Making Ourselves Uncomfortable

-- By DavidGoldin - 12 May 2010

The Role of The Lawyer

There are a lot of problems in the world. This is clear. Every time I turn on the news, or open the newspaper, I read about another one. There are also a lot of people working to solve some of these problems. Unfortunately, however, there is a disconnect. Many of the people who could potentially play a significant role in coming up with innovative solutions and helping the people who need it the most are not doing so. These people include lawyers.

Having a license to practice law grants its holder access to many of the institutions and people who have the power to effect changes in today's world. This is not to be taken lightly, and is one of the reasons that it is so upsetting to see many graduates from the nation's most prestigious law schools "pawn their licenses". The question then becomes why so many people do this. Some will say money - but this is only a partial explanation. True, receiving $160,000 a year sounds appealing. But given the amount that will go to taxes and the number of hours that we will need to work to get this, the money really isn't that great. In this paper, I will argue that another important reason is a fear of risk-taking.

Being Afraid

One of the anecdotes Eben gave us in class is a good illustration of this. He mentioned a young, out-of-work lawyer who was desperately looking for a job. She hadn't had much success, and was getting quite worried. Eben suggested that she start taking on clients and developing a practice. Whenever the topic, of going it alone, was mentioned in class, we would talk about why we couldn't do it. We don't have the training. Taking on their own clients is scary - we could mess up. What happened if we don't get enough clients and can't successfully cover our expenses? This illustrates a larger issue with the profession: many of us are downright terrified of taking risks.

But learning to think of yourself as running your own practice doesn't necessarily mean practicing by yourself, and it certainly doesn't mean having no ways to share or diversify your risk. The law firm imposes risks too, in case you hadn't noticed. And you're not allowed to diversify those at all. Maybe a risk-averse person who wasn't also a conformist would be more worried about the risk of borrowing a great deal of money in order to become utterly financially dependent on a job provided by some lawyers who themselves work in a large law firm whose business model is being disrupted not so much by "the bad economy" as by the twenty-first century. Maybe that means accepting a whole lot of risk that you can't lay off anywhere. And firm jobs don't suit you to run your own practice in any sense at all: they're more learned helplessness.

Lawyers have a reputation for being risk-averse, but why are so many lawyers like this? One reason is that we are trained to be this way. We hear stories where a seemingly minor mistake by a lawyer causes significant problems. We learn about estoppel in our Legal Methods class during the first week of school, and that often, once we say something as lawyers, we can't take it back. We are told to be careful, and that if we mess up, it can destroy our lives. These are likely significant factors in our collective fear of risk.

You think that lawyers who are entrepreneurial about how they build their practices are therefore also risk-loving people who don't practice carefully? That's wrong, for one thing. But it also exemplifies the problem with this sort of unifactorial explanation based on some (I guess) immutable character trait that people either have or don't have. Judging human beings in practice this way (either they have goodness or badness, smartness or stupidness, honesty or dishonesty, timidity or rashness, etc.) works very poorly in real life, and it's probably not going to pay off in a context like this.

Granted, this description doesn't apply to all lawyers. Many lawyers have taken huge risks in their careers, and many of these individuals have had significant impacts on the world. During Legal Methods, our professor brought in a number of his colleagues. The vast majority of them were risk-takers with regards to career decisions. They hadn't gone straight from law school to X & Y LLP, where they worked 2500 hours a year for 9 years and made partner. They had taken winding paths in their careers, accepting work that interested them as opposed to just "safe" work. The one thing that unified them is that (at least outwardly) all were satisfied with their careers.

So what does this anecdote demonstrate? People who don't do one particular thing, namely go to work at a firm and stay there, are "risk-takers with regard to career decisions"? Nothing here supports that inference. It's the proposition you're supposed to be testing dematerialized into an implicit assumption, where it rules your thought without you're being able to know it's there.

This brings us to the real heart of the problem, which isn't something called "risk-aversion." It's fear. Fear is an emotion we learn to regulate, cope with, and use. "Risk-aversion" is some sort of property, like left-handedness or the ability to roll your tongue lengthwise, that I'm supposed to believe you got issued in your genome, and are merely going to act out for the rest of your life from one unchosen situation to another. Being afraid of the future, being afraid you can't make your practice support you, being afraid of mistakes and bad choices are all part of the process of learning to be a lawyer. We recognize our fears, we talk about them with the people who help us learn, we do things in the world that allow us to measure ourselves against the demands of the real world, and we grow. But if we allowed our fears to prevent us from growing, how would that be "safe"?

The Next Steps

So where do we go from here? As I sit here, writing about how the fear of taking risks is holding me back, I am afraid. My first year of law school is over, and I don't know how much I've gained from it. I don't have any useful skills - I can barely do legal research and if someone came to me with a legal problem, I'd probably have a panic attack. If I have learned a third of what I'm going to learn in law school, I'm in bad shape.

This would be some kind of problem if learning were linear, which it isn't. You've done what every lawyer who has been educated in this society for the past hundred thirty years has done. It may well be imperfect, or even becoming more outmoded by the day. But your problem isn't the exterior system of education; it's your fear.

The next step, then, is to figure out a better system of preparing lawyers.

No. It isn't the next step in your education to change the system of education. It's your next step in your education to change yourself. This, like "risk-aversion" is a defensive digression, unconsciously designed to avoid the internal conflict that comes from internal change.

This again seems pretty self-evident. We have had a number of class discussions about it. People have thrown out a variety of ideas. We need better professors who know how to teach us. We need better classes which will actually prepare us to be lawyers. Law school should be less expensive, so the vast majority of us don't graduate with huge amounts of debt hanging over our heads. There are a lot of changes that need to be made.

I do not believe that people are inherently risk-averse or risk-loving. Granted, people have different risk thresholds and this is in part based on nature. But most of it is nurture. People are taught to either take risks or not to. Our current legal education system tends to teach us not to. In some respects, this is good - we don't want lawyers running around using their licenses recklessly. But at the same time, it inhibits many of us from using our licenses to solve the problems and make the changes that desperately need to be made. Perhaps, if we were taught the values of risk taking, as Eben has endeavored to do, and were educated in a way that would enable us to be lawyers without coddling, we'd be able to do so.

Endeavored to do but failed to do because of your inherent "risk-aversion," you mean? Perhaps you haven't yet fully applied yourself to the lesson.