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) : It goes without saying, Exactly so; ) : Nothing of the kind, Surely not; ) : Im not quite sure
about it, Thats hard to tell
1. Legal research is the only reliable tool of the legal profession.
2. In their first year students must read and brief hundreds of cases.
3. Experts say that the brain is a complex information processor capable of processing and assimilating complex information at greater speeds through practice.
4. We must know how to analyze and gather information, identify issues, organize our data base, draft inferences and reach conclusions.
5. You can brush up your writing skills by reading resources on the craft of writing.
6. It is easy to learn legal English.
7. We must learn the substantive law and legal procedure.
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BE CAREFUL. A CAREER IN LAW COULD CHANGE
THE WAY YOU THINK.
Guest Henry Dahut, Esq., author of Marketing The Legal Mind and founder of GotTrouble.com,provides insight into learning to think like a lawyer in the following interview.
Correspondent: , ? Mr. Dahut: When asked why I became a lawyer I usually say because it
seemed like a smart thing to do. Unlike some of my law school classmates, I had no illusions of becoming either a great advocate or a legal scholar. All I wanted was a nice income and a respectable position in life. For me, law was a safe career choice, not a passion. My only concern was that as a creative, emotive, right-brain type, I would not be able to make my mind do whatever it is that lawyer minds do to think like lawyers. But an old lawyer, I met, told me that the real danger was that once you start thinking like a lawyer it becomes difficult to think any other way.
C.: , ?
Mr. Dahut: That process began on the first day of law school when thedean told our petrified first-year class that before we could become lawyers we had to learn how to think like lawyers. One student had the nerve to ask the dean how we would know when he had learned to think like lawyers. The dean shot back, when you get paid to think! I soon saw how thinking like lawyers actually meant altering our reasoning structures. For example, memory, while important to success in law school, stood a distant second to learning how to reason like a lawyer.
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C.: ?
Mr. Dahut: Thinking like a lawyer demands thinking within the confinesof inductive and deductive forms of reasoning. As law students, we entered a world of rigorous dialogue in which abstractions are formulated and then described usually leading to the discovery of a general principle or rule,
which is then distinguished from another general rule. We learned how to narrow and intensify our focus. The process taught us how to think defensively: We learned how to protect our clients (and ourselves) and why we needed to proceed slowly, find the traps, measure and calculate the risk. And above all, never, ever let them see you sweat!
C.: -?
Mr. Dahut: The goal, of course, was for me to become a rational, logical,categorical, linear thinker trained to separate what is reasonable from what is not and what is true from what is false. Having learned to think in a new way, I had less tolerance for ambiguity. A new mental structure was forming a new set of lenses through which to view the structure of human affairs.
C.: - ?
Mr. Dahut: It turns out I had just enough left-brain skills to get methrough law school and the bar. The mental gymnastics is necessary for forming the plasticity of the human mind. Unconsciously, I began to relate to and observe others within the context of my new way of think-ing. The old lawyer I once met was right: Learning to think like lawyers made us less capable of the kind of emotive thinking necessary to make creative choices, manage and inspire people, and respond quickly to change.
