Article
| Publication year | 2014 |
| Pages | 12 |
| Citation | Vol. 27 No. 6 Pg. 12 |
November, 2014
Raspberries, Lightning, and New Lawyers
Emily A. Sorensen, J.
Adecade ago, I was living in Italy. I had been living in the country for nearly a year and had a pretty good grasp of the language. One day my friend - a native Italian - and I were walking down the street when I made a joke about lightning striking us. In my overconfidence, I had substituted the word for lightning (fulmone) with the word for raspberries (lampone). The latter certainly sounded appropriate: lightning - lamp - lampone. I didn't realize my mistake until my Italian friend had fallen to the ground in a fit of laughter. The visual in her mind - raspberries falling from the sky - was vastly different than the one I intended. Despite my advanced ability to speak Italian, I had still not mastered it.
As competent as new lawyers are when they graduate from law school, there is still much that they must learn about the culture of being a lawyer and of being a lawyer in Utah. There are rules of professionalism and ethics and skills in civility that are many times not fully understood within the closed context of academia. Much like what was revealed through my faux pas in Italy, new lawyers need guidance in the nuanced and cultural aspects of lawyering, not just in knowing the law, no matter how well trained they are prior to becoming licensed. Within the New Lawyer Training Program (NLTP), new lawyers are given a set of suggested activities to accomplish. But it is more than a checklist of tasks. It is a modifiable plan intended to give the new lawyer control over where the lawyer wants his or her career - or at least the first year of practice - to go.
In a recent issue of the journal put out by the General Practice and Solo section of the American Bar Association, Benjamin K. Sanchez related the following from a lawyer he heard speak:
[L]awyers are in the business of selling knowledge, not time or activity. The three types of knowledge that lawyers sell are substantive, procedural, and judgment.... [W]hat separates lawyers from non-lawyers in the realm of legal services is judgment. Online websites, articles, and forms all can sell substantive and procedural knowledge to clients just as well as any lawyer. What these websites, articles, and forms can't do, however, is sell judgment, the judgment that comes from experience and from the substantive and procedural knowledge you have learned.
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