Law professors and practicing attorneys cannot talk about “thinking like a lawyer” without bringing up the 1973 film “The Paper Chase.” In the film, Professor Kingsfield says to his first year students: “You came here with a broken mind and you will leave this place thinking like a lawyer”. While law professors still enjoy telling their students that they will be taught to think like a lawyer, you don't need to go to law school to improve your skills in logical and critical thinking.
Step
Part 1 of 3: Recognizing the Problem
Step 1. Approach the problem from all angles
In order to look at all possible issues in terms of a set of facts, the attorney will look at the situation from multiple points of view. Putting yourself in the other person's shoes will allow you to understand other points of view.
- In law exams, students learn to structure answers using the abbreviation IRAC, which stands for ' Issue (problem)', ' Rules', ' Analysis (analysis)' and ' Conclusion (conclusion)'. Failure to identify all possible problems can miss all answers.
- For example, suppose you're walking down the street and notice a ladder propping up a building. A worker at the top of the stairs was reaching far to his left to clean the window. There were no other workers, and the bottom of the stairs protruded out onto the part of the sidewalk where people walked. Recognizing the problem involves not only seeing the situation from the point of view of the worker and the passers-by, but also of the building owner, the worker's boss, and perhaps even the city in which the building is located.
Step 2. Avoid emotional attachment
There's a reason you might say you've been "blind" by anger and other emotions-feelings are irrational and prevent you from seeing facts that may be important to solving problems.
- Identifying the problem accurately is the main thing to determine which facts are relevant and important. Emotions and sentiments can cause you to become attached to details that have little or no importance in the outcome of the situation.
- Thinking like a lawyer requires you to put aside any personal interests or emotional reactions to focus on real, verifiable facts. For example, suppose a criminal defendant is sued on the grounds of abusing a minor. The police detained him near the playground, and began immediately asking why he was there and his intentions towards the children playing near him. The disturbed man confessed that he planned to harm the children. The details of the case may sound gruesome, but defense attorneys will brush aside the emotional trauma and focus on the fact that the defendant was not informed of his right to remain silent before he was questioned.
Step 3. Dispute both parties
People who are not lawyers may view this ability as a moral failure in lawyers, but that doesn't mean lawyers don't believe in anything. The ability to argue both sides of an issue means understanding that there are two sides to every story, each of which has points that may be valid.
As you learn how to make opposing arguments, you also learn how to listen, which will increase tolerance and allow more problems to be resolved cooperatively
Part 2 of 3: Using Logic
Step 1. Draw specific conclusions from general rules
Deductive reasoning is one of the hallmarks of thinking like a lawyer. In the field of law, this logical pattern is used when applying the rule of law to a certain pattern of facts.
Step 2. Build a syllogism
The syllogism is a special type of deductive reasoning that is often used in legal reasoning, and ensures that what is true for a group in general will also be true for all specific individuals within the same group.
- A syllogism has three parts: a general statement, a special statement, and a conclusion about a particular statement based on the general statement.
- General statements are usually broad and apply almost universally. For example, you might say “All dirty floors show neglect”.
- Specific statements refer to a specific person or set of facts, such as “This restaurant floor is dirty”.
- The conclusion relates the specific statement to the general statement. By stating the universal rule, and concluding that the particular statement is part of the group that falls under the universal rule, you can reach the conclusion: “This restaurant floor exhibits negligence”.
Step 3. Infer general rules from specific patterns
Sometimes you don't have a general rule, but you can see a number of similar situations with the same occurrence. Inductive reasoning allows you to conclude that if the same thing happens often enough, you can draw a general rule that it always will.
- Inductive reasoning does not allow you to guarantee that your conclusions are correct. However, if something happens on a regular basis, it is quite possible for you to be able to base it on when creating the rules.
- For example, suppose no one told you that, as a general rule, a dirty floor indicates negligence on the part of the store clerk or store owner. But you observe a pattern in some cases of customers slipping and falling, and the judge concludes that the shop owner was negligent. Due to his negligence, the shop owner had to pay for the injuries suffered by the customer. Based on your knowledge of these cases, you conclude that the shop floor is dirty and the shop owner has been negligent.
- Just knowing a few case examples may not be enough to create a rule that you can base on at any level. The greater the proportion of single cases in a group with the same trait, the more likely the conclusion is correct.
Step 4. Compare similar situations using an analogy
When a lawyer gives an argument for a case using a comparison with the previous case, he is using an analogy.
- The lawyer will try to win the new case by showing that the facts are substantially similar to the facts in the old case, and therefore the new case should be decided in the same way as the old case.
- Law professors teach law students to think using analogies by proposing a series of hypothetical facts to analyze. Students read the case, then apply the case rules to different scenarios.
- Comparing and contrasting facts also helps you conclude which facts are important to the outcome of the case, and those that are not relevant or decisive.
- For example, suppose a girl in a red dress is walking past a store when she slips and falls because she steps on a banana peel. The girl sued the shop for her injuries and won because the judge ruled the shop owner had been negligent by not sweeping the floor. Thinking like a lawyer means recognizing which facts are important to the judge in deciding the case.
- In the next town, the girl in the blue dress was walking towards her table in a cafe when she slipped and fell on a muffin. If you think like a lawyer, you may conclude that this case will have the same outcome as the previous case. The girl's location, the color of her dress, and the thing she tripped over were irrelevant details. An important and coherent fact is the injury that has arisen because the shop owner has been negligent in his duty to keep the floor clean.
Part 3 of 3: Questioning Everything
Step 1. Describe the assumptions
Like emotions, assumptions create blind spots in your thinking. A lawyer looks for evidence to ensure every statement is factual, and assumes that nothing is true except evidence.
Step 2. Ask why
You may have had the experience of a young child asking "why" after all of your explanations. While that can be annoying, it's also part of thinking like a lawyer.
- Lawyers will refer to the reasons why the law was made as a “policy”. The policy behind the law can be used to argue that new facts or situations should come under the umbrella of the law.
- For example, suppose that in 1935, the city council enacted a law prohibiting vehicles from passing through public parks. The law was enacted primarily for safety reasons, after a child was hit by a car. In 2014, the city council was asked to consider whether the 1935 law banned drones. Are drones a vehicle? Does banning drones improve legal policy? Why? If you ask these questions (and recognize the arguments that can be made on both sides), you are thinking like a lawyer.
- Thinking like a lawyer also means not wasting anything. Understanding why something happens, or why a law is enforced, allows you to apply the same rationale to patterns of fact and reach logical conclusions.
Step 3. Accept ambiguity
Legal issues are rarely seen in black and white. Life is too complicated for regulators to consider every eventuality when drafting the rule of law.
- Ambiguity allows flexibility, so that laws don't have to be rewritten every time a new scenario arises. For example, the Act has been interpreted to relate to electronic surveillance, a technological advance that the Legislators of the past did not think of.
- Much of the act of thinking like a lawyer involves getting comfortable with the vague and gray areas. However, just because the gray area exists, doesn't mean the difference is meaningless.
Warning
- Thinking like a lawyer also requires you to use judgment. Just because a logical argument can be made doesn't mean it's a good argument. Judgment is needed to decide whether a series of reasoning or inferences promote the good of each person or the importance of a group as a whole, or cause destruction and harm.
- Thinking like a lawyer can help in a variety of contexts. But cool and rational thinking is seldom appropriate when confronted with personal relationships or in purely social circumstances.
