THE
GOOD
LAWYER
Your first
night, sitting in the Big Barn at Thunderhead
Ranch, you might hear a story Spence has told
a hundred times.
It’s a story about the wisdom of
Spence’s Uncle Slim. Spence
tells about standing at a corral with his
Uncle Slim when the cowboy breaks into a laugh
that sounds “like the end note of a bull elk’s
bugle.” Slim points to a dude in the corral
trying to saddle a beaten-up nag with a fancy
parade saddle, made of black leather with
silver spangles.
Slim turns to Gerry and says, “Ya can’t
get nowhere with a thousand-dollar saddle on a
ten-dollar horse.” For Spence, the
thousand-dollar saddle is the expensive, but
not particularly helpful, legal education that
most lawyers who come to TLC have had. They
are the horses.
He might end his introductory talk with
words like, “So tomorrow we begin. We
will work on the horse.”
The next morning, as you enter the
cookhouse for breakfast, you see posted on the
day’s schedule a single word, “Psychodrama.” Psychodrama,
you will discover, is a therapy technique in
which participants act out traumatic events from
their own lives.
The technique was developed by Jacob
Moreno, a Romanian psychiatrist who was inspired
by the richness of children’s play. Moreno
promoted psychodrama as a means of regaining the
lost spontaneity of childhood and learning to
run free from the hobbling impediments of the
past.
Although psychodrama fell out of favor
among therapists, Gerry Spence saw in the
technique a way to help lawyers get in touch
with themselves. In his first course in 1994,
psychodrama was all about “working on the
horse,” and had no application for trial
preparation.
Through the use of spontaneous plays in
which lawyers pretended to interact with
people not actually present, and acted out
traumatic events in their lives, Spence took
lawyers on a voyage of self-discovery. It
seemed to serve its intended purpose, but as
one former student pointed out, left a lot of
lawyers wondering, “What the heck was that?”
Spence’s answer would be, “You cannot be
credible without first being honest about the
self.” At today’s TLC, psychodrama for
self-discovery has a second use: to remake the
saddle into something lighter, more suitable
for the horse that will wear it, than the
fancy saddle provided by a law school
education.
Psychodrama becomes a way to share the
pain, and gain insight into, the lives of
clients and, more importantly, tell their
stories to jurors and judges in ways that
reveal emotional truths about them....
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 Has a Passion for Justice
The
Good Lawyer Values Others in the Legal
Community
The
Good Lawyer Uses Both Intuition and
Deliberative Thinking
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
2:
The Good Lawyer is Empathetic