Category: The Business of Law

The three stages of a professional career

Some years ago I developed the theory that professional careers can have three stages. Stage One is the day you graduate from law school, or medical school, or accounting school. You know more about all parts of your field than you ever will again. You are full of knowledge but haven’t yet acquired the practical experience to put it to use.

Stage Two arrives maybe 5 to 15 years later, as your practice acquires a focus. You learn much more about a narrower field, but the details of what lies outside that field fade away. I can talk for an hour about how to draft an easement agreement (real estate), but I couldn’t give you more than 30 seconds of information about the guest passenger statute (torts) or the law of general average (admiralty). A physician might develop a specialty in orthopedics while retaining only a hazy knowledge about kidney disease.

Many people enjoy satisfying careers in Stage Two, becoming recognized as experts in their field.

But for some fortunate professionals, Stage Two will give way to Stage Three, when the professional has developed not just technical skill in a specialty, but the general skill to diagnose problems and to devise solutions. The Stage Three professional may not be the one who implements the solution, but is often the one who knows what is causing the problem and what the solution will look like, whether it’s the Stage Three orthopedist who recognizes the patient’s joint pains as signs of kidney disease, or the Stage Three lawyer who discerns the human conflict that underlies a business dispute and advises the client on how to solve both the dispute and the underlying conflict.

If you’re entering Stage Two as a real estate and business lawyer and want to achieve Stage Three, let’s talk.

Dean Alterman to speak on how to build a law firm

On June 28 the Real Property, Trusts and Estates section of the American Bar Association will present a panel discussion with Dean Alterman joining Heather Johnston of Sapphire Law Group and Sarah Cline of Miles & Stockbridge PC.  The panelists will talk about how to build a transactional real estate law practice, whether as a boutique firm (Dean and Heather) or within a larger firm (Sarah), using Dean’s first book as the outline for their presentations.

H.O. Lock opines on litigation

I often tell clients, “litigation is a blunt instrument,” and encourage efforts to come to a fair settlement before the expenses of a lawsuit mount up.  In 1946 Henry Osmond Lock (1879-1962), a Dorsetshire solicitor (his father represented the author Thomas Hardy), published a short volume entitled “Advice to a Young Solicitor,” distilling 40 years of experience at the bar into sound recommendations for the young lawyer.  Here is his more elegant paragraph on the topic:

Empty courtroom
Image from Shutterstock. Used under license.

“You may take it that in almost all cases of civil proceedings, the commencement of litigation is preceded by a course of negotiation.  Then is the time that it may be well to ‘agree with thine adversary quickly while thou art in the way with him.’ A fair and reasonable settlement is often more satisfactory than an action fought out to the bitter end, even though the outcome be a verdict in your client’s favour.  A successful litigant has many expenses to shoulder himself, and many an apparent triumph secured in the Courts of Law has in the end proved to be but a Pyrrhic Victory.”

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