Apologies for the off topic but would you have any tips on writing lawyers who arent just smarmy?
Some negative traits for a lawyer character that aren't "smarmy asshole:"
Being gossipy. I have never, in my entire fucking life, met a lawyer who didn't like drama, and I am including myself in that. I know the exact details of at least three different affairs involving other attorneys in my area, all of which happened years before I started work. In law school I knew which professors had married students (and, in one case, divorced his wife who was also a professor at the same law school to marry a student), who was sleeping with whom, and who'd been kicked out for various infractions. This does extend to our clients, and we definitely will complain about them to other attorneys (within the bounds of not sharing confidential information).
On a similar note, being critical of other attorneys. So-and-so never files motions on time, or doesn't know the rules of evidence well enough to make objections, or can't write their way out of a paper bag.
Being competitive. This is more a thing with litigators, I think, but god does it feel good when you crush your opponent into the dirt. Law is an adversarial system with winners and losers, and it is so fun to be the winner. Even when you like the opponent, there's something innately satisfying when you destroy them with your superior skills.
Not knowing how other people operate. This can take a variety of forms. For some people, it's that "I have no idea if what I'm talking about is common knowledge or something only I know, so I need to explain it in detail" thing. For others, it can be "oh, not everyone thinks attempted murder is funny. Whoopsie." I had a conversation with a fellow attorney where I nodded along politely while he complained to me that representing landlords was no longer profitable for him, all the while thinking, "Does he....... does he not know that I do eviction defense?"
Being know-it-alls. I feel like this goes without saying, but quite a lot of lawyers are very confident in their knowledge and will be assholes about it. However, this doesn't stop them from...
Being perfectly average. The common idea about lawyers is that they're all Harvard-educated geniuses who know everything there is to know about everything. And I am here to tell you that lawyers are just as capable of being dumbasses as anyone else. I am incapable of doing math, and so are a lot of lawyers (the judge in the Alex Jones case kept joking about her inability to do math). When I was in law school editing the students' journal articles, I needed to give a remedial training on how to write essays because some people genuinely didn't fucking know how. And I'm not even getting into the guys who didn't know what sundown towns were.
On the flip side, some positive traits for a lawyer character:
Caring a lot. It is really, really common to burn out on law, either because your subject matter is depressing or your schedule is fucked or your clients just keep being in horrible situations that you can't help them in.
Being fucking nerds. About the law, about other interests like history or science, about fandom shit. I just found out that one of the public defenders here is taking his girlfriend (also a lawyer) to a con this week; he's easily 10+ years older than me and really good at oral arguments. I am mutuals on Tumblr with so many fucking lawyers. And that can include getting excited about weird shit, like me watching the Alex Jones trial the way other people watch sports events.
Having good social skills. Law is a service profession. Even in cases where your client isn't a human person (in-house counsel for a corporation, mergers & acquisitions, criminal prosecution where your client is The State), you are still providing a service and you are going to need to interact with the humans that benefit from that service, even if it's the complaining witness in a criminal case or the CEO of a company you work for. Attorneys with bad social skills – who are obstructionist to their opponents, or abuse their staff, or are bad with clients, or are smarmy assholes – are not liked in the profession, and being liked goes a long way with other attorneys. The number of times I've done things like call another attorney and said something like, "Hey, your client is violating the custody order, can you tell him to knock it off so I don't need to file something about it?" or "Why don't we both knock CPS out of this case and then do the adversarial thing when they're gone?" is... a lot.
Most lawyers are not making shitloads of money unless they are at very specific firms or doing extremely specific kinds of work. The majority of lawyers are basically middle class. So while the "rich asshole lawyer" stereotype exists for a reason, most lawyers aren't.
We have very strict ethical rules that we need to follow. Now, the ethical rules were implemented because people weren't being ethical on their own, but we do have them. If you want to be a nerd, go look up your local bar's sanctions page.
We specialize in different areas of law. Just like how an eye doctor might vaguely remember stuff about the endocrine system from medical school but probably doesn't know more than that, a criminal lawyer is probably not going to go into, say, wills & trusts. They can, but most people find their niche in an area they like.
There are other kinds of law than just corporate and criminal. Where is my seasons-long TV series about legal aid? Environmental prosecution? TAXES?
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amandla
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