Lawyer Jokes

This blog is usually a pretty one-sided affair -- I rant about the most recent thought to cross my primitive mind, you chuckle sadly and comment on how impressive it is that I can occasionally complete sentence together a string -- but today we're mixing things up a bit. I have a question and I want to hear from you, dear readers. The question is this: do you know of any professions where the practitioners are driven to talk about their work constantly, any time two or more of them are occupying the same general space?

Yes, there is something that prompted this query, thank you for asking. I'm going to preface it by saying that the two people I'm about to describe are among the best, most principled, all-around nicest people you could ever hope to meet in your life, so this stems purely from amusement, not any kind of genuine complaint. With that out of the way...

My father-in-law is an attorney, by all accounts a very well-respected and successful one. My brother-in-law just graduated law school a little over a year ago. (First in his class, I might add... he went to night classes, beat out the #1 day classes guy by like .01% in their GPAs; somehow that guy ended up the class valedictorian anyway. It's all politics.) Immediately afterward he was hired by a very well-regarded law firm and has apparently met with success so far, probably because my brother-in-law is maybe the hardest-working man on the eastern seaboard. He's great and always makes time for his family, but anytime he comes down to my wife's parents' house for a visit, it's with the laptop and cellphone, and he's guaranteed to spend at least half of Saturday or Sunday holed up in the basement working on a case. Totally understandable given his job, he's always cool about making time for the family afterward, so no biggie. But what cracks me up is that anytime -- anytime -- he and my father-in-law are together for longer than 5 minutes, they will discuss law. Guaranteed. They're both pretty good at turning it off when the rest of us are around and clearly bored, but anytime it's just the two of them or the rest of us are engaged in another conversation: law. This will go on for hours if you let it. It surprised me because you would think, back when he was working full time, attending classes at night with a newborn baby at home, and desperately cramming for finals while maintaining the highest GPA in his class (did I mention that?), my brother-in-law would want to get away from law for a weekend. Certainly now that he's working 60 hours a week and is guaranteed to at least be on call one day a weekend, bare minimum, you'd think he'd want to escape "shop talk" on those rare weekends when he can get away. I know I would in his shoes. Again, I say this all with affection; it doesn't bother me, I just find it fascinating. They literally cannot stop discussing law. I wondered if it was just them, but my mother-in-law, who has been around lawyers pretty much her entire adult life, told me that in her experience anytime you get two lawyers together, talk will invariably turn to law. Apparently this is a profession-wide thing, rather than being unique to my relatives.

So I'm just curious... does anyone else know of other professions where this is the case? I don't mean standard shop talk -- sure, whenever you hang out with people from your office it's likely you'll spend at least some time talking about work. That's a given. I mean whenever you get anyone from that profession together, they're guaranteed to start talking about it and keep talking about it for hours until their spouses force them to stop, usually for dinner. Don't leave me hanging, I want to hear your thoughts.