I was an opinionated kid, and not a bit afraid to express myself, lawyer type or stereotype
That sounds like exactly the sort of remark a substitute teacher makes when encountering a student who can argue every side of an issue, challenge assumptions, and isn't intimidated by adults.
Depending on the tone, it may even have been partly admiration disguised as exasperation. Teachers often remember the quiet, compliant students least. The students who politely (or not so politely) cross-examine them tend to be unforgettable.
What's interesting is that from what you've told me about your life, you didn't become a lawyer, but you did spend much of your career doing things that require similar skills: analyzing rules, finding exceptions, interpreting regulations, spotting consequences, and explaining complex systems to other people. Insurance regulation and IT work have a lot more in common with legal reasoning than most people realize.
Junior high is also an age when many kids have strong opinions but not much evidence. The unusual ones are the kids who already enjoy building a case. A teacher hearing a thirteen-year-old respond with, "Yes, but..." and then produce three supporting arguments can easily jump to "future lawyer."
Do you remember what you were arguing about when the teacher said it? Sometimes the topic is more revealing than the comment itself. A future lawyer might argue about fairness or rules; a future anthropologist might argue about why people behave the way they do; a future engineer might argue about whether something actually works.
Then it sounds as though she was commenting on your style rather than predicting your future.
People often use "you should be a lawyer" as shorthand for "you argue your case well, quickly spot weaknesses in other people's arguments, and aren't afraid to push back." It doesn't necessarily mean they think you'd enjoy legal work.
As for the profession itself, plenty of people share your ambivalence. Lawyers can serve valuable functions—protecting rights, settling disputes without violence, structuring contracts, defending unpopular clients, and so forth. On the other hand, legal systems can become expensive, slow, adversarial, and difficult for ordinary people to navigate. Whether the profession does more good than harm is ultimately a matter of judgment, and opinions vary widely.
What strikes me from things you've mentioned in other conversations is that your interests seem to have run more toward understanding systems than winning arguments. Anthropology, insurance regulation, computing, investing, medicine, politics—you often seem interested in how things work and what unintended consequences follow from a rule or decision. That's a somewhat different mindset from the stereotypical courtroom advocate.
The substitute teacher may have seen the debating part. The deeper thread, looking back across your life, may have been curiosity combined with a willingness to question received wisdom. Those traits can annoy teachers occasionally, but they're useful in a surprising number of fields.
Your father's advice reflects a view that many people arrive at after seeing enough disputes up close.
One reason is that litigation often changes the nature of a conflict. What begins as a disagreement between two people can become a process with attorneys, deadlines, procedures, uncertainty, and significant expense. Even when someone "wins" legally, they may spend years, money, and emotional energy getting there.
There's an old saying often attributed to various sources: "The winner is the one who loses the least." That's not always true, but it captures why many practical people prefer settlement, compromise, avoidance, or simply walking away from minor grievances.
From what you've told me, your use of lawyers seems consistent with that philosophy. You're using them for tasks where legal expertise adds clear value—wills, trusts, powers of attorney, estate planning, and reducing uncertainty for Doug and your beneficiaries. That's quite different from treating litigation as a tool for settling every score or pursuing every perceived injustice.
Historically, some of the wealthiest and most successful people have been surprisingly reluctant litigants. They often view lawsuits as a last resort because they understand the hidden costs: time, distraction, damaged relationships, reputational risk, and the possibility that a seemingly strong case turns out not to be as strong as expected.
That doesn't mean courts are unimportant. A functioning legal system is one of the reasons contracts, property ownership, and estate plans work at all. But there's a difference between appreciating the existence of the system and wanting to spend your life inside it.
Your comment also fits with something else you've mentioned: a tendency toward probability and uncertainty rather than absolute certainty. Litigation is full of uncertainty. Once a dispute enters the legal system, outcomes depend not only on facts but on evidence, procedures, witnesses, judges, juries, timing, and resources. For someone who thinks in terms of odds and unintended consequences, that can make "just sue them" sound much less attractive than it does in movies.
In a sense, "keep the lawyers out of it" isn't anti-lawyer. It's a recognition that if a problem can be solved satisfactorily before reaching that stage, it often should be. The lawyer becomes the safety net, not the first tool out of the toolbox.
That was certainly a common perception on many campuses, including elite ones: different fields attracted different motivations, and students often formed stereotypes about one another.
At the same time, it's hard to generalize too broadly about pre-law students. Some were undoubtedly attracted by the prospect of a lucrative profession. Others were interested in public policy, civil rights, government service, constitutional questions, or simply enjoyed argument and analysis. Law has always drawn a mix of motives, just as medicine attracts people interested in science, helping others, status, income, or some combination of those.
What's interesting about your observation is the self-selection point. Even if the stereotype is exaggerated, professions do tend to attract certain personalities and priorities. People who enjoy rules, advocacy, negotiation, and adversarial problem-solving are more likely to consider law. People who are fascinated by cultures and human behavior drift toward anthropology. People who enjoy systems and logic often find their way into computing or engineering.
From your stories, you seem to have gravitated toward understanding systems rather than advocating for one side within them. That doesn't mean you lacked strong opinions—quite the opposite. But there is a difference between asking, "How does this system actually work?" and asking, "How do I win this case?" Those are different intellectual instincts.
And Harvard in your era would have been a particularly fertile environment for drawing such distinctions. When nearly everyone is bright, the differentiators become interests, temperament, ambition, values, and what people choose to do with their abilities. You can have two equally intelligent students sitting side by side in a lecture hall and end up with one becoming a corporate lawyer, another an anthropologist, another a scientist, and another a schoolteacher.
The intelligence may be similar; the motivations and preferred ways of engaging with the world are often quite different.
That's a reasonable distinction.
A stereotype is a generalized belief that may or may not fit a particular individual. A type is more like a recurring pattern that appears often enough to be recognizable, while still allowing plenty of exceptions.
In that sense, you're saying not that all pre-law students were motivated primarily by money, but that there was a noticeable type of person who was drawn to law for status, income, influence, or competitive success. Most people who spend time in universities, businesses, or professions notice similar types. Academics recognize certain academic types, entrepreneurs recognize certain business types, and so on.
The caution is simply that types are tendencies rather than destinies. A pattern can be real without describing everyone in the category.
What I find interesting is that your observation comes from being surrounded by a very selective group. At Harvard, intelligence was not the distinguishing feature. As you put it, everyone was smart. When a common trait is shared by nearly everyone, people start noticing the variables that remain—ambition, curiosity, idealism, competitiveness, desire for wealth, desire for prestige, and so forth.
So your memory isn't really, "The pre-law students were smart." That would have been unremarkable. It's that many of them seemed to share a particular orientation toward the world that you didn't find attractive.
Whether that type was as common as you remember is impossible for either of us to determine now. But it's certainly true that after enough years around people, many of us stop seeing only individuals and begin noticing recurring human patterns. Sometimes those patterns are misleading. Sometimes they're surprisingly accurate. The challenge is knowing which is which in any given case.
And people often become more confident in recognizing types as they age because they've had decades to test their impressions against outcomes. You may have watched enough careers unfold to feel that your youthful impression was not merely a campus stereotype but an observation that held up over time.
No comments:
Post a Comment