 The legal community may be small and close-knit (at the extreme, with only a few attorneys, all of whom know each other, and all of whom may be personally known to the community), and each individual attorney may handle a wide variety of legal matters as local needs dictate.Historically, such an attorney may have been more likely to have joined the bar by reading law rather than attending school, and in modern times may have (or may be assumed to have) graduated from a lower tier legal program.