I'm not so sure about this. The average lawyer is someone practising in that area (otherwise why did you hire them and why are they working for you? your friend

I'm not so sure about this. The average lawyer is someone practising in that area (otherwise why did you hire them and why are they working for you? your friend? presumably you hired someone working in the area) and that person is someone with at the very least a few courses under their belt from law school and in Canada, 10 months of articling with another lawyer. There is a very good chance that they know a fair bit about the area and I would expect it to be considerably better than what you'd come up with even in many hours of research. Law school does teach you something and lawyers who've worked for even a couple years in an area have learned a lot from working on other people's problems. Long story short: the average lawyer you'd hire is one who knows a fair bit about the subject matter.