Inside A Lawyer’s Arsenal

-- By PushkarChaubal - 13 Feb 2023

Boardgame nights can be fun but also frustrating when most players don't know how to play the game. One can hardly blame them; most adults don't remember the rules of Monopoly from their childhood days. Thankfully, there's always one friend who knows the rules of the game down pat. That friend can then assist others and help them strategize their moves.

I wasn't necessarily that friend when it came to board games, yet I do appreciate the fact that lawyers play a similar role in society at large. Lawyers are who individuals and businesses turn to when they need to know how to navigate the laws in society to achieve their ends, noble or otherwise.

How about "to manage their risks"? What would that change in the frame open up as alternative conceptions?

Words are perhaps the most important tool in a lawyer's arsenal.

As opposed to what other tools?

Skillfully wielded, this tool becomes a powerful weapon that a lawyer can use to drive success for his clients. I have always had an appreciation for reading and reasoning, and I came to law school to sharpen my tools.

If words are primarily conceived of as weapons, then they are unusually inutile tools, are they not? Most human tools, let alone words, are employed constructively, don't you think?

Words as Empty Utility

Few professions train their practitioners to focus so intently on the written word in the same way as in the law. It is hard to imagine something else as versatile as words. The same language we use to chat with our buddies and spark conversation with people we are interested in is the same language that was used to frame our central system of government.

Words can have a powerful effect, but it is also easy to become jaded. I started my career in management consulting and saw firsthand how partners at the firm used their oral and written skills to cover up rubbish. Mediocre managers would oftentimes be cavalier with their words, not fully recognizing the power that they had on their teams and clients. Seasoned partners, however, were much more intentional. I quickly noticed, however, that the words that came out of the mouths of partners were often empty. Promises made yesterday were null and void the next day.

This gave rise to a strange dichotomy for me. At an early stage in my career, I saw that words could effectively be meaningless to the speaker yet have incredible power on the receiver. As long as the socially attuned partner was careful with his word choice and tonality, he could sell sand in a desert. Partners could enter a room with a hostile group of clients, and, using nothing but their conversational skills, completely change the dynamic of the room to where the clients were not only pacified, but actively rooting for us.

After three years of being around manipulative partners, I had appreciation for their talent but was simultaneously cynical. Words, to them, were just tools to gain advantage and could be disregarded as easily as they were uttered. Words could have very little link to the truth yet influence people's actions. As someone who grew up with a love of language arts, I was discouraged. Was the "real world" all fake and insincere?

Words as a Medium For Wisdom

When COVID-19 lockdowns first began, my consulting team stopped weekly travel to our client site. Without the 14-hour round trip commute every week, I found myself with much more time on my hands.

With the stress and anxiety brought on with the uncertainty of COVID, I turned to spirituality. However, I didn't know where to start. My family is Hindu, and, while I subscribe to core beliefs, I had never read any of the literature firsthand.

Given my spare time, I found a copy of my parents' Bhagavad Gita. It was translated into English and was surprisingly approachable. I had grown up listening to my parents' informal lessons on the Gita, but this was the first time I dove into the text. The insights I gained from that readthrough were nothing short of lifechanging. The Gita encourages followers to give up fear and anxiety, and instead single-mindedly perform one's "task," whatever that may be. That mentality is what drove me to study for the LSAT again.

Reading the Gita was the first domino that led me to where I am today. Not only am I grateful for the book's advice, but it also reinvigorated my love for the written word. After spending 3+ years with high functioning sociopaths at work who defiled words for personal gain, words in the context of the Gita were once again my friends. It was words that were imparting centuries-old wisdom to me. My experience reading the Gita led me to read 12 additional books in a 4-month span. Between March 2020 to July 2020, I read books ranging from habit formation and negotiation to fiction titles.

Words, I realized, did not have to be wielded strictly for deception. Sociopathic uses of words were commonplace in some business settings, but words could just as easily be used to impart knowledge and wisdom for the betterment of ones' self and ones' society.

Words as a Swiss Army Knife

Having worked for 4 years out of college and survived my first semester of law school, I now think of words as a Swiss Army knife. While they can be used for manipulation, they can also be a source of structure, advocacy, and self-improvement. Clearly, words are more than just gusts of complicated airflow. In the right hands, words can be combined with logic to realize strategic aims for a lawyer and his clients.

Law school can be a passive exercise where one simply goes through the motions. Or, given a little intentionality, it can be a laboratory for the creative exercise of language and logic. As a lawyer, I want to strive to help my clients realize their goals by mastering the art of words. And, as a law student, I want to challenge myself to take classes and seek opportunities where I can further refine my skills and sharpen my tools of words and logic.

The highly general language of this draft's conclusion seems to me to indicate the route to improvement, which is focus. The present draft is the rather diffuse halo of the central idea it doesn't yet state. Reduced to essentials, it says: "I worked for 'management consultants' who were flim-flam artists. The disgust they inspired in me infected my relationship with words themselves. The Sanskrit literature in translation to which I turned for spiritual exercise during the epidemic ended my literary depression and I started reading again. Now I am in law school and I conceive that lawyers wield words as weapons to get their clients what they want." That does very well one of the most important functions of a first draft: to clear away the brush and show the question around which the next draft can grow. In this case, we might say the question is, "so what?" We can condense the existing jumping off point; even if my 67 words are too few, 100 would surely do it. Then we can ask what the generalities in your conclusion specifically mean with plenty of space for a good answer.

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