THE
GOOD
LAWYER
Are legal
outcomes sufficiently predictable to allow
experts to recognize patterns that can be the
basis for solid judgments? To outsiders (and
even some insiders), law seems like a
crapshoot that depends on the luck of the jury
pool, what your judge had for breakfast, the
whims of a regulator, or the personality
quirks of your legal adversary. Most
of us who have spent decades in law have a
different take, however. Although
legal outcomes do often depend on many
variables outside of a lawyer’s control, there
is a distribution of probable outcomes for
different situations that one can begin to
recognize with enough time and practice. Expert
lawyers often—but not always—can see the
familiar in a new situation and react
appropriately.
A couple of decades in traffic court or
drafting real estate contracts will give you
an edge in heading off potential problems in
those fields.
The skilled trial lawyer doesn’t stop
to do the careful analysis that a student in
Evidence class might do when she hears hearsay
coming out of a witness’s mouth; the veteran
litigator knows it is hearsay almost as soon
as it is uttered. The
experienced family law lawyer can draw on
patterns built over hundreds of hours with
clients to intuitively respond appropriately
to a client’s deep concerns—she knows when to
soothe, when to warn, and when to focus
attention on the problem at hand. Law
does not have the regular environment of a
chess game, but neither is it as random as the
world of stock picking. If
all else is equal, put your money on the
experienced lawyer.
Experience is the one big
thing we have going for us as we age. In our
twenties, our brain cells started dying off, our
short-term memory began to worsen, and our
mental processing began to slow. But as
the years pass, our experience helps us become
better at recognizing patterns. As
Elkhonon Goldberg observes in The Wisdom
Paradox, “What I have lost with age in my
capacity for hard mental work, I seemed to have
gained in my capacity for instantaneous, almost
unfairly easy insight.” Of
course, what brings wisdom is having the right
type of experiences, not just getting older. Tom
Wilson notes, “Wisdom doesn’t necessarily come
with age. Sometimes
old age shows up all by itself.” But if
we play our cards right, according to Goldberg,
we accumulate “numerous and generic” patterns
that “facilitate an effortless and instantaneous
solution of a wide range of important
problems.” Expert
pattern recognition, a product of ever growing
chunks of networked information stored in
memory, is not an entitlement for getting older,
but rather has “to be earned.”
Research by Goldberg and others has
shown that the right hemisphere of the brain,
the center for creative thinking and novel
solutions, degrades earlier and more rapidly
in life than the left hemisphere, where most
of our pattern recognition takes place. Youth
is the period for novelty, daring, and
overflowing creativity. It
is the right brain’s time. Gradually,
as we age, the period of right brain dominance
ends and the period of left brain dominance
begins—or, as Goldberg describes the trend,
our “center of mental gravity shifts” to the
left, and less-impaired, hemisphere. Neuroimaging
allows us to peer into brains and see neural
firing patterns that confirm that a novice,
when asked to perform a task, will show
primarily right-brain activations while a
skilled professional, when asked to do the
same task, will show primarily left-brain
activation.
None of this may compensate for hair
loss, declining virility, and reduced ability
to speed around a tennis court, but it’s what
we’ve got to look forward to....
Seeking Quality in the
Practice of Law
by DOUGLAS O. LINDER and
NANCY LEVIT (Oxford
University Press, 2013)
The Good Lawyer
About
The Good Lawyer
Preface
Introductory
Note
The
Good Lawyer is Courageous
The
Good Lawyer is Empathetic
The
Good Lawyer Has a Passion for Justice
The
Good Lawyer Values Others in the Legal
Community
The
Good Lawyer Thinks realistically About the
Future
The
Good Lawyer Serves the True Interests of
Clients
The
Good Lawyer Has Ample Willpower
The
Good Lawyer is Persuasive
Seeking
Quality
Quotes
Random
Facts
The
Happy Lawyer
Excerpt from Chapter 5:
The Good Lawyer Uses Both Intuition and
Deliberative Thinking