I would say many of them are rather smart. However I would also say that many of them are not very interedted in things.
That's a strange sentence I know, but what I mean is that they often seem to have a distinct lack of curiosity about the broader world.
I don't quite know why. I can think of a few things that contribute to this: having very little free time during their degree, and then being crazy overworked in internships (matches with doctors, who I find also share this intersection of traits), occupying one of the most adventurous periods of most people's lives for them with narrow toil and misery; mixing in a very incestuous social millieu which is constituted of people who not only work professionally within the same "industry", but usually have very similar backgrounds; charging in 6-minute increments, which has a strange psychological effect on how you spend your free-time by quantifying down to almost a minute the opportunity cost of anything else you spend time learning or doing, all while you already have a reasonably high paying job; already spending an enormous amount of time reading, collecting, arranging, reasoning, and synthesising about knowledge, which, having completed a masters degree, I can assure you, has a deleterious effect on one's capacity and interest in doing so during one's meagre free time.
These are just ad hic theories about what might contribute to the phenomena, but the point is, while many lawyers are intelligent, my experience is they are both ignorant and incurious in many ways.