From Chapter Thirteen: THE Choice Is Yours

Lawyers get paid good money for making the right choices. From a menu of options for accomplishing a given goal, they zero in on the best one, the one that will lead to a marginally--sometimes an infinitesimally--better result than the others. And yet, when it comes to their careers, they tend to have blind spots where choice is concerned. They can choose to leave one firm and go to work for another, or to expand their bankruptcy practice and scale back their M-and-A work without much trouble. But talk to them about choosing how they practice, how they can embody who they are in their work as lawyers, and they tend to glaze over or simply stare back uncomprehendingly.

It's the fashion these days to throw up your hands and run from such choices. The profession--and our world, for that matter--seems so unmoored, and so fraught with change, that it looks much easier to batten down the hatches, work as hard as you can, and let circumstance seal off your choices. After all, how much leeway do you really have, even in your own life?

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Arnold Kanter, a former large-firm partner who has consulted with Chicago law firms for the last seventeen years, is only too familiar with the sense of futility so many lawyers experience. "They seem to feel such a lack of control to do anything about the things that are bothering them," says Kanter. "It's as if it has all been imposed by outside forces, and there is nothing they can do."

There happens to be a lot they can do, according to Peter Cicchino, founder and head of the Lesbian and Gay Youth Project of the Urban Justice Center in New York City--if only they were clearer about what is at stake. "Our lives are the only things that are completely ours," Cicchino says. "The kind of life we make is the most important work, the single most important project we will ever undertake. One of the things that make me saddest when I talk to law students and lawyers is the recurring impression I get that they have lost a sense of their own agency, the sense that their lives are theirs to make of what they will. So people who are among the most gifted and privileged in the world instead live with a sense of drastically constricted possibilities of what they can do with their lives."

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At some level, what disaffected lawyers appear to be saying is that the law has grown deaf to their needs. Thus, they feel helpless. They want to work in an environment that offers an opportunity to awaken to deeper levels of who they are, one that provides a way to express what matters most to them, allows them to make the contributions that only they can make, and provides a comfortable standard of living. They want their work to be part of their search for--and ultimately an expression of--what they feel to be an authentic life.

But how will that come about? Certainly not by waiting for some ill-defined perfect moment when the institutional problems that plague the profession suddenly vanish and a paradisiacal Eden replaces them. Even those most troubled by what the practice of law has become retain an inner awareness of its potential greatness. But to get there, lawyers must meet the status quo halfway, bringing their own transformative powers to bear, so that what is potentially sacred in the profession-those qualities that make people feel a calling to the law-becomes its raison d'tre, and the headlong rush to ever increasing levels of wealth and power that has so gummed up the works begins to recede.

Regardless of profession, everyone has plenty to wake up to, greater depths to plumb. We live in a vortex of sights and sounds, demands and obligations, beauty and dross. If you don't take active measures to find out what really matters, no one will do it for you. Unless you control where you put your attention and your devotion, you will succumb to the usual distractions.

And it will become easy to make excuses, beginning with some version of the ever-popular "The client made me do it.". . . .

For lawyers who work at cultivating awareness, the options that every moment presents to make a satisfying choice will become clearer all the time. It may mean discovering a new practice area or setting, one better suited to your particular emotional and, yes, spiritual needs. Occasionally--probably less often than you might think--it may mean leaving the profession. But often people come to see that they can blossom right where they're standing, finding deeper meaning in the material at hand or discovering other sources of sustenance that are more readily available than was at first apparent.

(Chapter includes a discussion of ways to exercise one's sense of agency within a law practice, a list of junctures at which opportunities exist to enhance lawyer/client interactions, and choices that can bring satisfaction, even joy, to a law practice.)