I would like to use my message in this issue of Law Quadrangle Notes to say a few words about one situation when lawyers are most frequently called upon to teach: when they work with a young, less experienced colleague.
Before I joined the Michigan faculty, I spent four years practicing law with a small Washington, D.C., law firm. I worked during that period with about ten different partners. And today, when I try to remember them, my mind invariably retrieves scenes where I was being patiently mentored.
I remember Ron Lewis talking through the way he would order the issues in a negotiation. I remember Pat Lewis talking through the way she would frame a set of facts for a revenue agent. I remember Ralph Muoio talking through why it made sense to cut an argument from a brief that I had drafted. I believe that, if pressed, each of them would confess to two motives for those conversations. One motive was client service: they had all internalized the discipline of describing and defending their judgments before putting them into practice. But the second, independently sufficient motive, was a desire to help me learn my craft.
In recent years, I have frequently heard the concern that mentoring relationships within firms are suffering a kind of collateral damage. I am told that many corporate middle managers who hire lawyers are suffering from a truncated time horizon – a shortsightedness that undervalues investment in long-term lawyer-client relationships. And, the argument goes, that undervaluation has made it less profitable for firms to invest in the development of young attorneys.
While there is force to this concern, I think we must take care not to overstate it.
I do not believe that the partners I worked with were choosing a particular work style in order to maximize profits; I think they would have spoken with me in exactly the same way if we had been working on those projects pro bono. Nor do I believe my colleagues were always trying to maximize the quality of their immediate work product; I think they would have spoken with me in exactly the same way even if they had been morally certain that our conversations would not change the product at all. Nor do I believe they were investing in the long-term profitability of the firm; they knew that I would soon be leaving to become a law professor.
I suspect that these lawyers simply could not have done their work in any other way. They had, over years of practice, come to know and expect a recurring pleasure: seeing the spark of a new associate’s dawning comprehension. The role of teacher was reflexive, a natural and automatic feature of their professional lives.
Have things changed so much in the ten years since I left practice? Have the new financial pressures totally overwhelmed the pleasures of colleagueship? My conversations with our graduates give me the impression that the changes have been real but they have not been devastating; most of them still enjoy frequent chances to help a younger colleague learn his or her craft. As a teacher of future lawyers, I take great comfort from that impression.
