Reinventing The Law Business: Intellectually Fearless
If you don’t want to be replaced by artificial intelligence, you need to become intellectually fearless, according to managing partner Bruce Stachenfeld.
Many years ago – actually many, many years ago – I took an American History course at Scarsdale Junior High School by a teacher named Werner Feig.
Before that course, I was just a garden variety kid. I played basketball and went to school and stuff like that. Then I took this course. I sat down the first day and Mr. Feig came in.
He didn’t say hello. He just launched into something like this:
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“The only people who are intelligent in this country are the elite. They are the educated ones. They should run the country. Not the uneducated people. Uneducated people – like [insert name of ethnic group] – have no education and therefore they shouldn’t have the right to vote.”
He walked over to the girl sitting next to me – right next to me – and planted his hands on her desk and looked her in the face from about twenty inches away and asked her: “What do you think of that?”
She sputtered indignantly, with obvious fear: “But…but…that is just wrong…”
He stood up in a classic mocking pose and laughed right at her. “Wow. What a great argument. You told me I am ‘wrong’! Wow you really convinced me…”
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He walked around laughing at her again and again – most disrespectfully… “Wrong!” he said. “I am so impressed!!!” And then he walked back to her and asked her again: “Is that all you have to say for yourself?”
Unfortunately that was all she had to say that day.
To be honest, I was absolutely terrified. When would he attack me? What would I do? Remember this was only 7th or 8th grade – not the movie The Paper Chase!
Fast forward about sixty days. We had – all of us – transformed ourselves into intellectual warriors and the class itself was a war zone. Mr. Feig would say outrageous things and defend them (brilliantly and passionately) and we would spring back with our own counter-views, sometimes with raised voices. We were framing arguments, backing up our positions with logic and reason. We were – all of us – everyone in the class (to my recollection) aggressive and …… “intellectually fearless”…… which is my topic.
Mr. Feig dramatically changed my life. He woke up my brain. Instead of just the plain old kid I was before, I had a strong brain and I was not afraid to use it. If there is any single thing I owe my success in life to, it is Mr. Feig and maybe even that first day of class. Because that class was my first step toward becoming intellectually fearless.
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This phrase – “intellectually fearless” – is one I have been using quite a bit. What does it mean: it means that I am not afraid of things that I don’t understand, nor do I fool myself into thinking I understand things that I do not understand. When faced with the great unknown, I don’t just sit there wondering what to do – instead I use my trained brain to figure out a solution and pride myself on not being limited in my thinking. And finally, it means that my thinking is very flexible and is abstract when necessary – I don’t get trapped in what “is” and I am constantly examining what “could be.” This is what I am made for and what I am here for.
When I coach my partners – when I train associates – when I do my best to be a great parent to my children – it really all centers on this. The advantage we humans have in the world is our brains. We should use those brains.
Our reaction to something we have not seen before should not be to “ask someone else” or just say we can’t do it because we haven’t done it or, worst of all, fool ourselves into thinking we understand something we do not. Our reaction should be:
“I haven’t seen it before but, no worries, I will figure it out.”
And to even go a notch higher, our reaction should not just be to attack problems that others give us with the foregoing attitude, but, even more important, we should be trying to figure out what the problems are in the first place which, as many scientists will say, differentiates the great scientists from the less great ones. What I mean here, to be clear, is it is one thing to answer a client when she comes to you with a difficult problem. It is a much higher purpose to think about what the client is trying to accomplish and, without being asked, come up with a way to do it even better than it was before.
You might wonder why this is in my column about Reinventing the Law Business. Well, you may have seen the article in the American Lawyer entitled Computer vs. Lawyer? Many Leaders Expect Computers to Win. In the article, it says that 35 percent of law firm leaders see artificial intelligence replacing first-year associates within 5 to 10 years!
Honestly, that is about the dumbest thing I have ever heard. It shows a lack of understanding by the party asking the question (sorry Altman Weil) and a lack of understanding from those answering (sorry those 35 percent).
One obvious reason (as a reductio ad absurdum argument) why the question and answer makes no real sense, is that you would have to wonder if computers replace first-year associates then where do second-year associates come from? And third-year associates? And so on.
Even though the question – as asked – is kind of dumb, the subtext is not, and it is a really important issue. There is absolutely no question but that artificial intelligence will start to replace part of the legal world, in the same way that this is happening in just about every other area of human interaction. The question is: where will you be as this unfolds?
To answer this, you need to think about what portion of legal work could be done by a machine and what portion could not. And then, obviously, you should logically want to focus your career on the latter. This, by the way, is true in all professions and human endeavors.
My strong belief is that, in the legal profession at least, work that is performed by intellectually fearless lawyers will be the last work to be replaced by a computer or artificial intelligence. Once intellectually fearless work can be done by artificial intelligence, I guess I wonder what we humans will have left to do, but that is not within the scope of this article.
By the way, this analysis has nothing to do with whether you are a first-year lawyer or second-year lawyer or senior partner. If what you are doing does not involve a lot of brainpower, then it stands to reason that the portion of your brain being used will in fact be replaced by artificial intelligence (and probably not that far off).
So, to conclude here – if you don’t want to be replaced by artificial intelligence – it is wise to become intellectually fearless. If you are running a law firm, running a practice group, training associates, or anything similar, the most important thing to train your people on is this quality. Finally, if you are a trainee in any of these situations, and you are not learning to be intellectually fearless, it is high time you devoted some intellectual fearlessness to figuring out how to solve this problem.
Bruce Stachenfeld is the managing partner of Duval & Stachenfeld LLP, which is an approximately 70-lawyer law firm based in midtown Manhattan. The firm is known as “The Pure Play in Real Estate Law” because all of its practice areas are focused around real estate. With 50 full-time real estate lawyers, the firm is one of the largest real estate law practices in New York City. You can contact Bruce by email at thehedgehoglawyer@gmail.com.
