Lawyer in 426: The Law of Citations ranks the great jurists

The profession is old enough that ancient Athens tried to prevent it from existing at all, requiring litigants to speak for themselves — a rule quickly worked around by paid speechwriters. Rome split advocacy from legal scholarship, and England later split the profession again into barrister and solicitor, a divide it still keeps while most of the world does not. Training, licensing and pay vary sharply by country: a first-year associate at a major US firm can earn several times a solicitor's starting salary in London.

This page traces the lawyer from Antiphon's Athens and Rome's advocati through the Inns of Court and the modern billable hour to today's software-driven practice. It covers how lawyers train, what the work actually looks like day to day, who its most celebrated figures are, and how exposed the profession is to AI — a live question now that software can draft a contract or summarize a discovery production in minutes, though someone still has to argue the case and carry the liability if it goes wrong.

How many years does it take to become a lawyer? In most common-law countries it's five to seven years: a three-year undergraduate law degree, or a US-style JD after an unrelated bachelor's, plus one to two years of vocational training and supervised practice before bar admission. Civil-law countries often add a mandatory post-degree clerkship, so the full path to genuinely independent practice frequently runs seven to nine years.