Preparing for the Practice of Law

My decision to go to law school was a way to hit the reset button on my life. I was not happy with the direction I was going, and I wanted to learn skills that would make me more valuable in society- a trade that would make me more employable.

Prior to law school, the closest I had come to learning a trade was sales. I had also worked for the Post Office, but this simply involved brute manual labor. Working for the Post Office did nothing to prepare me for any sort of other job.

Sales was a fascinating experience, though. I took a job with a car dealership in Las Vegas. Management put me out on the lot, and the veteran salesmen were amused to watch me crash and burn with one customer after another. It was clear to everyone that I had no idea what I was doing. But I was paid totally on commission, so I was only really hurting my own wallet. Management watched me, though. If I got a qualified buyer in and seemed to be making progress, they would send over one of the three or four "closers" who worked there to make sure the deal got done. One closer, a sharp guy named Rod who was originally from Hawaii, would actually kick me under the table if I said something wrong to a customer.

Sales was a complete fog to me at first, but I eventually began to learn some things through failed experience, watching what the veterans did, and reading a very good book on selling.

I continued to work in auto sales after I made the decision to return to school. Ironically, in the five or six months in between my decision to go back to school and the start of classes, I became pretty good at my job. It was probably due in part to the fact that I was more relaxed. I had made my decision. There was no need to push too hard, as I knew I was leaving soon.

Anyway, management began letting me close my own deals. During one of our weekly sales meetings, a manager had me stand up. He told the group that my progress over the past few months had been tremendous, and he wanted me to share the secret of my success with them. I said that I simply found a part of the deal that I believed in. I got excited about it, and I tried to convey that excitement to the customer...

Now, less than three months from graduation from law school, I find myself trying to learn a new trade again. The practice of law will be far different from law school . Law school gives you some fundamental tools, but school is largely a world unto itself. There are also certain similarities between the practice of law and the art of selling, but there is no doubt that I have to get myself into a new mindset. Here are two of the most stark adjustments I am trying to make:

1) Changing the importance of being a nice guy.

In sales, "Make the customer like you" is a cardinal rule if not the most important rule of all. My sales performance improved once I began thinking of the business as "the science of being liked." You never argue with a customer in sales. You may win the argument, but you will lose the sale.

In law, I am not convinced that being a nice guy is important. Sure, you should always be courteous and polite. But your client is not hiring you to be a nice guy. Your client is hiring you to win their legal argument. Particularly in trial law, I think this holds true. Many of the trial lawyers I am meeting strike me as being confident to the point of arrogance. I do not hold this against them. You almost have to be arrogant and stubborn to be successful. Time and again in law school, I have heard that law is an adversarial system, and I've seen a little of how contentious it can get. If I am always being humble, trying to adhere to the science of being liked, then I am probably not serving my client very well.

In sales, ideally you want the whole process to be so smooth and pleasant for everyone involved that the same customer will come back to you again and again and also send you referrals.

But in trial law, you want to inspire fear- or at least hesitation- in the other side. There are some great lines from the movie, The Verdict, starring Paul Newman. Newman plays Frank Galvin, an attorney representing a woman in a coma due to the medical negligence of a Catholic hospital.

At one one point in the movie, another attorney, Mickey, asks him, "Do you know who the attorney for the Archdiocese is? Eddie Concannon."

Galvin replies, "He's a good man."

Mickey: "He's a good man?! He's the F***ing Prince of Darkness! He'll have people in there testifying that they saw this broad Tuesday on a surfboard in Hyannis!"

...Hopefully, in sales no one ever calls you the F***ing Prince of Darkness.

2) Eye wear.

Repetitive motion jobs take their toll on parts of the body. I observed this in the mail carriers I worked with and the health problems that they experienced.

If you're going to be a lawyer, you might as well resign yourself to the toll all the reading off computer screens is going to take on your eyes. Several people I know have had to get glasses or stronger prescriptions since coming to law school. My own vision has slightly worsened- though not to the point where I need glasses (my dominant performance at table tennis over the Christmas break convinced me that I don't need glasses, yet).

Losing my eyesight has always been a big fear. I always thought that people who wore glasses could not see anything beyond a certain range- that it all literally turned to black after 500 yards or so. As my own vision has suffered some wear, though, I am relieved to learn that vision loss does not quite work that way. I can still perceive color from far away.

One day, I was looking down Jefferson Street at a stoplight. It had to be over 500 yards distant. The light looked like a fuzzy prism and had no clear borders. I thought to myself, "Now, three years ago I would have been able to see the circle of that light clearly. It would not be fuzzy."

But I could still see the change from green to yellow to red.

That's good enough, I guess. As long as I can perceive color and light from as far away as I always have, and as long as I can clearly focus on things close to me, I'll take it.

In sales, this was obviously not a problem. I was outside on the car lot most of the time, and got to stretch my eyes, so to speak, by looking at the mountains on the horizon outside of Vegas. Or I could look up at the huge tower of the Stratosphere casino. Planes also came in for a landing right over our dealership. I could see strange white passenger airliners with no markings on them but a red stripe down each side. Rod, the closer from Hawaii, told me that those planes carried the employees of Area 51 back and forth. They landed at a location called JANET at the airport, which stood for "Just another non-existent terminal." Who knows if Rod was telling me the truth.

There are other changes to my mindset worth noting, but this entry has already taken too much time. I need to get back to studying Complex Civil Litigation.

Until Next Time,

Nathan Marshburn