May 15, 2008
Legal Department
Why I Am Not a Criminal Defense Lawyer
Over at Simple Justice, Scott Greenfield says some nice things about an article I wrote:
It's got merit. I've said it before and I'll say it again, that Mark Draughn is a smart guy. No wonder he never became a lawyer.
Mark is the Windypundit of Windypundit fame. For some unclear reason, he finds the law curious and maybe even fascinating, in some morbid way.
I think Scott's being a little ironic, but there's also a question implicit in his comments: If I'm so fascinated by this legal stuff, how come I'm not a lawyer? In particular, how come I'm not a criminal lawyer?
The short answer is that I don't have what it takes.
For one thing, I don't think quickly on my feet. If a witness hits me with an ugly surprise, or a judge asks me to justify something I didn't think needed justification, I probably couldn't come up with a good response quickly, and that seems like a fatal error during a trial.
Another problem is that I'm not really what you'd call a "people person." I get along with people okay (as far as I know) but I'd have trouble getting strangers to accept me and open up to me. That might hurt me at trial, and it would definitely hurt with figuring out the clients.
I also don't think I'd enjoy doing law as much as I enjoy hearing stories about it. It sounds like very stressful work. I'm not a very confrontational person by nature. I can buy a car or negotiate for a higher salary when it comes up, but I wouldn't want a job that was like that all the time.
Another reason I'd be a bad lawyer is that I have trouble empathizing with systems of values very different from my own. For example, it dumbfounds me that anyone would want to lock a woman in jail for prostitution. I don't understand what's going on in the heads of people whose response to a woman selling her body is to make her life worse by throwing her in jail.
That's not really an argument that would work in court. I'd have to find a real defense. However, it would piss me off that my client's fate depends on a system built by people who think that way, and it would aggravate me that I couldn't do anything about it. Maybe I'd get used to it as I gained experience, but would that be a good thing? And what if I never got used to it?
The flip side of that problem is that criminal lawyers deal with some awful people. Norm Pattis has a case where a young man is accused of a sex crime against his five-year-old step-sister. This arose in the middle of a custody fight between their parents, one of whom might be coaching the daughter to lie. I have no idea what the truth is, but someone is doing something terrible. I'm not sure I could spend so much of my life dealing with such people, let alone defending them.
I'd also have trouble getting used to...uhm...failure. Criminal defense lawyers rarely have complete victories. Even a really good lawyer at the top of his game is going to have a lot of clients going to jail---he may have shortened the sentence a lot, but it's still jail. Having to accept such dismal results would take a lot of fun out of the job.
All these reasons are pretty negative, but there's also a positive reason why I never tried to be a lawyer: I learned early on that I enjoy developing computer software. I find it to be a fascinating and rewarding experience.
Software development is everything lawyering is not. We're all on the same team, and we're working toward the same goals. There are conflicting values that arise in software development---the main one being between supported features, quick delivery, and future maintainability---but these conflicts can be resolved against a common interest in business success. Usually it's possible to achieve engineering consensus, but if that doesn't work you can always kick it up to the management pyramid.
Most things in software development happen on a schedule of days or weeks, so there's little pressure to think quickly. Even if I do have to come up with a quick answer---in a meeting, say---we can always go back and revisit it later.
Finally, in most kinds of software development, failure is rare. We may not always deliver software on-time or within the budget estimate, and there are bugs to be fought along the way, but the software almost always works in the end.
Software may not pay as well as being a lawyer, but I can do it well, it's not as stressful, and I really enjoy the work. So I'll just sit on the sidelines and make snarky comments while the real lawyers toil away in the courtroom.
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