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Why Local CLEs Are Endangered: Speaking To Non-Lawyers Is Rewarding, Speaking To Lawyers Is Self-Torture

Perhaps it's the extreme arrogance and self-importance that infects our profession...

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There are a lot of great continuing legal education programs out there. Today, lawyers can quite easily go online, and for a reasonable fee, learn something useful while working to fulfil their periodic CLE requirements.

But, like the black rhinoceros or the northern long-eared bat, good local CLEs where one might learn something useful about regional quirks of practice, or even the local legal community itself, are increasingly tough to come by. This is especially true in undersaturated legal markets.

If you ask my opinion, which is admittedly not based on a lot of hard evidence, but is backed by a voluminous sheaf of anecdotal experience speaking to many groups of both lawyers and non-lawyers, there is a very intuitive reason for that. Speaking to non-lawyers is rewarding, character-building, and fun. Speaking to lawyers, on the other hand, is like hacking off your hopelessly entrapped arm with a dull pocket knife.

The most recent example of this in my own life came about this past weekend, when I gave a presentation at a non-legal conference to a group of (mostly) non-lawyers. I know a thing or two about the topic, but the topic was legal only to the extent that I am a lawyer who writes about the law (and a lot of other stuff) and that background obviously colors my perspective on things that are not the law. The speech was overwhelmingly well-received. There were a dozen people waiting for me afterward who wanted to shake my hand, tell me what a great job I did, thank me for all the useful information I imparted, and chat just a little more about their individual situations. I was very happy to have apparently been of some value to these folks.

And then, waiting for me at the end of the line, was the former lawyer in the room. She did not want to shower me with compliments. Instead, she wanted to make it very clear that she was offended and upset, specifically by one sentence of an hour-long presentation, about something that made it into the content essentially only as a part of my bio. I guess her legal career had a bit of overlap with a part of mine, and she felt as though I had besmirched that part by stating something uncouthly.

I was cool, I was diplomatic, I apologized profusely, I assured her that I did not mean what I had said in the way that she had apparently taken it, and I promised that I would take her note to heart in the event I gave this presentation again in the future. After delivering a stern lecture on how we are lawyers and we thus need to choose our words very carefully, she finally let me go to lunch, offering a parting platitude to the effect of, “…and some of the other stuff you said was useful, I guess.”

I have had some variation of this experience again, and again, and again. That’s not to say that I never receive compliments from lawyers I’ve spoken to, or criticisms from non-lawyers. I invite criticisms: Every time I speak publicly about anything, I tell the audience that there is a lot of knowledge in the room beyond just mine and to raise your hand so we can have a conversation in front of the group if anyone has anything to add or to dispute. It’s just that when non-lawyers disagree with something, they seem to do it kindly and substantively, whereas the lawyers (and many more of them) continually scan for anything, however arbitrary or tangential, that they can meanly split hairs about.

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I suppose some of that is a function of the way we’re trained to think by the job. I’ve never given an argument in court and heard this response from opposing counsel:

You got me! Your Honor, his argument is so airtight that there is nothing about it I can exploit, misinterpret, or take out of context to further my own agenda. You win some, you lose some, I suppose.

Another aspect of it, again, just in my opinion, is the extreme arrogance and self-importance that infects our profession. When you are speaking to a room full of lawyers, a significant portion of your audience thinks they are better than you, thinks they are smarter than you, and feels the need to prove this either by challenging you in front of your peers or by later trashing you to other lawyers behind your back. It’s unpleasant.

Maybe I’m wrong. I know I’ll get a lot of complaints and criticisms on this very article. But the further I get into my career, the more I see the miniscule rewards of giving a live presentation to lawyers as being far outweighed by the hellish nastiness of the whole ordeal. As for non-lawyers, well, please keep those speaking invitations coming. I’d love to have a chat with your group.

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Jonathan Wolf is a litigation associate at a midsize, full-service Minnesota firm. He also teaches as an adjunct writing professor at Mitchell Hamline School of Law, has written for a wide variety of publications, and makes it both his business and his pleasure to be financially and scientifically literate. Any views he expresses are probably pure gold, but are nonetheless solely his own and should not be attributed to any organization with which he is affiliated. He wouldn’t want to share the credit anyway. He can be reached at jon_wolf@hotmail.com.

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