“Isn’t it a shame how 99% of the lawyers give the whole profession a bad name.”
30 years ago The George Washington University National Law Center turned loose on the world a shiver of new graduates. Being among those graduates, I dutifully set out to make the world a better place through lawsuits. In the three decades that followed, I learned an awful lot about an awful lot.
Mostly, I have learned what’s important to me—both in terms of the practice of law and outside the practice. It’s important, in fact it’s the reason I practice law, to be engaged in helping people solve problems. It’s important to care, really care, about your clients and their cause or you will never do a good job solving their problems. It’s important to put your client’s interests first until the rules of ethics dictate otherwise. It’s important to remain professional always, to not create animosity and non-substantive skirmishes that only drive up the client’s cost of litigation. It’s important to maintain your integrity and keep your reputation unsullied so your client, the court and opposing counsel will trust you to do as you say. It’s important to create a healthy work environment to attract and keep excellent staff and attorneys to accomplish the work. And in all of this, it’s most important to put your family first—“No success can compensate for failure in the home.”
Over the past three decades, the practice of law has changed a lot. I’m not certain of the cause, but I have seen the “legal profession” become the “legal business.” Despite the financial pressure this evolution necessitates, the important things remain important. Arguably, the important things are even more so.
In this environment, how do you keep these first important things first? I hope to develop answers to this large question over the course of time and through interactions with those who stumble upon my musings. One initial answer in many is to remember that each case is part of something much bigger. For the litigant, her case is part of the big picture of her business and life. An effective attorney will counsel his client about the costs of litigation, including the most expensive costs—time, lost opportunity and emotional energy. If she is sitting in a deposition, she is not sitting behind her desk dealing with the daily conflagrations of business. An effective attorney will approach any legal problem from an outside perspective to help his client make a reasoned business decision that takes these cost into consideration; even if that means losing the business opportunity to represent the client in ligation. Doing the right thing builds trust. The next time a problem crops up, your client will reach out to you because she knows that you serve her interests first above all others, including your own. According to the wisdom of Mark Twain, “Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest.” It will also firmly plant you in the territory of the 1% who don’t give the profession a bad name.