The 'Renaissance Attorney': No, Lawyers Don’t Need To Learn Math Or Science (Yet)
The more you can do for a client, the more a client will rely on you, making you a more indispensable asset to their business.
Being a Renaissance Attorney has nothing to do with learning the old skills typically associated with the Renaissance Man in old Italian folklore. I am not saying attorneys should begin painting the ceilings of their offices or writing briefs in iambic pentameter (we are talking modern Renaissance Man here, so while I am aware iambic pentameter is an English poetry technique we are going to let it slide). Rather, a Renaissance Attorney understands aspects of the law outside of his or her specialty, wants to improve and learn for the betterment of themselves, their firm, and their clients, and wants to think outside the box, using solutions from one area of the law to solve problems in another.
Before the modern era, most lawyers did not have specialties but rather did it all. It is only recently, relatively speaking, that attorneys have become more and more specialized. This is not a bad thing and I do not want anyone to think that I disagree with the direction the field is going. On the contrary, specialization leads to efficiency and lower costs to clients due to fewer billable hours, generally. But just because someone is a specialist in one area of law, does not mean they cannot, or should not, know other areas of law. In fact, knowing other areas of law, even in a minor capacity, will likely aid an attorney more than spending that same time polishing their specialty.
It is the theory of diminishing returns. Polishing a specialty can be extremely important depending on the type of law an attorney works in, but at some point the lawyer will have diminishing returns in that practice area. That is where learning alternative areas of law come in. An attorney’s ability to learn in a new area of law will be exponentially greater than in an area he or she has studied for their entire career. And, that new area of law may even help in the attorney’s specialty by giving the attorney abstract ideas about how to handle issues that have never been tried before. Learning new skills and practice areas will also benefit your clients.
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New Practice Areas and Skills Benefit Your Business
The obvious reason to learn new skills or practice areas is to generate new business. While it is never a good idea to jump into a new practice area without any experience (both because you may be committing malpractice and because you want to be able to do everything possible for your client), it is a good idea to take new types of cases under the tutelage of an experienced attorney in that field or where the issue you are unfamiliar with comes up as an underlying issue in a matter where you are comfortable.
That is to say, if you are solely a litigator you should not be taking matters involving the filing of patents on your own, but if you are interested it may be a good idea to work with a patent attorney and learn under someone with experience. Similarly, a transactional attorney should obviously not just jump into litigation, but it may be good to work with a litigator on briefing and potentially second chair an oral argument to get a feel for litigation.
While these are extremes in attorneys going from one end of the spectrum to another, this also applies to sub practice groups and specialties. For example, commercial litigation is a broad field, but commercial litigators can benefit immensely from doing drafting work in that their litigation experience will help in drafting contracts without potential issues and the new contract experience will help in future litigation. At our firm, we try to have a healthy balance of commercial litigation and transactional work to keep my colleagues and I well-rounded and up to date on emerging areas of law. This allows us to better serve our clients and become better attorneys in the process.
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Learning new skills and practice areas can not only add value to yourself and to your firm, but can also help your existing clients, both from a cost perspective and from a winning perspective.
New Practice Areas and Skills Benefit Your Existing Clients
Similarly, and playing off my previous commercial litigation and contract drafting example, attorneys can help existing clients by learning new practices. As mentioned before, a litigator learning to draft contracts is great for the litigator in that the litigation experience will help him see potential issues down the road, but it will also be useful for the client in having the same attorney who potentially drafted and negotiated a contract litigate a breach of that same contract.
There are two ways learning new skills and areas of the law will aid your current clients. New understandings can help an attorney look at their current cases or areas of expertise in a new way, and new expertise can invariably help an existing client if that client needs an attorney in that new (to you) area of the law.
The simpler of these two benefits to existing clients is that if you as an attorney learn a new area of the law, and your current client needs an attorney with expertise in that area, you are capable of better serving your client, saving your client time and money, and making yourself indispensable. By being more of a renaissance attorney, your client will save time in explaining the details of their business to a new attorney and save money by not having multiple attorneys (or firms) with different areas of expertise that need to become familiar with their business or matter. Moreover, the more you can do for a client, the more a client will rely on you, making you a more indispensable asset to their business.
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The more intriguing reason to learn new skills and expertise in law is to apply those skills and expertise to your existing skill set and case load. This is a more abstract idea but people in and out of law have been doing it for years. While I am not saying there are crossovers with every area of law — far from it — I am saying that things learned in one practice area may aid in another practice area, whether it be a particular way of looking at an issue to a more robust crossover such as a rule, standard, or process that can be applied where it has not been applied before. This is important for both the legal and business worlds as innovation is not always a new iPhone, a toy that spins with ball bearings, or a man-bun that clips on, but rather new theories and ways of looking at complex issues that others have not yet tried.
Being a renaissance attorney does not mean you need to go from one extreme to another. Trying new things in new fields when there are no options is the best way to learn, grow as an attorney, and innovate. So go ahead and try and use the Howey test to prove that a child is a security in a custody case; you probably won’t win, but if there is no other option give it a try, you have nothing to lose.
Brian Grossman was an attorney at Balestriere Fariello, a trial and investigations law firm which represents clients in all aspects of complex commercial litigation and arbitration from pre-filing investigations to trial and appeals. You can reach firm partner John Balestriere at [email protected].
