Practice Management

Writing and Lawyering: Not tech or work-life balance things.

By Dan Hull

Easy reading is damn hard writing.

--Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1804-1864

Writing is not a "get-a-life" thing. Neither is lawyering--especially contentious and advocacy work. You bleed. You give blood. Like writing, it's a privilege and a trust to do it well. In both, you serve. It is not all about you. Anyone can try to write.

And almost anyone--in America, especially (look around you; we've dumbed corporate lawyering way down)--can and apparently does become a lawyer. Not a big deal anymore.

But great lawyering--like great writing--is difficult. There is too much going on in the work of writers and lawyers to make good work simple to do. If you think that either is easy, you are not doing it right.

Savor the brutality. Revel in the headaches. Stop trying to make great but hard things easy. Stop making tech the main event. E-mail less. Talk on the phone. Meet with people. Fire up ideas. Hear some voices. Stop hiding. Know that your laptop is not your brain; there are no answers to hard problems in that thing. Resist the new mail-it-in culture. Get a standard.

Full post as published by What About Clients? on May 19, 2010 (boomark / email).