Making A Good Lawyer

Every lawyer wants to be a good lawyer. They want to do right by their clients, contribute to the professional community, become good colleagues, interact effectively with people of all persuasions, and choose the right cases. All of these skills and behaviors are important, but they spring from hard-to-identify foundational qualities necessary for good lawyering. After focusing for three years on getting high grades and sharpening analytical skills, far too many lawyers leave law school without a real sense of what it takes to be a good lawyer. In The Good Lawyer, Douglas O. Linder and Nancy Levit combine evidence from the latest social science research with numerous engaging accounts of top-notch attorneys at work to explain just what makes a good lawyer. They outline and analyze several crucial qualities: courage, empathy, integrity, diligence, realism, a strong sense of justice, clarity of purpose, and an ability to transcend emotionalism. Many qualities require apportionment in the right measure, and achieving the right balance is difficult. Lawyers need to know when to empathize and also when to detach; courage without an appreciation of consequences becomes recklessness; working too hard leads to exhaustion and mistakes. And what do you do in tricky situations, where the urge to deceive is high? How can you maintain focus through a mind-taxing (or mind-numbing) project? Every lawyer faces these problems at some point, but if properly recognized and approached, they can be overcome. It's not easy being good, but this engaging guide will serve as a handbook for any lawyer trying not only to figure out how to become a better--and, almost always, more fulfilled--lawyer.

You get good grades in college, pay a small fortune to put yourself through law school, study hard to pass the bar exam, and finally land a high-paying job in a prestigious firm. You're happy, right? Not really. Oh, it beats laying asphalt, but after all your hard work, you expected more from your job. What gives? The Happy Lawyer examines the causes of dissatisfaction among lawyers, and then charts possible paths to happier and more fulfilling careers in law. Eschewing a one-size-fits-all approach, it shows how maximizing our chances for achieving happiness depends on understanding our own personality types, values, strengths, and interests. Covering everything from brain chemistry and the science of happiness to the workings of the modern law firm, Nancy Levit and Doug Linder provide invaluable insights for both aspiring and working lawyers. For law students, they offer surprising suggestions for selecting a law school that maximizes your long-term happiness prospects. For those about to embark on a legal career, they tell you what happiness research says about which potential jobs hold the most promise. For working lawyers, they offer a handy toolbox--a set of easily understandable steps--that can boost career happiness. Finally, for firm managers, they offer a range of approaches for remaking a firm into a more satisfying workplace. Read this book and you will know whether you are more likely to be a happy lawyer at age 30 or age 60, why you can tell a lot about a firm from looking at its walls and windows, whether a 10 percent raise or a new office with a view does more for your happiness, and whether the happiness prospects are better in large or small firms. No book can guarantee a happier career, but for lawyers of all ages and stripes, The Happy Lawyer may give you your best shot.

"Doug Linder and Nancy Levit combine evidence from the latest social science research with numerous engaging accounts of able attorneys at work to explain just what makes a good lawyer -- courage, empathy, integrity, realism, a strong sense of justice, clarity of purpose, and an ability to transcend emotionalism"--

Small steps can lead to big changes. For lawyers who want to improve their career, Building a Better Law Practice: Become a Better Lawyer in Five Minutes a Day is full of these small steps. A few minutes a day with this easy-to-read guide will help put you on the right path to growing your career

The Good Lawyer encourages the development of a sense of social and moral responsibility as the foundation of better practice.

‘How the Law Works is a gem of a book, for law students and for everyone else. It is a must read for anyone interested in how society is shaped and controlled via law.’ Dr Steven Vaughan, solicitor, Senior Lecturer, Birmingham Law School ‘How the Law Works is a comprehensive, witty and easy-to-read guide to the law. I thoroughly recommend it to non-lawyers who want to improve their knowledge of the legal system and to potential students as an introduction to the law of England and Wales.’ HH Judge Lynn Tayton QC Reviews of the first edition: ‘A friendly, readable and surprisingly entertaining overview of what can be a daunting and arcane subject to the outsider.’ The Law Teacher ‘An easy-to-read, fascinating book . . . brimful with curios, anecdote and explanation.’ The Times How the Law Works is a refreshingly clear and reliable guide to today’s legal system. Offering interesting and comprehensive coverage, it makes sense of all the curious features of the law in day to day life and in current affairs. Explaining the law and legal jargon in plain English, it provides an accessible entry point to the different types of law and legal techniques, as well as today’s compensation culture and human rights law. In addition to explaining the role of judges, lawyers, juries and parliament, it clarifies the mechanisms behind criminal and civil law. How the Law Works is essential reading for anyone approaching law for the first time, or for anyone who is interested in an engaging introduction to the subject’s bigger picture.

Law school was never Anna Dorn's dream. It was a profession pushed on her by her parents, teachers, society... whatever. It's not the worst thing that can happen to a person; as Dorn says, law school was pretty "cushy" and mostly entailed wearing leggings every day to her classes at Berkeley and playing beer pong with her friends at night. The hardest part was imagining what it would be like to actually be a lawyer one day. But then she'd think of Glenn Close on Damages and Reese Witherspoon in Legally Blonde, and hoped for the best. After graduation, however, Dorn realized that there was nothing sexy about being a lawyer. Between the unflattering suits, sucking up to old men, and spending her days sequestered in a soul-sucking cubicle, Dorn quickly learned that being a lawyer wasn't everything Hollywood made it out to be. Oh, and she sucked at it. Not because she wasn't smart enough, but because she couldn't get herself to care enough to play by the rules. Bad Lawyer is more than just a memoir of Dorn's experiences as a less-than-stellar lawyer; it's about the less-than-stellar legal reality that exists for all of us in this country, hidden just out of sight. It's about prosecutors lying and filing inane briefs that lack any semblance of logic or reason; it's about defense attorneys sworn to secrecy-until the drinks come out and the stories start flying; and it's about judges who drink in their chambers, sexually harass the younger clerks, and shop on eBay instead of listening to homicide testimony. More than anything, this book aims to counteract the fetishization of the law as a universe based entirely on logic and reason. Exposing everything from law school to law in the media, and drawing on Dorn's personal experiences as well as her journalistic research, Bad Lawyer ultimately provides us with a fresh perspective on our justice system and the people in it, and gives young lawyers advice going forward into the 21st century.