Short answers, pulled from the story.
A lawyer is a person qualified to offer advice about the law, draft legal documents, or represent individuals in legal matters. The exact nature of the work varies by legal jurisdiction, legal system, and the lawyer's area of practice.
A barrister, also known as an advocate or counselor, typically specializes in arguing before courts, particularly higher courts. A solicitor, or attorney, prepares cases and gives advice on legal subjects, and in some jurisdictions also represents people in court.
In the United States, law is taught at the graduate level after an unrelated bachelor's degree, and a common prerequisite is writing the Law School Admission Test, the LSAT, which is scaled between 120 and 180. Most candidates earn a J.D. and pass the bar examination, and in a handful of US states a person may become a so-called country lawyer by reading law and passing the bar without attending law school.
The median pay among lawyers in the United States was $151,160 as of 2024, while solo practitioners average $65,000. In BigLaw firms, first-year associates make a median of $200,000 and eighth-year associates a median of $330,000.
Hostility toward the legal profession is widespread, with William Shakespeare writing "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers" in Henry VI, Part 2. Public distrust in the United States reached record heights after the Watergate scandal, and one study found 74.4 percent of participants thought lawyers were more interested in winning cases than seeing justice served.
The earliest people who could be described as lawyers were probably the orators of ancient Athens, though Athenian rules barred them from taking fees and organizing as a profession. If lawyers are defined as those who could practice openly and legally, the first were the advocates of ancient Rome after Emperor Claudius legalized advocacy as a profession.