Special Advice to Young Lawyers – Passion for the Law
My primary advice to a young lawyer is to find your personal strengths and build on them. You can also work on your weaknesses, but your strengths are what are really going to make you successful. You should think about what they are, figure out how to make the best use of them and build on them. Related to that, I think of passion. Passion may seem an odd word for corporate lawyers, but I’ve always thought that if you love your work, it’s not really work and you’ll do a much better job. Something I read recently seems pertinent: Figure out what you love to do and then figure out how to make a career out of it. For people who choose the law as a profession, there are many different kinds of lawyers and many different kinds of law to practice; hopefully, there is some aspect for which you really have a passion. You ought to figure out what that is. It is likely that it will involve your personal strengths.
When I was summer associate many years ago, the firm took us to court to see some of the great lawyers of the time in action. I was really amazed at how different they were. They each had different strengths and weaknesses. Some were great orators (but some weren’t very good orators); some were great thinkers; some were great brief writers. The lesson for me was that you can find an area of the law and a way to use your strengths – no matter what they are – and become a successful lawyer.
The philosopher Martin Buber wrote about dramatic, flash-of-insight "I-thou" moments. In the practice of law, we too have an I-thou moment. You start out thinking of yourself as distinguished from your law firm or company, which is “they.” “They” are making decisions; “they” are giving you assignments and setting deadlines, and so on. At some point, I remember starting to think of the firm as “we” rather than “they.” I was a part of it; I was responsible for the client services. It just wasn’t someone else asking me to do something, or someone else’s deadline being imposed on me. If you want to be successful, you should be trying to become a part of the firm or company you’re working for – to be thinking about it in terms of “we” rather than “they.” I think this dovetails with my earlier advice about understanding the clients’ perspective so that you can be a partner with your clients and also think about your clients in terms of “we” rather than “they.”
Finally, if you really want to find personal satisfaction as a corporate lawyer, you need to have a higher purpose than just wanting to make money. You have to believe in what you’re doing and believe in the law. It may be old fashioned, but you should think of the law as a noble calling, with lawyers providing services that are valuable to society and acting as officers of the court responding to ethical rules that are above the norms of what the marketplace would require. John Waldron, one of the senior partners when I started with the firm, was so objective and ethical that when he was negotiating a contract and there was a difficult issue, the lawyer on the other side would sometimes say, “Let’s ask John what he would propose as a solution to that,” and be willing to accept his proposal, even though he was representing the other side of the transaction. I don’t know if that works today, but it was an ethical standard, which we all looked up to as we grew up in our firm.