Legal Commentary

What Good Lawyers Do

By Professor University of Miami School of Law

Although it came highly recommended there were a number of things that I found didn’t resonate for me in Deconstructing the First Year: How Law School Experiences Lead to Misunderstandings of What Lawyers Do at the blog called “clinicians with not enough to do.” I do think almost all of this part is pithy and descriptively accurate:

Really good law students succeed in part by figuring out how law school works and organizing around long-standing structures. Really good lawyers succeed in part by pointing out (diplomatically) what facts the judge does not understand accurately, or by making an argument never tried before in a particular jurisdiction. Really good lawyers know their cases and their files better than anyone else, inside and out. Really good lawyers understand the policy behind the law and why the laws are written a particular way. Really good law students learn to accommodate authority. Really good lawyers confront authority (again, in a diplomatic way).

My only caveat with the quoted passage that I’d say really great law students learn to maneuver around authority structures. But that’s hard.

One could of course have a long discussion as to whether this is a good way for a law school to be. But I hope we’d agree that a good part of what a really good law school does is offer the initial training people need to be really good lawyers.

Full post as published by Discourse.net on March 10, 2009 (boomark / email).