We spent decades training lawyers to be knowledge specialists. Now AI is poised to take on that role. But upgrading to "wise counsel" won't be as easy as it sounds.
Great article Jordan - as usual! I've been teaching law students for five years now focused on introducing them to relationship-building/people skills and how to be that unique lawyer who listens, seeks to understand their clients and offers clear, practical and actionable advice aligned to the client's vision of success. Visionary law schools are adding these types of courses to their curriculum (like University of Calgary and Dean Holloway's visionary approach). There is definitely a huge opportunity for more law firms to adopt your suggested approach for early stage associate learning and development.
I like this blog a lot Jordan. It also speaks to a very interesting debate about whether professionalism has become technocratic rather than civic (for want of a better word). I think the emphasis on character is a bit risky and narrow though. Wisdom is partly an institutional thing (how the lawyers role is defined and relates to the larger whole) and about how the job is done (the habits and practices, and what one advises on, not just whether one has wisdom or character- although they may sometimes be correlates of better practices). Ben White did a nice interview with Jordan Breslow on this (I blogged on it recently on lawyerwatch if you want the link) which implicitly captures some of this in a very interesting story.
Thanks, Richard! I'd welcome a link to the interview you describe.
I recognize the risk in referencing "character," since that's a term admissions authorities routinely use ("good character test") as an additional barrier to entry of people who come from different backgrounds or simply have the wrong colour and accent. I do think there's value in the term, especially the way it's developed and expressed in the Ivey Leadership Framework referenced in the embedded link. But this just emphasizes the importance of having a common understanding of what we're talking about (and what we're very carefully not talking about) when we talk about "character." Admissions authorities haven't done much thinking in this regard, it seems to me.
The desire for "wise counsellors" and "trusted advisors" itself is quite interesting, and something I didn't have space to address in the article. *Why* do Tim Mayopoulos and many other people experience a longing for wisdom in their lawyers? We don't look around for wise doctors or wise accountants or wise architects. It might be because wisdom is tied directly to lawyers' advisory role, and presumably expresses all the abilities and attributes we hope a lawyer will deploy when advising us: worldly experience, thoughtful reflection, insight into and sympathy for the human condition, and some understanding of and commitment to higher principles. Those are things we look for in our friends, mentors, and confidants; it's interesting to think that we also want to rent those attributes from our lawyers.
There's a really fascinating article to be written -- I don't have the chops for it -- on what we expect from lawyers and why we expect it. It seems that lawyers, individually and collectively, are often a disappointment to people. It would be helpful to know exactly what we expected lawyers to be, so that we can understand the nature and source of the disappointment.
Great article, thanks! I particularly like the GC's job described as: "You keep people from acting on their own worst impulses." That speaks, I think, to my earlier query about what we expect from lawyers. There's a disquieting element of "Lead us not into temptation, deliver us from evil" there. Surely *that's* not our expectation for lawyers? :-)
Full disclosure, I'm not necessarily the best person to write about all this, because I have a strong interest in virtue and an equally strong belief (rooted in my Christianity) that people have a responsibility to treat each other and to act in the world in a virtuous fashion (if we prefer Aristotelean terms, with courage, charity, truthfulness, patience, and so on). I do shy away from the term "virtue" a little because of the taint it's acquired (especially among the religious right), but I think it's time we rescued the idea and put it to proper work in society (and the legal profession).
Pretty much all my writing about lawyers and the law is grounded in the idea that to the extent there's a "right thing to do" in any given situation, lawyers should pursue it, try to identify it, and strive to see it done. I think that's a mandate for every lawyer, for the legal profession, and for the justice and legal services sector in general. I'd even argue it applies to law firms and law departments. When people ask, post-scandal, "Where were the lawyers?", I think they're implicitly endorsing that idea.
Anyway, that's not a universal or even widely held belief among lawyers, of course, and I've long hesitated to make it the explicit focal point of my work. I don't know; maybe it's time I tried. But I have a lot more to learn about this subject before I even consider writing about it. So at least I've got the virtue of humility working for me. :-)
Many years ago while at Windsor Law, I had a very wise contracts professor by the name of John Whiteside. He was the only professor I had who looked at problems through the eyes of the client. He was the very definition of "wise counsel". But becoming a trusted advisor is a skill...and you are correct...in general we are not taught to be wise counsel...we have been overwhelmed by the abacus approach...how many billable hours can we squeeze out of a day. I don't know how you get back to teaching "wisdom", because we have an entire generation of lawyers and professors who thought that soft skill was unnecessary to one's practice. I'm not sure we can reclaim it.
Great article Jordan - as usual! I've been teaching law students for five years now focused on introducing them to relationship-building/people skills and how to be that unique lawyer who listens, seeks to understand their clients and offers clear, practical and actionable advice aligned to the client's vision of success. Visionary law schools are adding these types of courses to their curriculum (like University of Calgary and Dean Holloway's visionary approach). There is definitely a huge opportunity for more law firms to adopt your suggested approach for early stage associate learning and development.
I like this blog a lot Jordan. It also speaks to a very interesting debate about whether professionalism has become technocratic rather than civic (for want of a better word). I think the emphasis on character is a bit risky and narrow though. Wisdom is partly an institutional thing (how the lawyers role is defined and relates to the larger whole) and about how the job is done (the habits and practices, and what one advises on, not just whether one has wisdom or character- although they may sometimes be correlates of better practices). Ben White did a nice interview with Jordan Breslow on this (I blogged on it recently on lawyerwatch if you want the link) which implicitly captures some of this in a very interesting story.
Thanks, Richard! I'd welcome a link to the interview you describe.
I recognize the risk in referencing "character," since that's a term admissions authorities routinely use ("good character test") as an additional barrier to entry of people who come from different backgrounds or simply have the wrong colour and accent. I do think there's value in the term, especially the way it's developed and expressed in the Ivey Leadership Framework referenced in the embedded link. But this just emphasizes the importance of having a common understanding of what we're talking about (and what we're very carefully not talking about) when we talk about "character." Admissions authorities haven't done much thinking in this regard, it seems to me.
The desire for "wise counsellors" and "trusted advisors" itself is quite interesting, and something I didn't have space to address in the article. *Why* do Tim Mayopoulos and many other people experience a longing for wisdom in their lawyers? We don't look around for wise doctors or wise accountants or wise architects. It might be because wisdom is tied directly to lawyers' advisory role, and presumably expresses all the abilities and attributes we hope a lawyer will deploy when advising us: worldly experience, thoughtful reflection, insight into and sympathy for the human condition, and some understanding of and commitment to higher principles. Those are things we look for in our friends, mentors, and confidants; it's interesting to think that we also want to rent those attributes from our lawyers.
There's a really fascinating article to be written -- I don't have the chops for it -- on what we expect from lawyers and why we expect it. It seems that lawyers, individually and collectively, are often a disappointment to people. It would be helpful to know exactly what we expected lawyers to be, so that we can understand the nature and source of the disappointment.
Here it is... https://wp.me/pxDm8-1NA
I'm in a meeting all day so posting this in a hurry. Will try and swing back ...!
Great article, thanks! I particularly like the GC's job described as: "You keep people from acting on their own worst impulses." That speaks, I think, to my earlier query about what we expect from lawyers. There's a disquieting element of "Lead us not into temptation, deliver us from evil" there. Surely *that's* not our expectation for lawyers? :-)
Full disclosure, I'm not necessarily the best person to write about all this, because I have a strong interest in virtue and an equally strong belief (rooted in my Christianity) that people have a responsibility to treat each other and to act in the world in a virtuous fashion (if we prefer Aristotelean terms, with courage, charity, truthfulness, patience, and so on). I do shy away from the term "virtue" a little because of the taint it's acquired (especially among the religious right), but I think it's time we rescued the idea and put it to proper work in society (and the legal profession).
Pretty much all my writing about lawyers and the law is grounded in the idea that to the extent there's a "right thing to do" in any given situation, lawyers should pursue it, try to identify it, and strive to see it done. I think that's a mandate for every lawyer, for the legal profession, and for the justice and legal services sector in general. I'd even argue it applies to law firms and law departments. When people ask, post-scandal, "Where were the lawyers?", I think they're implicitly endorsing that idea.
Anyway, that's not a universal or even widely held belief among lawyers, of course, and I've long hesitated to make it the explicit focal point of my work. I don't know; maybe it's time I tried. But I have a lot more to learn about this subject before I even consider writing about it. So at least I've got the virtue of humility working for me. :-)
Many years ago while at Windsor Law, I had a very wise contracts professor by the name of John Whiteside. He was the only professor I had who looked at problems through the eyes of the client. He was the very definition of "wise counsel". But becoming a trusted advisor is a skill...and you are correct...in general we are not taught to be wise counsel...we have been overwhelmed by the abacus approach...how many billable hours can we squeeze out of a day. I don't know how you get back to teaching "wisdom", because we have an entire generation of lawyers and professors who thought that soft skill was unnecessary to one's practice. I'm not sure we can reclaim it.