Jeffrey Sean Lehman

I have just returned from a nine-day visit with our graduates in Japan, as well as with some of our many other friends on Japanese law faculties.  Our more than three hundred Michigan graduates who live in Japan have achieved extraordinary distinction in all areas of professional endeavor.  I had the privilege of meeting with a Supreme Court Justice, a recently retired President of Tokyo University, members of the Boards of Directors of major corporations, partners in outstanding law firms, and renowned law professors.  All of them share a deep affection for Michigan.  As I returned to Ann Arbor to welcome a new group of summer starters, I held a heightened appreciation for the fact that our students are destined to be leaders not only in this country, but around the world. 

The beginning of a new generation of students also reminded me that it was time to select a theme for the coming year.  As I reported in this page last year, I intend to organize each year of my deanship around a different theme, a different character trait that distinguishes an outstanding attorney.  During 1994-95, I chose to emphasize the great lawyer’s commitment to continuous intellectual growth and renewal.  I am grateful to all those of you who helped me by offering suggested themes for future years.

Several of your letters dealt with the moral dimension of professional life.  For example, Judge John Milligan ’52 wrote about how lawyers need to develop the ethical resources to resist a moral degradation that might otherwise too easily follow from life in a competitive commercial world.  In a related vein, Albert Donohue ’36 wrote at length about the centrality of integrity to the life of the lawyer.  And I believe that “integrity” is indeed an appropriate character trait to adopt as my next theme.

The word “integrity” has multiple connotations.  The integrity of a ship’s hull is the integrity of completeness:  no holes, nothing missing.  The integrity of a chemical solution is the integrity of purity:  no adulterants, nothing extraneous. In an attorney, it is usually understood to connote moral soundness, uprightness, honesty, sincerity, and a commitment to fair dealing.  It is often thought to be most strongly implicated in acts of communication. Thus, a lawyer with integrity is honest and keeps his or her promises.

Scholars of professional responsibility have long debated the way great lawyers reconcile the demands of sincere and truthful communication with the role demands of lawyer-as-advocate and lawyer-as-negotiator.  I look forward to having occasions to discuss some of those issues with you during the coming year. And I also look forward to exploring this theme at the institutional level.  What does it mean to say that a law school is “complete,” “pure,” and “morally sound”?

The past ten days have reminded me how much our life in the law and legal education revolves around different forms of conversation.

First the Law School welcomed hundreds of graduates of the Classes of ’50, ’55, ’60, ’65, and ’70 back for a reunion weekend.  Some saw their first law school classes in decades, others saw a faculty debate about the future of legal education, still others participated in an alumni roundtable on the profession.  The Honigman Auditorium was jam-packed for a warm, funny, and thoughtful speech by Dick Gephardt ’65.  (If you have a computer with a sound card that is connected to the Worldwide Web, you may listen to his talk by pointing to http://www.law.umich.edu/audio/)  A football game, walking tours, receptions, banquets — even an intimate Sunday brunch for 150 at our home — each setting encouraged a different style of conversation.

Then, this past weekend, the students took the reins and sponsored two nationally significant conferences.  The Michigan Journal of Race and Law launched itself with a spectacular two-day symposium entitled Toward a New Civil Rights Vision.  And the Michigan Law and Policy Review launched itself with equal panache, bringing together distinguished academic and nonacademic commentators to debate the complex problems of tort reform.  Each conference used panel debates to bring out the complexity of multifaceted social and legal issues.

These many different conversations — whether serious, frivolous, supportive, or fractious — shared to varying degrees a quality that bears on my theme for this year.  As I indicated in my last Dean’s Message, I am organizing the 1995-96 academic year around the character trait of “integrity.”  And as I suggested there, the integrity of the attorney is most often exemplified in communicative contexts, as we convey ideas to others through speeches, debates, negotiations, or other conversations. 

 

The quality that I want to stress in this message is the quality of trust.  For at least one of the dimensions of integrity, as I understand it, concerns a person’s ability to act in a way that elicits the trust of others.  Two provocative recent books emphasize the critical role that trust plays in productive societies.  In Trust, Francis Fukuyama argues that the most efficient economies are those where people can expect regular, honest, and cooperative behavior from one another, based on commonly shared norms.  And in Work and Integrity, William Sullivan argues that the professions will only be able to thrive if their members commit themselves to promoting a climate of “positive interdependence,” aligning the professions’ norms and expectations with the promotion of social trust and mutual obligation.

The conversations in and around the Law School this fall have been successful to the extent they have been genuine.  The quality of the speakers has been reflected in their integrity, in their abilities to promote an environment of mutual trust.  They have built on the trust that exists when people are joined together in the pursuit of larger purposes.

And that may well be one of the best ways to think about the integrity of an institution such as the University of Michigan Law School.  People gather here for many different reasons.  They may wish to understand tax doctrine, to develop a new vision of civil rights, to clarify the costs and benefits of changing our tort system, or to renew friendships with other members of the Class of 1965.  I find satisfaction in the idea that the Law School adds value to society by bringing individuals together for a common purpose, in a spirit of mutual trust.

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.

In my last message I indicated that I have decided to select as my theme for this year the great lawyer’s role as citizen – as member of a community that extends beyond family.  This issue of Law Quadrangle Notes gives us an opportunity to consider just how far the “community that extends beyond family” may reach.  For here at the Law School, we are encouraged every day to see that community as worldwide.

When the University of Michigan was chartered in 1837, the authorizing legislation provided that the University should employ a professor with expertise in international law.  Almost as soon as the Law School began to enroll students in the second half of the nineteenth century, it attracted some of them from outside the United States.  By 1900, 80 students from outside the United States had received degrees from the Law School.

Today about one in twelve of our graduates lives abroad.  Some are American expatriates whose professional and personal interests have led them far from their parents’ homes.  But most are foreign citizens who came to Michigan with the intention of returning home after they completed their studies.  When, in my role as dean, I am called upon to travel outside the United States, I am invariably inspired to learn of the leadership roles that our graduates are playing in every corner of the world. 

And within the Law Quadrangle, the affairs of the world play an ever- greater role in the studies of all our students.  In the middle of the nineteenth century, our students listened to lectures on shipping and admiralty from Dean James Campbell and international law from Professor Levi Griffin.  This year our students can take courses taught by ten distinguished professors who are visiting Ann Arbor from England, Belgium, France, Germany, Israel, Japan, and South Africa.  They can spend a semester studying at universities in Freiburg, Leiden, Leuven, London, or Paris, or work on faculty-supervised projects in Johannesburg or Phnom Penh.  Over the past decade, about thirty members of Michigan’s core faculty have taught law overseas.

When we try to explain the continual internationalization of our community and our curriculum over the past one and one half centuries, I think we should resist the simple account that subordinates law to business and a global legal profession to a global economic order.  Falling transportation costs and rising technological capacity are important factors:  they are what enable us to bring a professor from Kyoto to Ann Arbor for a three-day stay, and they are what enable us to conduct a joint seminar by videoconference with Oxford and Toronto.  But I do not believe that profit maximization goes very far to illuminate the roots of the international imperative.

Why do so many of us want to study foreign laws and international institutions?  Why do we want to understand the norms that shape the behavior of nations?  Why do we care about how another country regulates marriage, or pollution, or the press? 

No doubt one reason is comparativist.  We believe, rightly, that we will gain new insight into ourselves and our own legal system by better understanding how other societies and cultures have taken different paths to resolve similar social questions.

Yet I think an even more significant reason is fundamentally humanist.  Even while we respect the legal importance of state borders, a core part of us subscribes to a “community” that includes all human beings.  We are excited whenever we recognize ourselves in people from different cultures.  And because law is so central to almost every culture, the University of Michigan Law School is an especially good place to pursue that recognition and feel that excitement.  Francis Allen described law as “a path to the world,” and his words may be read literally as well as metaphorically.  In their lives as lawyers, our graduates feel a sense of responsibility to a community that embraces the entire world.

Over the past four years, I have used my messages in Law Quadrangle Notes to comment on the attributes of an outstanding attorney.  I have noted the great lawyer’s commitments to intellectual growth and renewal, integrity, teaching others about the law, and serving as citizen.  During the coming year, I will explore a related theme:  that of the great lawyer as keeper of our profession’s image.

The legal profession has long inspired a broad range of public  images. Throughout the ages, great lawyers have stood as champions of the underdog, bulwarks against injustice, diplomats, and civic leaders.  We have had countless opportunities to take pride in the lives of lawyers who exemplify the highest aspirations of our craft, lawyers such as Patrick Henry, Abraham Lincoln, Clarence Darrow, Learned Hand, and Thurgood Marshall. 

To be sure, there are other images as well. While it may be easy to romanticize the way lawyers have traditionally been viewed, in truth the caricature of an attorney as venal, unscrupulous, and self-centered has been a longstanding feature of popular culture.  And to our great chagrin, the practicing bar has all too obligingly provided examples to reinforce that caricature.

In conversations with our graduates today, I often hear concern expressed that the average citizen holds the profession of law  in ever-growing disdain.  Even more unsettling, I have observed that lawyers themselves increasingly deride, sometimes with justification, the work and behavior of their colleagues.

I have yet to see a compelling analysis of the presumed decline in public attitudes toward lawyers.  No doubt any investigation would take into account changing societal attitudes towards authority, especially towards government, with which lawyers have been closely associated  since the framing of the Constitution.  Other sources include a shift in media portrayals of the lawyer as an authority figure with special public responsibilities, the rapid growth in the number of practicing attorneys, increased economic pressure on both lawyers and clients alike, and changes in our understanding of a “successful” life.

Whatever such a study might conclude, I believe that we must consider how individual lawyers, sensitive to the importance of sustaining public appreciation for the law as a noble calling, can contribute to that appreciation.  And I believe that, as critical as lawyering skills are to the profession, so too are the links that lawyers offer to their colleagues, their families, their friends, and their communities.  A case in point is Michigan-trained lawyer Clarence Darrow.

A recently discovered treasure trove of Darrow’s correspondence, currently on loan from his granddaughters  to the University’s Bentley Library, provides elegant evidence of the ways in which people from Mother Jones to Theodore Dreiser to Helen Keller came to depend on Darrow for comfort, support, and encouragement.   In their letters to him, some of the most prominent and influential people of their time acknowledged the profound ways in which he supported their aspirations. 

I have no doubt that our profession’s image benefited enormously from the courage and leadership of Clarence Darrow.  Yet I also know that it benefited enormously from Darrow’s humanity, from the kindnesses that he showed to friends and acquaintances.  And, simple as it sounds, this is where I think we must all start to rebuild the image of the legal profession, among ourselves and within our communities. 

The crushing demands of modern life, the long hours spent on tasks  which are considered necessary for professional success,  can make it difficult for a lawyer to find time for others, to make room for small gestures of kindness.   At the same time, those very demands make us even more likely to recognize and appreciate the moments when people go out of their way to be a friend.  And when lawyers, whose history is filled with a generous sense of community leadership  and model citizenship, are willing  to do so, they help to rehabilitate an awareness that our profession is filled with people who are imbued with a generous spirit. And that generosity of spirit lies at the core of the image we wish for the public to associate with those who have chosen a life in the law. 

During my tenure as dean, I have used my messages in Law Quadrangle Notes to explore various qualities that help to define an outstanding attorney.  I have had occasion to discuss how great lawyers pursue intellectual growth and renewal, maintain integrity, teach others about the law, serve as citizens, and bolster our profession’s image.   In the coming year, I would like to turn my attention to a different attribute that we admire when we see it:  patience.

The most memorable words I ever heard about that quality came from the late Justice Thurgood Marshall during the year that I served as a law clerk to Justice Stevens.  I was meeting with one of the Marshall clerks when Justice Marshall came in to talk with him about a case.  He insisted that I stay, and after the case discussion was completed we all talked more generally about the practice of law. During the course of that discussion, Justice Marshall offered the following observation:  “There’s only one kind of reputation that a young lawyer can get in a hurry.”

Since that day, I have often remembered Justice Marshall’s comment.  And I have had occasion to consider the different messages it might convey.  

On one level, Justice Marshall was noting how much lawyers value the quality of painstaking care.  Rigor is assumed to the point of almost being taken for granted.  To be distinguished a lawyer must show a high level of care for a long time.  Conversely, even one careless slip can do significant damage to a lawyer’s reputation along this critical dimension.  

Yet Justice Marshall’s words can also be understood in a different way.  I believe he was telling us that our time as students was coming to an end.  We were in the midst of a transition from lives as students to lives as lawyers.  From a campus world with tests and grades to a far more subtle and complex world, a world where many different human qualities contribute to success, a world with no closed-book examinations and no four-point evaluation scales.  Reputation emerges slowly and painstakingly, as a lawyer demonstrates a consistent ability to perform work of the highest quality.

This past May 15, as we launched the Class of 1999 into their professional lives, I thought back to Justice Marshall’s words.  I wondered how well we had prepared our students for this transition.  The pressures of contemporary practice are enormous, and today there is added allure to the dream of making one spectacular leap after another up the ladder of professional success.  “Ever faster, ever onward,” is a tempting strategy.  

How can we let our students know, before they face such temptations, that people do not receive a special prize for reaching the end of life early?  That the quality of an accomplishment is not defined by the speed of its production?  That the achievements that matter most to us invariably require a sustained period of careful attention, hard work, and patience?

This is a challenge for all of us in the profession.  It is a challenge for those of us who hope to prepare new lawyers.  And it is a challenge for those of us who serve as mentors to our new junior colleagues.  I look forward to exploring this theme further in the year ahead.

This year, I have used these messages to discuss the great lawyer’s capacity for patience.  We can learn more about this complex and nuanced quality by exploring its obverse.  I am thinking here of the great lawyer’s impatience.   For sometimes the mark of a truly outstanding attorney is the ability to charge ahead decisively at a moment when the easier course would be to wait and temporize. 

I am not here thinking of the ability to be impatient with others.  That is, of course, a talent that many lawyers both great and mediocre have in abundance.  Rather, what I have in mind is a certain impatience with oneself.  

Ours is a cautious profession.  By our training, we become exquisitely attuned to risk.   As we learn how to recognize the strongest arguments against any legal position, we learn more generally how to anticipate the possibility that things might not play out according to plan.

Business clients are ambivalent about this quality of ours.  They want to be warned of anything that might go wrong.  No surprises.  Yet they quickly grow weary of the counselor who sounds like an unrelenting prophet of doom.  

In the business world, risk is a fact of life.  The successful business person becomes comfortable with the need to manage risk prudently.  To form judgments about risk magnitudes, to put limits on the potential damage if things break badly, and to accept the fact that great opportunities are never risk-free.

Successful business people expect us, as their lawyers, to understand that fact, and to accommodate our temperaments and our judgments to a company’s goals and aspirations even as we recognize that danger may lie ahead.  And that requires us to cultivate a degree of impatience with ourselves.

Every day the practicing lawyer must decide when and how to advise.  Inside, the lawyer’s sense of the right answer has begun to crystallize. It is not yet rock solid; there are a few nagging doubts.  Is it time to express an opinion despite the doubts?  Should the judgment be hedged?  Why?  To protect the client or to protect the lawyer?  Or should more time be invested in research and reflection, in an effort to get closer to “the bottom of the well”?  

Law school does not teach the answers to those questions.  But the best lawyers share a kind of drive that enables them to push beyond lawyerly caution and reserve, to serve their clients best.  They have the intellect to recognize what they do not yet know.  They are able to convey a complex sense of what they know and what they do not know, in a way that is maximally useful to their clients.  And a critically impatient voice inside often insists that they need to respond quickly, before they have reached a point of complete security and serenity about what they are about to say.

My last message concluded with the observation that the many dimensions of patience call for a particular balance, the balance between being sensitive to others and preserving an authentic and enduring self.  Here we see emerging the need for a different balance: between patience and impatience, impulse and hesitation.  Somewhere on the continuum from inertia to rashness, lawyers and business people alike struggle to find the middle ground of thoughtful but decisive action. 

In my last message, I suggested that great lawyers are optimistic.  Not complacent Panglosses.  But, rather, pragmatic activists who are inspired by a faith that their actions as attorneys are not pointless.  They are people who believe in their own efficacy.

Any experienced lawyer has a deep repository of war stories in which the wrong thing happened.  A correct legal argument was rejected by a trial judge or an appellate court. An honest and accurate witness was disbelieved by a jury.  An innocent person was charged, prosecuted, convicted, and sentenced.

Given such experiences, why do lawyers persist?  Perhaps the simplest account would be that they believe errors are more or less random and will balance out in the long run.  (In metastasized form, this view might become a belief that the judicial process produces results that are entirely unrelated to the merits of the underlying dispute, but that extreme of cynicism is not necessary to explain the willingness to persist.)

There is something unsatisfying, however, about this “errors cancel out” view of things.  For one thing, it is not clear why errors should cancel out.  Why shouldn’t errors on one side overwhelm any errors on the other side, as a result of systemic biases?  Why shouldn’t structural flaws of one kind or another lead to the conclusion that the judicial system is simply incapable of reaching a just result, at least in certain classes of cases?

For another thing, the notion that errors will even out in the long run cannot explain the commitments that lawyers sometimes make to a single case.  I think, for example, of the work of Brian O’Neill ’74 as the lead attorney for the plaintiffs in the Exxon-Valdez litigation.  The tanker ran aground in March 1989, it was five and one half years until the jury returned its verdict, it was and another six years until the Supreme Court denied certiorari.  As described in the book Cleaning Up, O’Neill uprooted his life and moved to Alaska for several years in order to direct the litigation.  His law firm partners back in Minneapolis borrowed tens of millions of dollars for the expenses of litigation, many of them offering their homes to secure the borrowing.

It is hard to explain behavior such as this with the idea that bad luck in one lawsuit will be offset by good luck in the next one.  To me it seems more natural to conclude that a more fundamental optimism was at work here.  The lawyers in question believed in their hearts that, in the end, the legal system would work.  If they did their jobs as well as they could, if they were skillful advocates on behalf of their clients, their clients’ interests would be vindicated. Because of that belief, they were willing to make heroic sacrifices to continue the litigation.

The best lawyers I have known share that quality.  They recognize the imperfections of our legal system. They understand that biases and errors, both human and structural, can lead to miscarriages of justice. But at the end of the day, they believe such outcomes are the exception.  With an optimistic faith that, in any given case, the most likely outcome is also the correct one, they choose to go forward and play their role in the process to the very best of their abilities.

Each year I use my messages in Law Quadrangle Notes to examine a quality that helps to define an outstanding attorney.  I have discussed how great lawyers pursue intellectual growth and renewal, maintain integrity, teach others about the law, serve as community citizens, bolster our profession’s image, exhibit patience, and sustain a form of optimism. In the coming year, I would like to explore the quality of voice.

The famous English preacher Charles Haddon Spurgeon once published “Hints on the Voice for Young Preachers” in 1875.   Most of his guidance had to do with diction – with qualities such as articulation, cadence, and volume.  And while that is not the kind of “voice” I am speaking of here, I nonetheless expect most lawyers would find his recommendations entertaining at least.  Consider, for example, the following advice:

·      “[A]void the use of the nose as an organ of speech, for the best authorities are agreed that it is intended to smell with.”

·       “It is impossible to hear a man who crawls along at a mile an hour. One word to-day and one tomorrow is a kind of slow-fire which martyrs only could enjoy. Excessively rapid speaking, tearing and raving into utter rant, is quite as inexcusable; it is not, and never can be powerful, except with idiots.”

In referring to the “voice” of a great attorney, however, I am speaking of more than diction.  I am referring to qualities of personality – to the ways that we can shape the nature of our relationship with our listeners through choices about timing, syntax, tone, and word selection.  And we can read some of Spurgeon’s observations differently from the way he wrote them, in ways that prompt reflection about what substantive attributes of voice might characterize the best lawyers.  Let me note a few examples:

“[O]pen your mouths when you speak, for much of inarticulate mumbling is the result of keeping the mouth half closed.”  The best lawyers always seem to know when and how to speak up.  Never too soon, never too late, never in ways that leave their listeners wondering why they chose to speak at all.

 “Always speak so as to be heard. … Adapt your voice to your audience.”  These lawyers share an unerring sense of audience and context.  They know which clients should be patiently walked through each step of a complex analysis, and which clients become confused and impatient with anything beyond a summary conclusion.

“Do not as a rule exert your voice to the utmost. … Vary the force of your voice.” Persuasion often requires restraint.  The lawyer who tries to steamroll listeners, overwhelming them with an avalanche of argument, often elicits suspicion and resistance more than acquiescence.

“Get a friend to tell you your faults, or, better still, welcome an enemy who will watch you keenly and sting you savagely.”  Important moments of advocacy or negotiation require preparation. The best attorneys appreciate the limits to their ability to imagine the reactions of others, and they make effective use of third parties to unearth the dangerous unintended reactions that a presentation might provoke.

During the coming year, I hope to explore in greater depth the ways in which a great lawyer’s voice can influence a situation or a relationship.  Like Spurgeon, I believe that we may profitably analyze, debate, and teach the subject of “voice.”  In doing so, we can better prepare our students for careers in which the voices they use are often as important as the substantive ideas they express.

This year, I have been devoting my messages to the ways that a great attorney’s  “voice” can shape his or her relationship with listeners.  In my concluding message of this series, I would like to focus on my experience of how outstanding lawyers deliver news.  How they deliver bad news.  And how they deliver good news.

The reason I want to concentrate on that particular feature of the lawyer’s voice is because it is one that I often hear mentioned in a particular context. Each year, several times a year, I host lunches at the Law School in a series that I call “the Dean’s Forum.” In a typical Dean’s Forum, ten or fifteen students have lunch with a lawyer who is now running a business. The lawyer speaks about career path.  Frequently, the lawyer speaks about what it is like to be a client.

Often a student will ask our graduates what they think distinguishes a good lawyer from a bad lawyer.  As often as not, the response concerns the way the lawyer delivers news.

The easiest examples concern the delivery of bad news.  By bad news, I mean news of the form, “the course of action you describe may well be illegal or would expose you to civil liability.”The best lawyers seem to know intuitively that the delivery of such news is a delicate art indeed.

Most of us have had the experience of seeing a lawyer deliver bad news with glee, or if not with glee then at least as a contemptuous scold.  We know how detrimental that tone can be to the client’s vision of the law, and of the legal profession. 

But I have also had many opportunities to see gifted lawyers deliver bad news with astonishing skill.  It has been fifteen years since I was in practice, but I retain a vivid memory of how a lawyer I worked with used to prepare himself to deliver bad news. As I reflect on that preparation, I believe that today I have a deeper appreciation of why his clients valued his counsel so much.

First, he would try to present a legal obstacle or a legal risk in a matter-of-fact way.  Not as a matter of profound injustice or unfairness that gave cause for whining and tirades against the legal system, but as a feature of the world no different from the existence of a competitor with a high quality product.  A challenge to be overcome.

Second, he would try to show the client that he was an ally in a larger endeavor. Invariably, that meant helping the client to think about how the same ends might be achieved through alternative means.  A different, safer path through the forest.

The delivery of good news can sometimes present a very different challenge. This challenge is not to sustain the client’s ability to be effective.  It is to sustain the client’s sense of the law as a system worthy of respect. 

When a lawyer discovers a clever solution to a problem, it is natural to want credit for cleverness.  But as my mentor showed me, the best lawyers are able to claim credit not for manipulating a system that has no integrity, but rather for understanding the nuanced complexity of a legitimate feature of the business environment. The difference may be subtle at times, but this ability to present good news in a way that respects the law was essential to his ability to present bad news effectively.

The best lawyers would seem to be able to sustain a consistent voice through the presentation of bad and good news.  A voice that maintains a respectful stance towards the law while also making it possible for a client to be effective in navigating its terrain. At the Law School we will continue to strive to help our students develop that consistency of voice, drawing on the vast experiential resources to be found among our 20,000 graduates.