Reflections of a Boston Lawyer

The big question family and friends ask when you decide to become a lawyer (at least, it was when I started on this journey) is whether you could represent someone you know to be guilty.  A related question many law students face (or did when I was in school) is whether they want to work in big law firms and represent corporations (guilty or not).  These questions, of course, are naively simplistic, and at some point early in one's career, one learns that there is much more complexity, and many more public and private interests at stake, than the questions suggest.  One's answers to the questions evolve over time, adding layers of nuance that take into account some of this complexity as it becomes appreciated through experience. One of the early versions of my answer I learned from my law school professors.  It had to with the adversarial system of justice.  The concept is that every citizen is entitled to representation.  Moreover, ours is a system of truth-seeking and confl

I've often wondered what inspired Van Morrison to write the song, "Professional Jealousy."   Had he encountered another musician who was jealous of his talents?  Was he envious of someone else?  The latter is hard to imagine.  I consider Van Morrison to be one of the most talented musicians in rock, have many of his albums, have been blown away by his powerful voice in concert, and developed my first rule of radio listening several decades ago because of him:  "Thou shalt not change the station when they're playing a Van Morrison song."  I still think "Hard Nose the Highway" is one of the most underrated albums of all time. Unfortunately, professional jealousy is a real, and very destructive, force in law firm practice.  We work in a highly competitive profession.  We compete with hundreds and even thousands of lawyers in other law firms.  We also, all too often, compete with our colleagues in our own firms.  We succeed or fail by the extent to w

When I moved to Boston to begin a judicial clerkship, Jimmy Carter was still President.  A little over a year later, when I entered private practice, Reagan defeated Carter's bid for reelection, and the world seemed destined to change.  As a law clerk, I got to watch some great lawyers try cases.  As a young lawyer in private practice, I was privileged to learn from some of the titans of the Boston bar.  Back then, it was all about the lawyering.  The  billing seemed incidental, at least to a young lawyer like me, and clients were only beginning to expect to receive more information about their legal expenses than the one-line bills that began and ended:  "For legal services rendered . . . ." Today a good lawyer is expected to be a good manager as well.  Not only must we possess superlative skills in the courtroom, but we must know how to staff a case, how to prepare a budget estimate, and how to make sure that the actual cost is more or less in line with the budgeted e