What Quickens the Lawyer’s Heart?

Perhaps, you say, it is akin to the hockey player, who skates with the puck again and again into the offensive zone, only to be met with a stick here, a shoulder there, caroming into the boards or sliding splayed out into the ice, but upon another foray sneaks one way around a stick while pushing the puck the other, then erupting forth past a shoulder, gathering the puck and looking up to find only a wide-eyed squid between heaven and hell. A sudden rise in heat, pressure transforming into euphoria, but not quite yet, the sensation of success and freedom and discovery, the peak mere moments away, that would describe the quickening of a heart.

So the lawyer advances upon the page seeking a theory of the case, thwarted now with trivialities, and now with minutiae, and now again with the grey fog of unknown timelines and facts, only to find a small gap of truth, then twisting through another proposition, then stepping through to find yet another, thereby surging in to stare into a witness no longer smirking.

But I put to you what quickens is not absolute. For the articling student, ever accustomed to drudgery and insignificance, respected to forego fetching coffee but disrespected to be denied first chair, tasked over consecutive days of research and drafting, and told only to draft again, turns around and sees, no, not sees but hears and feels, the effect of written words suddenly find life in lead counsel’s oral submissions. Soaring above the flight of first love, elation at what could be, validation of what one is, decade upon decade of education narrowed to a point, I challenge you to deny the ecstasy of the moment, should it lie in your memory.

You would accept that the lawyer in the middle of a career attends peacefully to what the articling student does not. Written words hold no excitement out of the mouths of others. Here the well-tempered holds the baton and conducts the orchestra of words, swinging this way and that, rolling into the rhythm so designed. In cross-examination a confident witness refuses to be played, but a note is found, 528 Hz solfeggio, and the witness pauses in dreadful repose. Now then, repeat the note, let it resonate before the jury, then follow with arpeggios. Dropping into dissonance, and so close to the truth, ask the question to release the symphony. How glorious the sound of a witness in fugue!

So the wizened lawyer yet again, battle-hardened, finds easy repose in youthful inspiration. Delight is found in connection. Visiting a prospective client, as exotic and unattainable as Queequeg on the shore, one charms with the full palette of skills accumulated over decades of training: mirroring laughter, sustained eye contact, then to the crux of the matter to discover what ails – to be or not to be? To be, of course! – and to be the provider of the healing elixir.

Would it be sensible to conclude that you and I should pursue these highs? Or is it not folly to be forever unsatisfied, pursuing hit after hit? How often, and how endemic, is our master craftsman a lonely and sad addict, driven by the needs of the craft at the expense of the joys of life? The apprentice must look upon the master with awe, trepidation, and not a little disgust. I have heard of one such master who entranced a courtroom with a mage’s hand, and yet divorced many times, having developed a personality that made no discretion between in-court and out-of-court! Early in my career I found one seeking thrills in the controlled chaos of litigation, only to collapse of a brain aneurysm. And yet another wrapped in silks, cliques, and beautiful things, I can not be the only one who saw that the emperor had no clothes!