Thinking Like A Lawyer:
An Essay on Finding Some Common Ground
Roberta I. Shaffer,
M.Ln., J.D.
Roberta Shaffer is an information professional specializing in law for over 25 years.
Learn the "Five R's"
To many people, the idea of thinking like a lawyer conjures up sinister thoughts of finding loopholes and work arounds, assisting in miscarriages of justice, and stretching the truth. Many of our more shocking current events have some lawyer's action that seems outrageous at their core.
We may be somewhat cynical about lawyers on a global scale, and in the United States in particular, because so much of our cultural capital seems to be expended on litigation and on the high costs associated with legal advice. Yet, it is difficult to refute the critical role that the law, and by extension, lawyers play in the smooth running of commerce, the facilitation of invention, and our ability to exchange ideas about all shades of controversy. And these are just a few areas where the law makes a positive contribution to our lives.
As information professionals, we may find that we have a great deal to learn from the way lawyers think. Lawyers are a credible group to analyze information behaviors and attitudes because they are so reliant upon information to practice their profession.
If we start our review with the ways in which lawyers are taught, we see that the seeds of "thinking like a lawyer" are embedded in the structure of legal education. Distilled down to its most basic parts, law students spend three years studying a variety of subjects. Almost all of these subjects are designed to develop five abilitiesresearch, reasoning, [w]riting, reading, and rhetoric (in the oratory sense of this word). These are often referred to as the "Five R's."
Through the vehicle of the subject specific classes, the "Five R's" are designed to teach students to be thorough in their research, air tight on their reasoning, crystal clear in their writing, careful in their reading of everything (including the key meaning of punctuation), and facile in their oral communication.
To many, the focus of legal education is being taught to think critically. Yet, like much of the concern that is waged against graduate education in library and information science, there is a strong demand from the marketplace for skills training. Like their graduate school counterparts in professional education, law schools have resisted a strong emphasis on skills development unless those skills remain true to the "Five R's." The law schools see their mission as teaching students to think. In their eyes, this is an investment in their students' future success that cannot be compromised or diluted.
Educators in both law and library and information science take great pains to help students "think like lawyers [critically]." This is not easy because it makes the instructor seem argumentative, adversarial, and mired in minutiae. These are teaching techniques that sharpen the "Five R's." To a legal mind, being a lawyer or not, there should be no such thing as "fine print" regardless of font size!
It could be convincingly argued that library and information professionals have the same professional motivation as lawyers. Information, a precious commodity, is given to the information professional's stewardship, just as law is given to lawyers. Neither profession can afford to be cursory in research, opinionated in reasoning, careless in word choice and usage, superficial in reading, and unclear in oral expression.
Next, let us look at the attributes of lawyers that are shared by information professionals or should at the very least be noted?
Lawyers are information perfectionists who must know the level of authority and the source of everything cited or used in legal argument. They also approach research as information optimists. There is an assumption that a "mirror" (or at least a complimentary case) exists or a statute or regulation is on point with a client's needs. Lawyers are very hesitant to declare something to be a "case of first impression." By the same token, information professionals have trouble facing the prospect that information does not exist.
The lawyer's need for information is both historical and real-time, all at the same moment. Anglo-American legal tradition, in particular, is based on a system of precedents and analogy building. Viewed from this perspective, ancient law, and in some cases, even discarded principles may still shed light on a cutting edge legal problem.
Thinking Like A Lawyer
Lawyers think in the context of cultural values and public policy. They are strategic in setting a precedent or in the forging of new territory. While the needs of the individual client drive the lawyer's representation to the client of various results, certainly judicial decision making takes notice of the bigger social picture in both selecting the decisions upon which to actually write opinions, and then in selecting or highly-refining the issue(s) upon which to reason a decision.
While the law has infiltrated so many other disciplines, it has, in turn, been highly influenced by a wide variety of subject matter. Lawyers are not information isolationists, but rather are anxious to understand the "literature" of all disciplines and to use it effectively in advocacy. Increasingly, sociology, psychology, the basic sciences, and engineering have found themselves embedded in legal inquiry. Lawyers employ principles of qualitative and quantitative research in jury and forum selection.
Lawyers are still primarily verbal and text oriented. Words remain the critical tools of the trade. However, there is a significant movement in the direction of visual language in the creation of demonstrative evidence for trials and in mathematical modeling used in risk assessment. Some have been so bold as to declare that the law is becoming "bi-lingual" in the sense of the text/visual communication continuum.
Lawyers are also very team-oriented. Legal teams are frequently vertical teams that bring together a group of experts in order to look at all the consequences of an action; yet, they rely simultaneously on being part of another team that is horizontal and hierarchal within their organizations.
Time management and time measurement are critical aspects of a lawyer's ability to be profitable. Consequently, lawyers value convenience and service. Access to information, both in the traditional meaning of how information is organized and in the more modern meaning of how easy a tool is to navigate use, are very important selection criteria. Since lawyers display an exceptional level of initial product skepticism and then very high product loyalty, the "hows" of access make or break new entries into the legal marketplace.
Looking to the future, lawyers should be strong advocates of digitized information once they can be assured on the issues of authenticity, security, and format stability. Digitized information holds out the promise of concurrent access to various versions of laws and the ability to compare law across time and application. It also enhances the ability to move among cited and citing materials with easy, adjacent viewing options. Finally, it facilitates the recycling, regeneration, and updating of work product.
As information professionals, we can learn a great deal from how other professionals think and how their thought processes are inculcated into our own professional persona. In addition, we must know how our clientele(s) thinks in order to provide service that fits well within their professional framework, and takes into account the unique information needs they may face. 
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