When I, good friends, was called to the bar

Today, I'm going to do something a little different. I'm going to talk about lawyering. If you want to draw any inferences about or comparisons to the profession of writing, you may feel free to do so.

Becoming a lawyer is hard work and takes a lot of money. You have to get good undergraduate grades to get into a good law school, and get high scores on your LSAT. Once in law school, it takes a lot of money to stay there for the three years it takes to come out the other end with your diploma in hand. There are all kinds of hard courses you have to take.

Exam week is grim. Students huddle together in study rooms of the law library, at their apartments or dorms, at Perkins because it's open all night and they won't throw you out if you do nothing but drink coffee for seven hours. Then, after three years, those of you who are still left (and yes, the numbers do drop alarmingly) must face the bar exam. You sign up for a bar review course, another big chunk of money spent, and toil up to six hours a day in a classroom watching bar review videos, then go to the library or home to study some more.

The bar exam in our state is held twice a year, in one of the three major cities, in a hotel. The year I took it, they held it at the Galt House in Louisville. Those of us not native to that city drove down (or up or across), plunked down the cost of a room at the Galt House and waited for our face-to-face meeting with Grim Destiny. The exam takes two days.

Then you drive home and spend the next two to three months waiting for the results. For me, this was a period of excruciating back pain and stomach problems for which the doctors could find no cause. Of course not. It was just anxiety.

The exam results finally arrive. You console your friends who flunked, celebrate briefly with the friends who passed, and set about trying to find a job. You also go down to the state capital to get sworn in. At the swearing in ceremony, the Chief Justice of the state or federal court will shake your hand. This is a big deal. It means, you are in the club now. It's a club you've worked long and hard to become a member of.

You get a job. You go to your first bar conference. You are overwhelmed by the ethics panels. You read the ethics rules in law school, but now the enormity of them sinks into your stomach like a lead weight. One slip could cost you your license, that license for which you worked and sacrificed.

Every month, the state law reporter mails out copies of the state supreme court's rulings on ethics charges. You read about fines, suspensions, and even lawyers losing their licenses for good.

And you look around you at all your colleagues. You know they worked just as hard as you did to get where they are. They walk the same tightrope as you.

So here's the thing. Lawyers never rat each other out. It's what outsiders jokingly refer to as "professional courtesy," while thinking about that cartoon of sharks not eating each other. But it's true.

Lawyers are a band of brothers. We are faced with enemies on two sides -- clients and the state ethics committee. Frivolous and false charges are leveled against us all the time. Sometimes the charges aren't false or frivolous. But they come from the outside. We don't rat each other out.

Becoming a writer does not require jumping through any of the hoops I've outlined above. You need merely plant your butt and start writing. No ethics committee is waiting breathlessly for you to make one slip before yanking away your license to write, because you don't need a license to write. There is no common enemy that writers share. Well, except one.