Why are lawyers good strategists?

There are stereotypes in the public consciousness that the best managers are visionary entrepreneurs, and that lawyers are incapable of managing anything other than pieces of paper on their own desk. Both are fundamentally wrong.

In many countries around the world, lawyers achieve great career heights in business and politics. Among the presidents and prime ministers of the countries of Europe and North America, if not the majority, then in any case more are lawyers than representatives of any other profession or education. This is, of course, no accident. This is because lawyers have extraordinary abilities for strategic thinking and planning – skills without which it is impossible to imagine a top-level manager.

But why does this happen? Let’s try to figure it out.

Of course, it would be a big mistake to think that you can graduate from law school and simply because of that fact get the position of president of a country or a large corporation. No one except scammers will teach either leadership or the ability to be a top-level manager. Management skills are long and difficult to develop; it is no coincidence that these are the most expensive and sought-after skills in the labor market. It’s difficult to even roughly describe all the skills that an effective strategic manager should have, but let’s try to highlight the main ones.

1. Accepting and understanding other opinions

Already while studying at law school, future lawyers learn the basics of what, unfortunately, many people cannot learn in their entire lives – the ability to accept and understand different points of view on the same problem. When I was studying at the university, one of my professor’s favorite tasks was to announce the conditions of a game problem and divide the group into two parts, into conventional ‘plaintiffs’ and ‘defendants’. After several minutes of preparing the position, the professor called one of the ‘plaintiffs’ to the board to voice his position, but already at the board he said: “Start, but you are now on the defendant’s side”. Such exercises allow you not only to understand on an abstract level that ‘everyone has their own truth’, but to actually realize it, experiencing it in your own skin. After such an experience, you will not dare to say that there are only two opinions – mine and the wrong one.

2. Critical thinking

The Davos Forum almost every year recognizes this skill as one of the most in demand on the labor market. And this is in the digital era, when it would seem that technological abilities should ‘dominate’ … In fact, there is nothing surprising: almost any educated person can ‘pick up’ the skills of working with various computer programs in a few months, but critical thinking needs to be developed over the years, and without constant practice, this skill fades away very easily and very quickly. The paradox is that the rapid development of information technology not only doesn’t help critical thinking, but greatly hinders it. When a person spends thirteen hours a day on a smartphone and consumes terabytes of information, there is simply no time to comprehend what he saw, heard, or read. And the information received by the brain, which is not immediately subjected to critical analysis, quickly begins to be perceived as truth – this is how the human brain works. By the way, the work of ‘black’ propaganda is based on this mental feature, but this is a topic for a separate, large analysis. For now, let’s just note that in the modern world it is much more difficult to maintain and develop critical thinking than a hundred years ago, when the pace of life made it possible to work with the information entering the brain more thoughtfully.

A strategist needs critical thinking like air. Exercising strategic control and especially strategic planning without questioning the initial data and conclusions on the basis of which decisions are made is a road to nowhere. This is why, by the way, visionary entrepreneurs cannot and should not carry out strategic management on their own. An entrepreneur by his very nature should not doubt what he is doing, otherwise he will not be an entrepreneur. Successful business projects always require the involvement and joint work of an obsessive entrepreneur who is confident in success and a strategist manager who critically evaluates everything and everyone.

Lawyers, as professional risk managers, due to their education and their profession, have developed critical thinking. They are able to meticulously and enthusiastically double-check any information, ask the right questions, find weak points and logical holes in the arguments. In the legal profession, critical thinking is a truly basic skill, without which it is incredibly difficult to become a true professional.

When a lawyer has to deal with a strategic process, he or she can demonstrate critical thinking skills that enable him or her to excel in that area, even if it is new to the lawyer.

3. Risk-oriented thinking

Almost all popular strategic planning tools assume that the strategy is built on the basis of risks and threats, which is a ‘comfortable environment’ for a lawyer. After all, it is lawyers who face problems more often than others in their daily work. It just so happened historically that ‘absolutely healthy’ people rarely turn to doctors and lawyers. As a rule, people come to lawyers not just with problems and complaints, but with seriously advanced problems. As a result, it is the lawyer, unlike many other specialists, who has the most complete and detailed information about what problems a business has and how they can be solved. And when a lawyer is involved in the strategic process, he does not need to work extra hard to identify existing problems and propose solutions. Over the years of work, a lawyer has developed such a ‘trained eye’ for detecting risks, threats and problems that only a few can compete with him.

Of course, this skill has a downside – alarmism. Having worked with risks for years and knowing for sure that even an unclosed risk with a probability of occurrence of 0.0000000000000001% can lead to serious troubles, a lawyer can overestimate the seriousness of a particular threat. But firstly, it depends on the specific person: the tendency to alarmism is always individual. And secondly, in a strategic process where decisions are made once for many years and every, even the smallest, mistake can cost millions of dollars, it is always better to be too much safe than to be careless.

4.Teamwork

An equally important skill that lawyers have is teamwork. The importance of teamwork in the strategic process is often underestimated, and in vain. It is effective team interaction that allows you not to deviate from your goals, to follow the chosen path, without succumbing to emotional temptations. With sole management, it is almost impossible to achieve such an effect, because any person is susceptible to emotions simply by nature, no matter how educated and experienced he may be. More importantly, only a team can make the right decisions, since it is the effective interaction of professionals with different types of thinking and worldview, which is the cement that holds the three previously mentioned skills together.

So, the education and practical experience of lawyers allows them to carry out strategic management tasks with relative ease, which cause difficulties for many others. This is why in Western countries lawyers so often become effective managers in large companies, political parties, and even head governments. And that is why lawyers are involved as internal or external consultants when making and implementing strategic decisions. Critical thinking, experience with business problems, the ability to work in a team and perceive different points of view will allow a business to avoid large losses due to errors in the planning stage.