Lawyers, Right-brain, Thinking, and Diversity
| Publication year | 2011 |
| Pages | 11 |
| Citation | Vol. 80 No. 3 Pg. 11 |
The Diversity Corner
By Michelle T. Johnson, Kansas City, Mo., Michelle@MichelleTJohnson.com
When Corporate America in general, and the legal profession in particular, talks about diversity in the workplace, it usually leaps to two issues — race and gender.
From that leap comes the automatic criticism from some that worrying about those issues smacks of "quotas" and "lowering the criteria" to accommodate clients or to look good in public relations materials.
While I've literally written a book on how workplace diversity is so much more complicated and expansive than women and racial minorities, when it comes to the legal profession race and gender often do become the more obvious markers by which diversity is evaluated.
There is a reason, for example, why the American Bar Association is concerned about the large number of women of color who leave America's law firms in droves.
But there is a wider issue of diversity that I don't think is unconnected with the visible aspects of diversity that the legal profession concerns itself with — left-brain versus right-brain thinking.
In Daniel H. Pink's book, "A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future," he talks about how the currency of success in America has moved from rewarding left-brained thinking, which is more rational and linear, in the Information Age to rewarding those who excel in right-brained thinking, which is more empathetic and holistic, in what he calls the Conceptual Age.
Generally speaking, Pink talks about how as a country, we have had to shift our thinking because of what he dubs "Abundance, Asia, and Automation." In other words, success comes when you can show that what you do can be done more creatively (because of the abundance of competition), cheaper (because many functions can be outsourced to Asia), or faster (because of the prevalence of computers and automation).
Therefore, he makes the strong argument that even attorneys aren't immune to this concern because people can, for example, now easily go online and get cheap templates for wills, contracts, leases, business incorporation, and many other "simple" legal tasks that formerly could only be obtained by having a costly sit-down with your local lawyer.
As Pink writes, "The attorneys who remain will be those who can tackle far more complex problems and those who can...
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