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Business | Bartleby
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Why everyone should think like a

lawyer
The unloved profession has a lot to teach managers

illustration: paul blow

Jun 27th 2024 Share

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00:00 00:00

L awyers are often seen as the most tedious of professionals. And the
most derided (“What do you know when you find a lawyer up to his neck
in concrete? Someone ran out of concrete”). Yet that damning reputation is
undeserved: lawyers are in fact role models. The method and meticulousness
entrenched in the legal style of thought has something to teach other
knowledge workers and their managers.

In “One l”, a book about his first year at Harvard Law School, Scott Turow
describes the slow, arduous progress of going over his first case as “stirring
concrete with his eyelashes”. But legal education is not about specific cases or
statutes. It is, as Mr Turow later understands, about processing a mountain of
information and exercising judgment. It teaches how to infer rules from
patterns, use analogies, anticipate what might happen next, accept ambiguity
and be ready to question everything.

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The sober way of going about this is by sticking to the facts. What matters is
what you can prove. In her final year of law school, this guest Bartleby gave her
hairdresser of many years advice on whether another client’s behaviour
amounted to breach of contract. It did not—the law did not offer an effective
remedy for that problem. This left the salon owner grateful not to be spending
resources on a lost cause. (She proceeded to remunerate your columnist with a
free haircut.)

In a world of business that is increasingly dominated by amorphous, ever-

changing markets, the interaction might sound familiar to managers, and many
of their subordinates. White-collar workers, after all, also need to remain
rational in the face of unexpected situations and undeterred by initial
incomprehension. No lawyer knows every law, but by the time their training is
over they are calm in the face of the unknown and know how and where to look
anything up. Likewise, anyone running a company will never have all the
answers. What they need is equanimity and a method of quickly arriving at
conclusions that are likelier than not to be the correct ones.

Managers also have something to learn from the adversarial legal system,
central to common-law jurisdictions like America’s and Britain’s, where
advocates represent their parties before an impartial arbiter (usually a judge
and a jury). In preparing for trial, lawyers attempt to identify and rehearse both
sides of litigation. By putting themselves in their opponents’ shoes they are
forced to engage with a line of reasoning with which they may disagree.

In so far as managing employees is, like arguing a case before a court, about
persuasion, managers would be wise to adopt some of the same tactics. That
means avoiding emotional reactions (lawyers may try to appeal to jurors’
feelings but they never let their own get in the way). It also means considering
the strongest criticism of their own reasoning. This not only makes their own
arguments bulletproof but is liable to look fair in the eyes of employees and
fellow managers. (Plus, a friendly but thorough performance review is
essentially a mock cross-examination of your witnesses.)

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Law, after all, is a way of dealing with social stress. If attorneys are trained for
one thing, it is on how to maintain focus, precision and a clear strategic plan in
the midst of a crisis. When a team feels a wrong should be redressed, a
manager should look for the rule that governs the conduct in question, how
that rule was applied in the past and act in a way that seems morally
defensible. If the crisis is external, a manager should also follow precedent,
which is the basis of common law and much of what lawyers do in court. The
purposefulness and heady resolve that characterise most lawyers are attributes
that executives, too, should cultivate. There is no room for passivity when
something goes wrong, only for action.

Perhaps the most valuable lesson from lawyers is both the most obvious and
the most scorned. The antidote to work anxiety is not taking your mind off
work with meditation or Netflix. It is disciplined preparation. There are
rewards in leaving no stone unturned. By putting in the hours, even if these are
not billable, managers can ensure they are as ready as they can be for the
uncertainties that lie ahead. As an added bonus, hard graft wins them the
respect of colleagues and subordinates.

Your columnist ended up not pursuing a career in law. But she never regretted
her training as a lawyer—and not just because of the free haircut. ■

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This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Why you should think like a
lawyer”

Business
June 29th 2024

→ Is the revival of Paris in peril?

→ European millionaires seek a safe harbour from populism

→ A new lab and a new paper reignite an old AI debate

→ Why everyone should think like a lawyer

→ Why big oil is wading into lithium

→ Boom times are back for container shipping

→ Who shaved $250bn from Kweichow Moutai’s market value?

→ Is artificial intelligence making big tech too big?

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