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 desparately 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.

Lawyers have a reputation for being risk-averse. Why so many lawyers are like this? One reason is that we are trained to be this way. We hear stories where a seemingly minor msitake 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.

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.

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 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 pretty bad shape.

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

So I took a different approach to this paper. I still think that many lawyers are holding themselves back from doing good. I have decided to focus, however, on a different reason - the unwillingness to take risks. In my earlier paper, I used the unwillingness to speak openly as a proxy for this, but apparently, it wasn't an effective way of getting my point across. As always, I'd be happy to hear any comments or see any suggestions that you have. Many thanks, -David