I don’t think I have anything particularly special to say about professionalism as such. All of us can grow and learn. Well, maybe all of us have growing and learning to do; whether we “can” is another matter. I know I still have a lot to learn, even 18 years into this way of helping people and making a living.
Attorneys aren’t known for their small egos, generally. To survive in this profession you have to have a reasonably strong personality, even if you don’t do trial work. In transactional work, you have to have the confidence that your estate plan, your trust document, your $750 million bond indenture document all will survive scrutiny, future litigation and other regulatory or administrative review; that takes a certain amount of raw nerve, knowledge, confidence. But one of the most gratifying things I have noticed, 18 years in, is that attorney egos are mostly big in the healthy sense: balanced, strong, not vulnerable to the daily buffeting. 10,000 lawyers-as-jerks jokes aside, most attorneys seemed to me like pretty balanced and secure people in my experience, even the ones with whom I might not have excellent rapport or communication. This is saying a lot, given the combative nature of some litigation and the level of alcohol and other problems in the profession.
Perhaps it’s because of my own highly unusual career path, but I haven’t seen a whole lot of toxic insecure envy in the profession. Some, occasionally, but not as much as I might have expected, given lawyer jokes and the stress of the profession. I don’t have any great insight into the human condition or into the lawyer condition, but I suspect that the ideals of professionalism – not codified but sort of carried along implicitly – help keep this out.
There’s no way for any lawyer to be the only lawyer in town. Why? Because, adult name changes aside, most legal work affects the legal rights or interests of other people or legal entities. Conflicts of interest require those affected parties to be warned and sent to other attorneys in most cases. Maybe a pizza parlor could try to drive out all other pizza parlors in town, but a law firm cannot drive out other law firms. Even within a sub-field of practice, ethical and practical conflicts make it impossible for the profession to bear a local monopolization into one provider of legal services in a given field.
Take unemployment insurance hearings, for example, a field in which I practice routinely. I cannot and could not do “all the hearings” even if I wanted to. For one thing, there’s only one Godfrey and there are 16 hearing locations in this state, some over 100 miles from others. For another, I would have ethical conflicts between clients because UI isn’t the only practice area in my practice. Although I almost never represent management and have never done so in an unemployment hearing, I can be conflicted out of a given case or cases for many reasons. If I staffed up to handle more hearings, the conflicts would grow exponentially between clients and attorneys in my hypothetical employ, though perhaps scheduling conflicts would be reduced somewhat.
The point is that there’s no way to monopolize any segment of law practice. The Bar can only function in numbers for that reason and for many others.
What makes a profession is the chopping-off of substandard modes of practice, through licensure, certification or other standards enforcement. While non-professionals may aspire to a professional attitude in their work, that (honorable) aspiration doesn’t make their work part of a profession. Making pizza isn’t a profession, even if a given pizza parlor enforces its own ruthless standards in-house; that’s great, but that’s not a profession.
In law, success isn’t zero-sum but a battle for continued improvement, whether one represents tenants in landlord-tenant court or civil rights plaintiffs before the United States Supreme Court. It’s a battle perhaps against our own flaws, not primarily against the lawyer down the road (maybe for one case, but not for a career.) Lawyers talk about standards, not about market share; market share is a sales or marketing scoring item.
Part of what keeps the profession out of zero-sum thinking is the required and practical confidentiality of much of our work, especially much of our most critical work. You can find out a sales rep’s sales figures in many cases; companies will sometimes publish them or give out awards. While mega-firms may award bonuses for high billable hours figures they don’t publicize their compensation structures broadly (though some information leaks out, it’s not on media releases.) Even the lawyer-client relationship itself is confidential in many cases. Many a civil settlement has concluded quietly without a public footprint or notice. Many a white collar criminal investigation has concluded through the timely and wise actions of defense counsel early in the process, without a public footprint.
Early in my career I read Jay Foonberg’s classic books How to Start and Build a Law Practice and How to Get and Keep Good Clients. In those books, Foonberg mentioned that he did not see his fellow attorneys as “competition.” While opposing counsel in a given case may be, in a sense, competition, we attorneys shouldn’t view each other in the way that commercial enterprises may at times view each other regarding market share. It’s not a zero sum competition but more of a struggle against our own most recent best standard or our own shortcomings. Fortunately, the room for growth is always there.
