Careers of many lawyers are affected by this mental compulsion and the need to satisfy it. Where accepting things upon trust or faith could have solved situations and led to success, we often incur pain and loss by allowing compulsion for personal proof override good sense.
Fresh out of law school, most junior lawyers have vibrant minds fertile with imagination. It takes a little time to adjust, grow pragmatic, and come to grips with realities of the system. We often question the acts, activities, and advice of our seniors and mentors because we are not ready to accept facts unless proved to personal experience. This also happens because often what we are taught about the legal world at the law school does not match the actual experience of practicing as an enrolled lawyer.
Scientific education inculcates some common traits into us while we are still children. In my manner, I sum them and term them as:
- The urge to challenge facts presented without proof acceptable to personal perception
- The urge to accept facts only upon personal verification
- The urge to test limits of established situations and institutions
- The urge to experiment and devise new procedures to do things
Of course, there are many other traits built into us by our system of education, but in context of this article, I consider the above four to be the most important. This is because it is impossible to be a successful lawyer without the above-mentioned four qualities, and because these same qualities override our good sense most often leading to the waste of our time, energy, and career.
Let's give an example to make things easier. When one of my friends first joined the bar, he was on the lookout for a good senior whose association can help his career. He targeted a few likely prospects, and out of them there was one brilliant, rich, and sleek senior lawyer whom he wanted to join. He tried finding references to approach the senior lawyer and one of those whom he approached warned him against his choice for unspecified reasons. In fact, more than one person gave the same warning.
But my friend, being of a scientific nature, just had to find out for himself the truth of the matter. So, he joined the senior he wanted. Within five months, he wanted to leave, but by then it was a bit late. His name had become involved in several crooked deals, and already he was being stamped as a crook's accomplice. It took my friend five years to extricate himself from the mess, but by that time, he had lost face, lost self-esteem, and lost the formative years of his career. All because he let blind scientific attitude override his good sense.
So, as I said, a little tweaking is needed to our scientific attitude as far as experimentation and verification of things is concerned and scientific attitude should not act as a compulsion that overrides our good sense (pragmatic perception of a situation).
In legal education and everyday practice, we come to learn and apply the term ''upon good faith'' and attach it only to principles of equity. By failing to apply the ''good faith'' principle in our lives and day-to-day activities, we waste time, lose things, and earn unnecessary pain that hampers our quality of life and career.
