Better Lawyers

Colleagues are so important in the practice of law. Working with good lawyers on hard projects has been the best thing for me in my efforts to become a decent lawyer.

For years I had the luck to work with a great lawyer named Ken Laino. Ken has so much natural judgment and good intuition that I was a better lawyer just by having an office next to his. In a typical exchange, I would lean into his doorway and say, “Ken, I have a judgment-call question ….” I would describe the issues that were bothering me or hanging me up, and Ken would listen with the attentiveness of a game show contestant. When I was done he would, more often than not, lean back in his chair, chuckle, raise both palms, and say something like, “Wellll, Todd, think of what you’re saying!” He would then paraphrase what I’d just said to him, but from the perspective of the other party or some hypothetical judge or in relation to some legal axiom, and the path forward would just become clear. As a lawyer I’m always anxious about the trips and traps in the law and the murky zones of my ignorance, but from Ken I learned simply to trust the obvious.

Tina Rhodes is another lawyer friend who shares a well worn, balanced perspective on what we do. She is also a deeply generous and steadfast colleague. Tina’s style is to hug the shore, as John Updike used to say, and she is always concerned with the way logic flows along the close contours of an argument. Like Ken, she wears her lawyer mind very comfortably, and all the time.

As someone who wears his lawyer mind more like a powdered wig, or a lampshade, I look up to friends like Ken and Tina because they inhabit their lawyer roles with their full measure of naturalness and compassion. Most lawyers are smart, or smart enough, but people like Ken and Tina bring a different measure of dignity and wholeness to the way they practice law. That’s a quality that could use some emphasis these days, when every lawyer publication and website seems to be overlarded with “super-duper” claims and vanity advertising.