Yup, there's the justification right on time. They had to abandon basic civility and professionalism to "hit their targets."

Thats why they can be abusive, ignore the company process for tickets, threaten their coworkers, whatever they want. They need to "stay on parnet track" and "hit their targets." No one else has any stressors or requirements at their workplace, just the lawyers.

Nevermind that the "support staff" make sure lots of people, processes and services work, and may individually be more important to "hitting targets" for the company as a whole than any individual lawyer.

How about the lawyers "do their job" by interacting with their coworkers professionally? By submitting tickets correctly and in a timely manner?

Abusing your coworkers is never justified.

But being rude and abusive to support staff doesn’t help, encourage, or even compel the support staff do their jobs any better or faster. In fact, I’d wager it’s rather the opposite.

I work in IT (not IT support, though) and I’m fortunate enough that none of my business partners are outright abusive. Even so, I still have some that I deprioritize compared to others because working with them is a pain (things like asking for project proposals to solve X problem and never having money to fund them). If someone was actively rude to me when I had fucked up, much less when I was doing a great job, I can guarantee I wouldn’t work any better or faster when it was for them.