LAWYERS 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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