As we are reminded of every day, the business of law is fundamentally flawed. The idea of hiring a bunch of great students who may or may not become great lawyers for a great deal of money and churning them through mountains of menial tasks until a few prove they can do real work sounds stupid on its face. And now it’s proving to be so as soon as the mountains of menial tasks shrink.

But the profession of law may or may not be under as much attack. A profession, or being a professional, or having professionalism can mean many things. On the one hand, a professional is simply someone who is paid for his or her skills, like a professional athlete (or blogger). On an other hand, professionalism means acting in a polite, businesslike, buttoned-up manner. And on the third hand, professionalism means spending additional resources to become a member of one of the learned professions (law and medicine being the two biggest) and the respect that goes along with having done so.

There’s no danger of the first going away. Until the Revolution occurs, the system of law in this country will always be complicated enough that some specially trained lawyers will be needed and they will be able to change. 11,000 lawyers get laid off in seven months and it sounds like the end of the world. But Microsoft recently completed a wave of 5,000 layoffs and that’s one company. Plenty of lawyers are still being paid handsomely to do their jobs; “counter-cyclical” is just the name of the game.

The second seems to be the focus of law schools. Law schools—wrongly so in my opinion—seem to have limited the promotion of professionalism to acting in that stoic, conservative (not in the political sense) manner. To their credit, some of this education targets real problems amongst attorneys, namely depression and alcoholism. But too often it’s a facade. Law schools believe that if someone talks like a professional, dresses like a professional, and carries themselves like a professional, they’ll be a professional. As if it’s impossible to talk well, dress well and have a dysfunctional personal life or do poorly at your job.

The third definition of professionalism is where it’s at, and it’s what the legal profession and law schools need to act quickly to regain. Even amongst their own, lawyers do not value their membership in a learned profession. Yesterday’s Tale From the Breadline post on Above the Law. In it “Max”, a laid off lawyer who should have been in demand but had to work very hard to eventually find work as a partner in a D.C. firm recounts how he was treated when searching for a job:

The whole process was infuriating. I remember thinking, “I sent you four emails. You can’t respond to anyof them?” It was pretty horrible. But, you know, I had a lot of time to think, and what I finally realized is that lawyers are inherently wussies. Sometimes they have no news because no one has made a decision, but no one wants to tell you.

Is this what lawyers have become: a bunch of passive-aggressive sissies? What happened to underdog plaintiff lawyers and “take no prisoners” defense firms who didn’t care if Granny was on a respirator and a fixed income, she wasn’t getting a dime? I’m not saying lawyers should become hated monsters, but even the Devil stands for something.

If this is how one member of the profession is treated, then is there really much value to being a member of the profession? If nothing else, the six-figure debt and three years of hazing should at least get you into a fraternity where you’re respect by your peers and your elders for going through something that the vast majority of people can’t or won’t go through. Advertising and greed doesn’t do nearly as much damage to the profession of law as one lawyer not giving the basic respect that another lawyer deserves.

That’s not to say that lawyers are so much better than everyone else and even other lawyers should look away in awe. But every member of a profession should have some level of respect for someone who when through the same rites of passage as they did. If that is gone, than the profession of law really is much closer to become the trade of law. And it’s sad when what’s needed to prevent this is not a legal Woodstock where we gather around a bonfire and sing Kumbaya, but just lawyers taking the little extra effort necessary to treat their brethren collegially and with respect.