Small Law Firms, Solo Practitioners, Technology

Why Outside-The-Box Thinkers Make The Best Lawyers

And is it possible to be an outside-the-box thinker without using technology?

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You may have heard about a behavioral science experiment involving monkeys and a ladder with a banana at the top of the ladder. When one monkey would try to climb the ladder to reach the banana, the researchers would spray all of the monkeys with a hose. After a while, when a monkey tried to go towards the ladder, the others would stop him so that they wouldn’t get hosed. The researchers then switched out one of the monkeys with a new monkey who didn’t know about the hose. When he would go towards the ladder, just as before, the others would stop him. The swapping continued, and the new monkeys would join in stopping newer monkeys from going towards the ladder, not knowing about the hose treatment, but learning from the example of the original monkeys that going towards the ladder is bad. The researchers eventually swapped out all of the monkeys so that none of the original monkeys were together, but all of the new monkeys would try to stop each other from going towards the ladder.

There is some debate online as to the origins of that experiment, or whether it ever happened, so I’ll just call it the “parable of the monkeys who just do what everyone else does without understanding why” — or, for short, “the parable of the associate.” If you work in a law firm, you probably recognize the above fact pattern and can analogize it to your colleagues.

I’ve come across a bunch of lawyers since I started my legal career ten years ago. Some of them were really good, some were really bad, and most of them were just somewhere in the spectrum of not being memorable. The lawyers who were bad were all bad for about a thousand different reasons, but the lawyers who were good, almost always shared one quality: they were outside-the-box thinkers….

Is It Possible To Be an Outside-The-Box Thinker And Be Old School?

Perry Mason was an outside-the-box thinker. He got to the truth with innovative solutions and by approaching his cases from unique angles. Although he’s a fictional character, I am going to assume that lawyers before my time and before the invention of computers and the Internet could have also been innovative. Likewise, I am going to assume that even today, there are creative lawyers out there who don’t use all of the technological tools that we have available, but are still excellent, outside-the-box thinkers. But, the question should really be, “Is it possible to find the best outside-the-box solutions without using technology?” That’s a question that I have a harder time saying yes to. I know this is hard for most lawyers because we are trained to look to the past for answers in our analyses of legal questions. I can’t say for sure if stare decisis holds lawyers back from thinking about the future, but it sure seems that way.

For example, one time I was working on a case where our client rear-ended someone at less than 5 mph, but since it was a commercial vehicle, there was a million-dollar claim. The plaintiff shows up to deposition almost 18 months post-accident in a neck brace and testifies that he can’t do the things he used to, such as run or exercise. Instead of hiring a private investigator to follow the guy around, we looked to the Internet. Before trial, the attorney for our side prints out the plaintiff’s race results from Active.com, a site for registering for races and other sporting events. When we presented page after page of race results, the best part was watching the camp at the other table trying hard to pretend like they were not losing about $10,000 a second.

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Finding Innovative Solutions To Problems

I recently had the opportunity to attend a unique legal technology conference in San Francisco called LegalTech SW (Startup Weekend). LegalTech SW was a three-day event/competition that brought together legal professionals and various technology professionals to come up with innovative legal solutions to help new businesses. The attendees broke off into teams to prepare solutions or ideas for legal products. On the final day of the event, they presented their ideas for the chance to win prizes. Examples of the solutions presented were a privacy policy statement generator for developers. Another team, led by a corporate attorney from Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, presented a web-based platform to automate aspects of document exchange and communication for more efficient negotiations. The keynote address was given by Stanford Law School research fellow Ron Dolin, who worked at CERN and as one of the first employees at Google.

Conclusion

If you want to be just another one of the million lawyers who dwells in the comfortable realm of mediocrity and not stand out, then, by all means, do that. But, if you want to really differentiate yourself, find better ways to put that six-figure education to use, and learn about the tools that we have available to us today to solve our clients’ problems.

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Jeff Bennion is a solo practitioner from San Diego. When not handling his own cases, he’s consulting lawyers on how to use technology to not be boring in trial or managing e-discovery projects in mass torts/complex litigation cases. If you want to be disappointed in a lack of posts, you can follow him on twitter or on Facebook. If you have any ideas of things you want him to cover, email Jeff at jeff@trial.technology.

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