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The generalist is a dying breed in the legal profession. In a law firm of almost any size, it seems an attorney must focus on something at least as specific as boot eyelet liability law to have any chance at respect from peers, let alone a partnership offer.
But are we harming the legal profession, and more importantly the clients, by incentivizing young lawyers to narrow their practices into increasingly esoteric categories? Anecdotally, a number of times I’ve come across an opposing counsel who claimed to be an expert on some subcategory of a legal issue, even though it only had two or three reported cases touching on it in the jurisdiction, who I then defeated with what seemed a relatively common-sense argument. Far from being advantaged, these lawyers seemed blind to anything beyond their professed expertise.
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If you ask me, in litigation there just aren’t that many cases in which hyperspecialized legal knowledge helps much. I can read the precedent on just about any legal subissue and know at least as much about it as the judge is going to, if not the supposed expert on the other side. It says something to me that the bench is the one place where generalists rule in the legal profession. Sure, there are special dockets in some places, but, by and large, judges see a wide variety of stuff. I am often appearing in front of a judge in the afternoon on something like a summary judgment motion in a civil boundary line dispute, and that same judge was ruling on a child custody issue in the morning, and will be presiding over a murder trial the following day. These are the people we trust with actually deciding cases and controversies, and perhaps there is good reason for it.
Journalist David Epstein’s brilliant book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World is not specific to lawyers. Other than closing with an Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. quotation, I don’t recall lawyers even being meaningfully mentioned in the text. But it’s not supposed to be about any one profession. That’s kind of the point.
Epstein’s basic premise is that there are certain learning endeavors that are “kind” –- things like chess, which offer predictable measures of success and a defined set of rules that does not change. In kind learning environments, someone can specialize early, practice often, and expect to excel, if not necessarily to innovate. In “wicked” learning environments, on the other hand, patterns are much more difficult to discern. Feedback is delayed or even counterintuitive. Wicked learning environments are complicated. As machines take over more and more of the work in kind learning environments, a wicked place is where more of us are finding ourselves professionally.
While intense specialization may help some individuals succeed in kind learning environments, and occasionally even in more wicked ones, Epstein makes a compelling case that adaptable generalists typically do better in wicked learning environments, and that the true breakthroughs in any variety of fields are likely to come from those with a more generalized background. Specialists trend toward myopathy, whereas generalists are more likely to have access to analogies from other disciplines that can prove invaluable in overcoming stubborn obstacles in wicked fields. Generalists also tend to ultimately end up with better “match quality,” which is how Epstein describes finding your sweet spot professionally. Those who specialized too deeply too early tend to stick with it, even if what a 25-year-old person chose turned out to be a bad fit for his or her 45-year-old counterpart. The sunk cost fallacy leads to a lot of professionals stagnating in fields in which they will never truly shine.
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I think a “wicked learning environment” is about as apt a description as any for the legal profession. Of course, overspecialization among lawyers is often more about marketing than about performance (those lawyers who actually get to use the work “specialist” in marketing sure are protective about it). Also, Epstein is very clear that he isn’t disparaging focused expertise, he’s just putting it in perspective and underscoring the alternative value of early exploration as opposed to early specialization. All that being said, you won’t read Range without developing a new appreciation for intellectual diversity. This book should be required reading in law school.
And that ending quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes in Range? Of the free exchange of ideas, Justice Holmes wrote, “It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment.”
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 [email protected].