The Good Lawyer

Any description of good lawyer, rooted in thebreality of what lawyer do, is at the same time,an imege of the ideal lawyer. Some ideals we take from the traditions of the profession. The eminent jurist, roscoe pound, noted that we often assume ideals ”as a matter of course” traditional ideals and what effect do they have on us as lawyer? Pound, in his examination of these ideals, found them “so generally and firmly established with the weight of authoritative tradition behind them as to be a form of law in the strictest analytical sense. If pound is right that”men [and women] tend to do what they think they are doing,”then our ideals are best known by the character we take on as we practice law. [on idealism, as a feature of jurisprudence see alf ross, on law and justice 64-70 (london: stevens, 1958)(Margaret Dutton trans.)

We sometime talk about the good lawyer as someone who gets the job done, who is successful where others might have failed. As Xaviar de Ventos points out, “[a] car is good if it starts easily,brakes well,runs smoothly,hold the road properly,is comfortable....”[X. De ventos,self-Defeated Man 13 (New york: Harper Colophon,1975)]. The good lawyer takes readily to the tasks that lawyers do, performs them efficiently, and seems to do so with ease and style. Good, as in good car and good lawyer, simply means that they serve their purpose and live up to our expectations, that they are functional. Using “good” in this functional sense leads to the phantasy that we can say with precision and clarity what constitutes a good lawyer and that we don’t need much in the wayof ethics to chart the “good” in this functional sense.

Being a good lawyer may mean simply that one tries to comply with the body of ethical rules expressed in the profession’s rules of conduct. It is not earth-shaking to suggest that being a good lawyer requires that we know, pay attention to, and follow ethical rules as a guide to our work with clients. Yet, following ethical rules contained in a code of conduct does not, in and of itself, make one a good lawyer in any broader sense of that term. While a lawyer can avoid professional sanctions by following the profession’s ethical standards, compliance with ethical rules alone, do not, and can not make one a good lawyer. As suggested in the rules of professional conduct, the profession’s ethical rules (formally prescribed) “do not exhaust the moral and ethical considerations that should inform a lawyer, for no worthwhile human activity can be completely defined by legal rules.”