The wrong humans have been entering law school for some time now, from the oldest Baby Boomers to the youngest of Gen-Ys. Somehow we need to attract those who are born with the basic mental, emotional and physical makings of the kind of person clients and customers can rely on with confidence.
–this blog, September 21, 2015
If you labor in the legal profession, you may have heard, or have thought yourself in the past few decades that “Nice, smart kids make terrible lawyers.” Over the years we’ve said at this blog that repeatedly the wrong types of personalities have repeatedly entered the legal profession. Often, they have ended up working in the higher tiers of litigation, regulatory work and transactions where they do a creditable if not brilliant job of their daily work. Hey, life is okay, somewhat prestigious and they are making enough to help feed a family. But they learn early on that they don’t really like all aspects of lawyering for a client. They may resent having to immerse themselves in the work so much in some projects, or dislike the confrontational or contentious aspects of adversaries in other projects.
They are pleasant people–indeed, great company–and often have superior abilities in Western logic and, not surprisingly, legal thinking. They may have graduated high in their law school class. And you put it together and it is never enough. Here, quite seriously, is the kind of personality from American culture you can take and build something from. He or she may have personal problems that hold him or her back in a number of respects, granted. You can work with that, though. Who out there in an outside American law firm would not like to hire–especially for a litigation or regulatory shop or department–and employee with the raw superior intelligence, cunning, persistence and nearly machine-like single-minded obsession (granted, it’s sociopathic here) of the protagonist villain l;itigation