The Writer Who Practiced Law

It only took me the first thirty of my thirty seven year legal career to understand that my actual Giftings were writing, analyzing, and solving. Law was simply a vehicle, a beloved vehicle, but my Giftings could have been exercised just as well in any of a number of other professions.

It also took me years to come to terms with the fact I was not born to litigate. I did litigate when I had to, and effectively enough, but not gracefully, and not without an inordinate expenditure of time for which I could not fairly bill. Let me draft the pleadings, then turn them over to the short-sword centurion to get in close and beat up the bad guys, then let me negotiate a settlement that had legs and worked for everyone.

Let me work deals and write them up so they would work not only here and now, but in the future. Let me solve problems and paper the solutions so that they don’t rear their ugly heads at a later date. These are things which came naturally and easily, they were my “zone” where I was in “flow”, I learned, eventually, not to dabble in areas where I could, with enormous effort and personal expense, pull off a win most of the time, but which never looked pretty and left me frustrated, exhausted, and angry that I had spent far, far more time than I could justify billing.

But I also, eventually, learned something else. Two things, related things, actually.

I learned first that by “sticking to your knitting”, you do work which is not only more enjoyable, but markedly better than others around you, and in doing so, you get noticed. And you begin to see a significant increase in work referred in to you by colleagues and by related professionals. This is called the reputational effect.

The second thing I learned is that this only works in firms which understand specialization and which don’t reward dabblers. It doesn’t work in a firm which focuses entirely on gross billings and billings quotas at any cost. The tyranny of the “nut to crack”, month in and month out, actually works against specialization and ultimately against reputation. Show me a firm full of mediocre lawyers and I’ll show you a firm which is a condominium of lawyers who are like a hockey team where the players play whatever position they feel like whenever they feel like, so long as they meet the monthly quota. Show me a firm full of high-reputation specialized experts and I’ll show you a firm where there’s no need to scrabble over the scraps because there’s plenty to go around. I’ll let you guess which firm is the happy one.

I know for a fact that some readers need to talk about this.