At the end of chapter four, Atticus catches the children playing the Boo Radley game. Jem denies that their game has anything to do with Boo Radley when Atticus questions him about their activities in the front yard. In chapter five, Atticus comes home and catches Jem attempting to leave Boo Radley a letter in his windowsill. After chastising the children for bothering Boo Radley, Atticus also scolds them for reenacting Boo's life story in their front yard for everyone to see. Jem accidentally admits to playing the Boo Radley game that he denied earlier, telling Atticus, "We weren’t makin' fun of him, we weren’t laughin’ at him...we were just—" (50). Atticus then grins and informs Jem that he's caught him in a lie. Essentially, Atticus ends up getting Jem to admit that he was reenacting Boo's life story, and Jem becomes upset because he knows that Atticus used a common lawyer trick to catch him in a lie. When Atticus goes inside, Jem realizes that he has been "done in by the oldest lawyer's trick on record" and yells, "I thought I wanted to be a lawyer but I ain’t so sure now!" (51).
Jem's been caught out by an old lawyer's trick. The lawyer in question is his own father. Atticus has caught Jem and Dill trying to deliver a note to Boo Radley through a side window. As well as giving the boys a good telling off, Atticus uses his lawyer's bag of tricks to ask Jem a series of leading questions that makes the young man inadvertently confess what he's been up to.
Jem feels like he's been comprehensively diddled. He waits until his father's out of earshot before expressing uncertainty regarding his future career choices. Atticus had always made the law seem so incredibly noble, so right and proper, a shining beacon of morality and justice. Yet Jem has now discovered something that most people find out sooner or later—that lawyers often resort to underhand tricks to get their way.
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