefits from knowing more about the legal system, because this is the stuff that rules the society you live in - and demystifying the legal profession is a part of being better informed about what controls your life.