Traits OF A GOOD Lawyer - essay PDF

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TRAITS OF A GOOD LAWYER: CREATIVITY When we think about a job as a lawyer, creativity may not be the first trait that comes to our mind. Inevitably, people always synonymous a lawyer with a bookworm or a guy who just memorize and follow the book. Being a lawyer does require a lot of reading, research, writing, and analysis. However, contrary to the popular conceptions of most people, successful lawyers are often highly creative people. The law is not purely a science. There is an art to effective legal practice. Regardless of whether you are a litigator, a transactional attorney, in-house counsel, or something else, you need to be creative. Let us peel back how creativity plays a role in a lawyer’s life. There are certain activities of lawyers in legal tradition, which we presume do not require “creativity”, and those happen to be very high-profile activities: arguing appeals and deciding appeals. That is because the “common law” tradition is based on precedent. In this tradition, a lawyer written argument must be supported, sentence-by-sentence, and sometimes even word-by-word, with quotations, citations and references to prior case law. This is where creativity comes. To be persuasive at this method of argument, the last thing we, as a lawyer, want is to give the impression that our ideas are new, fresh or original with us. Even if our argument is new and unique, we try to make it sound like the oldest and most obvious thing in the universe. Even the routine wrong-righting and crime-punishing litigation which eventually results in some of those boring arguments about case law at the appellate level, at first took creativity to develop in its early stages, especially during the investigative stage, before all the facts were known, established or presented at trial. The truth hides: it takes creativity to discover it. Trial itself requires a high degree of creativity, particularly in this day and age when it has to compete with attention-grabbing techniques. Words that came out from a lawyer are vital to influence everybody in the courtroom, either judges or the opponent lawyers. We can take the case of O.J Simpson as an example where former college and professional gridiron football star, O.J. Simpson, who was acquitted in 1995 of the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman. It was one of the most notorious criminal trials in American history. One of the defendant’s lawyer, used his creative mind by asking O.J Simpson to try the glove found at the crime scene to show that the glove used was not his. As the glove did not fit, he influenced everybody in the courtroom by saying, “If it doesn't fit, you must acquit”. He intended the phrase specifically, as a reference to the gloves, and as a metaphor, to describe the prosecution's uneven case against Simpson. As a result, Simpson

was found not guilty of the murders of his ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend Ronald Lyle Goldman. Aside from that, everything else in the law takes a high degree of creativity. Many lawyers, particularly those involved with business and contracts, do nothing but negotiating and problem-solving. That takes creativity. As a lawyer, we have to be able to anticipate problems that our clients cannot foresee, and solve disputes that they cannot resolve. To recap what have been said, the very top lawyers are not only logical and analytical, but they display a great deal of creativity in their problem-solving. The best solution is not always the most obvious and in order to outmanoeuvre your challenger it is often necessary to think outside the box....