"The more lawyers there are, the more people are out there to encourage others not to go to law school"
About this Quote
A joke dressed as a labor-market observation, this line flips the usual anxiety about lawyer overpopulation into a self-correcting punchline. David E. Kelley, a producer who built a career turning legal culture into prime-time entertainment, is winking at the strange economy of professional prestige: law school keeps selling itself as a ticket to status, even when the people holding the tickets are warning everyone else not to buy one.
The intent is mischievous but pointed. Kelley isn’t attacking “law” as an ideal; he’s skewering the pipeline. The more lawyers you create, the more first-hand witnesses you produce to the grind: debt, billable-hour purgatory, credential inflation, and the psychic wear of turning conflict into a daily job. That’s the subtext underneath the breezy rhythm. “Encourage others not to go” sounds altruistic, but it also hints at protectionism. When a field feels crowded, discouragement can masquerade as wisdom: a soft gatekeeping move that doubles as therapy for the disillusioned.
It works because it captures a very American paradox: the professions that market themselves as rational and meritocratic still run on myth. Kelley's background matters. As someone who translated courtroom life into drama, he knows how institutional systems create recurring characters - the idealist rookie, the burned-out veteran, the cynic with a mortgage - and how those characters talk. The line lands like dialogue you’d hear in a writers’ room: funny, bitter, and true enough to sting. It’s less a statistic than a cultural weather report from inside a status machine that’s started to squeak.
The intent is mischievous but pointed. Kelley isn’t attacking “law” as an ideal; he’s skewering the pipeline. The more lawyers you create, the more first-hand witnesses you produce to the grind: debt, billable-hour purgatory, credential inflation, and the psychic wear of turning conflict into a daily job. That’s the subtext underneath the breezy rhythm. “Encourage others not to go” sounds altruistic, but it also hints at protectionism. When a field feels crowded, discouragement can masquerade as wisdom: a soft gatekeeping move that doubles as therapy for the disillusioned.
It works because it captures a very American paradox: the professions that market themselves as rational and meritocratic still run on myth. Kelley's background matters. As someone who translated courtroom life into drama, he knows how institutional systems create recurring characters - the idealist rookie, the burned-out veteran, the cynic with a mortgage - and how those characters talk. The line lands like dialogue you’d hear in a writers’ room: funny, bitter, and true enough to sting. It’s less a statistic than a cultural weather report from inside a status machine that’s started to squeak.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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