Egypt’s National Bar Association was established in 1912. Its original bylaws forbade its lawyer members from mixing with merchants, brokers or others who engaged in “exploitative” vocations. Years later, the Association’s first president, Ibrahim al-Hilbawi, wrote in his memoirs that in 1887 his work as a lawyer could have been detrimental to his marriage plans. The bride to be, who worked in the Khedival palace, did not understand what he did for a living. When she asked her officer about al-Hilbawi’s profession, he answered that a lawyer was “a forger and a swindler.” The purpose of this paper is to document and explain the changing views of the legal profession in Istanbul and Cairo from the mid-nineteenth century until the early decades of the twentieth century. The paper builds on studies of the creation of scholarly disciplines and professionalization in the modern Middle East. Histories of the legal profession in particular have focused on lawyers’ intellectual formation, career trajectories and political activism. By contrast, this paper will focus on how lawyers, a corps of professionals that was becoming increasingly visible from the last decades of the nineteenth century onwards, were understood by their contemporaries. It will draw on newspaper collections, state-enacted regulations of the profession and publications of lawyer associations. As such, this paper engages with a broad question within intellectual and social history, namely, the question of reception. Intellectual histories are frequently interested in exploring the lineage of certain ideas and why these ideas become manifest in certain contexts. They are usually less interested in how these ideas were understood within the larger social context. This paper attempts to overcome this difficulty through capturing the extent to which certain ideas about the legal profession became thinkable or widespread. It focuses on Cairo and Istanbul not only because they were the sites of momentous experiments of legal reform in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but also because of the existence of a vigorous journalistic tradition in both cities, which would enable a study of popular ideas.