I love to read Dan Hull’s blog, What About Clients? He gets it. Or, more precisely, he gets most of it. He doesn’t get contingent fees, which puzzles me. But the rest of it is firmly within his grasp.
Dan’s post, Litigation: Lawyering, Real Life and a Little Zen is one is wish I would have written. Here is an excerpt from the post, which I hope will wet your appetite to read the rest of it.
The ability "to think like a lawyer"–what you get in law school and then polish in practice–is at most about 8 percent of what you need to be an effective lawyer. That’s right, about 8 percent.*
Legal reasoning. Lots of people finally acquire it. Some are famously better and faster at it than others. A revered M&A lawyer wrote years ago that, at a minimum, it requires the ability to think about something that is "inextricably attached" to something else–but without thinking about that something else to which it’s attached.
Legal reasoning is critical–but it’s never enough by itself to become an outstanding lawyer. The rest is frame of mind: energy, ambition, organization, logistics-sense, re-thinking everything all the time, a take-charge orientation, genuine people skills, and an urgent passion to solve tough problems.