A career in law, along with being lucrative in various ways, also changes the way one thinks in their ordinary course of life. The moment anyone asks me why I want to become a lawyer, I immediately respond with the obvious answers of lucrative incomes and being respectable in life. I did not vow to be extremely learned a scholar or a stalwart in the field of law. Thus, law was more of a safe career option rather than a passion.
However, the more I decided to pursue this course, the more I realized that thinking like a lawyer might not be my forte as I was more inclined towards a creative perspective and judged mainly based on emotions. However, I recall an instance wherein a highly experienced senior lawyer during one of my internships told me that the real danger ensues when once you start thinking like a lawyer and cannot think any other way.
On our first day of law school, our Vice Chancellor told our first year class that before we even embark on our journey of becoming lawyers, we must learn how to think like them. One of the brave hearts in the batch asked him that how do we know when had we learned to think like a lawyer, in reply to which our Vice Chancellor replied that it is when we get paid to think.
The more we got involved in the intricacies of the course, the more I saw that thinking like a lawyer actually changed and modified our reasoning skills and structures. Reasoning came before memorizing and law professors were adept at filtering out students who only memorized but couldn’t reason their issues.
Essentially, thinking like a lawyer means thinking within the confines of inductive and deductive forms of reasoning. We had readily entered into a world full of rigorous dialogues, when we started off as law students. In this particular world, abstracts were first formulated and then described and thus, a general principle or rule was discovered, then distinguished from another general rule. Narrowing down the focus along with intensifying the same became our strong points in the initial years of law school itself. Law school gave us retreats and surprises; rewarded us when we performed well and ridiculed the same when performed poorly.
The entire process of law-like thinking teaches us to be defensive, to protect the interests of our clients and how to go about that. The process involves slow moving, finding potential risks, taking adequate measures to overcome those risks and most importantly, never letting the clients see that you are stressed.
Realistically speaking, more work could be accomplished if pursuing legal knowledge wasn’t the only goal. The driving force behind this was the entire competitive nature of the profession. It reinforced certain views and diminished others. In any case, our very nature of thinking was altered. The final goal was to become more rational, logical, categorical and linear thinkers, who were trained to separate the reasonable from the unreasonable and truth from the lie.
Henceforth, ambiguities were less tolerated by us as we learnt to think in a new way and we viewed human affairs through new glasses. The entire process was a quantum leap and intellectually transcendent. We did believe that we would be paid enough to think in the future.
During the advanced course of our internships towards the end of third year and in fourth year, I realized the importance of such mental gymnastics are attributed to the plasticity of human mind and that, in the due course of time, the values learnt in a law schools begins to overflow into our personal lives. We do unconsciously relate and analyse other human beings with our new mindset and it begins to tint our views and judgments.
Honestly speaking, such a journey has its own downsides and I did lose out some friends and acquired new ones who thought in a similar way as me and saw the world in the same light as I did. The senior lawyer I met during my old internship was indeed right. We could not think in the emotional manner anymore and could not make creative choices or manage or inspire people. However, we became self dependent in due course of time and were not dictated by anyone or their opinions, thus the price paid was worth it. Although, now-a-days, several lawyers want to get their creative and emotive mind back and for that reason, they’re switching careers to a more innovative and different field.
