Lawyers

Review: The Servant Lawyer

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Cover image of "The Servant Lawyer: Facing the Challenges of Christian Faith in Everyday Law Practice" by Robert F. Cochran Jr.

The Servant Lawyer: Facing the Challenges of Christian Faith in Everyday Law Practice, Robert F. Cochran Jr. IVP Academic (ISBN: 9781514007228), 2024.

Summary: An exploration of the real work lawyers do and the challenges and opportunities for Christians who practice law.

Did you have the same reaction I did to the title The Servant Lawyer? I thought many would think the phrase an oxymoron. Robert F. Cochran Jr, a practitioner and law professor thinks otherwise. In this book he considers the everyday work of most attorneys and explores the servant opportunities for Christian lawyers. While doing so, he also discusses the challenges and pitfalls attorneys face in this work.

He begins with the client and the importance of seeing him or her as someone God has brought into one’s life. This is important because the cases studied in law school and legal practice tend to depersonalize the client. He addresses affording clients with dignity, respect, love, and dispassionate advice, helping clients weigh their options. He discusses choosing clients, encouraging obedience to the law, and refusing to be complicit in injustice.

Cochran describes lawyers as builders and trustees. In drafting good contracts and helping with compliance issues, they help clients produce good products and flourish while conducting their business lawfully. They offer practical wisdom that help clients determine what is in their best interests in a conflict. This also relates to their role as advocates and peacemakers. He discusses the virtue of the adversary system and why it can be good to make arguments you don’t believe, especially when ensuring a client receives a good defense. Peacemaking, the negotiating of good and fair settlements is also part of this work.

This brings up the work of prosecution and defense. He argues the importance of prosecution for the good of society and the good of the defendant while warning of the dangers of the misuse of prosecutorial power. Likewise, defense attorneys make the state prove its case and observe procedural justice. They can have a role of counseling clients at a crucial juncture in their lives.

Much of the work of the lawyer is outside the courtroom, counseling clients, whether in business practice, estate planning, or civil litigation. Even this is subject to pitfalls. The lawyer can be godfather, hired gun, or guru, rather than approaching clients as one would a friend. He addresses the issue of disputes between Christians and with churches. While conciliation can be helpful in many cases, he notes that where the potential for harm exists or where abuse has occurred, legal recourse may be the only remedy.

Perhaps one of the most powerful chapters is on lawyers as prophets and advocates for the least of these. Cochran draws on the historical example of the Clapham sect, including Granville Sharp, in effecting many reforms including the abolition of slavery. He also cites the importance of legal aid work, highlighting John Robb’s work in this area. He challenges lawyers to tithe their time in legal aid, if possible.

Cochran summarizes the challenges of law practice he has touched on throughout. These include cynicism, pride, insecurity, and the danger of a divided life. He concludes by focusing on the societal importance of lawyers in upholding the rule of law and the personal influence attorneys have. Cochran tells the “rest of the story” of Sidney, a criminal defendant he represented early in his career who is now one of his great encouragers.

What so impressed me about this book is its focus on the everyday work of the vast majority of lawyers I know. He gives practical examples of their opportunities to serve and fleshes out biblical principle. I love to give away books and this is one I’d be excited to give to every attorney I know.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher for review.

Review: Thinking Like a Lawyer

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Thinking Like a LawyerThinking Like a Lawyer, Colin Seale. Waco: Prufrock Press, 2020.

Summary: Applies the framework law students learn to teaching critical thinking for all school students.

Colin Seale was a disruptive student in school until a perceptive teacher had him tested and got him into a gifted program. Later, when he slacked off on studies, a school counselor leaned into his poor performance based on his past grades, got him into a summer school, where he was thought smart, and he decided to live up to it. In college, he almost gave up on his course of study, but his mother told him, “You have always figured things out, and you just have to figure this out. I have to get back to work.”

Three people saw through his behavior and refused to allow him to waste his potential, resulting in him getting into law school, where he ended up at the top of his class. There he learned what it meant to “think like a lawyer.” Something else happened as well. To work his way through law school, he taught school. He discovered that the critical thinking methods and skills he used so successfully in his classes could help his students — even those who were academic under-achievers. He discovered that instead of critical thinking being some high level skill only advanced students could use, it was a key skill that motivated all sorts of other kinds of learning. This book reflects his efforts to apply the teaching of critical thinking throughout the educational process.

He defines critical thinking as:

  1. the set of skills and dispositions we need
  2. to learn what we need to learn
  3. to solve problems across disciplines
  4. that are grounded in the spirit of doing right instead of being right

He calls his approach the “thinkLaw framework.” It involves:

  • Analysis from Multiple Perspectives: understanding all sides of an argument. He unpacks this further as the DRAAW+C framework
    • Decision: Who should win?
    • Rule/Law: What is the rule or law for this case?
    • Arguments plaintiff will make:
    • Arguments defendent will make:
    • World: Looking at the big picture, why is your decision better for the world than other possible decisions?
    • Conclusion: Re-write the Decision as a Conclusion
  • Mistake analysis: identifying what mistake we should really care about and what mistake “Joe Schmo” is most likely to make.
  • Investigation and Discovery: what do we know and what do we need to know?
  • Settlement and Negotiation: Determine the underlying interests, Identify the best outcome if you fail to negotiate a settlement, and Make a proposal that addresses interests and exceeds your best outcome without a settlement.
  • Competition: in law school, being a good student is not enough. success requires creative analysis that uses all these other skills to argue a conclusion better than one’s classmates.

The rest of the book unpacks how all this can work to make everything from literature and social studies to math and science fertile ground for critical thinking. He outlines a variety of structures that can be woven into instruction, contrasts it with “engagement,” discusses the use of thinkLaw in classroom management, test prep, and with families–particularly with not enabling learned helplessness by intervening in homework struggles (kind of like his mother did with him as a college student).

Reading this, on one hand, felt like thinkLaw was the silver bullet for whatever ails education. What I would love to see is a more detailed study of the difference his methods make in a school or school system that adopts them. At the same time, what comes through in every page of the book is the conviction that we under-estimate what students are capable of, and particularly in this matter of critical. If more students have to look at a question from all sides, work rigorously to discover what is known, learn to analyze mistakes, including the ones they make, and to think how their solutions work in the real world, we certainly would have students equipped for whatever innovations in technology and the nature of work are thrown at them.

What comes through on every page, unmistakably, is Colin Seale’s passion that we “simply have to stop leaving genius on the table.” Sometimes that genius comes in the form of those most creative in disruption, more often seen as a problem than as genius. Can Seale’s critical thinking methods develop that disruptive genius? He suggests one of the real payoffs in observing that often the people companies turn to when they need to innovate or turnaround are those skilled in “creative disruption.” Likely they weren’t the good students in class–more likely the cut-ups or disruptive ones. Like Colin Seale.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary review copy of this book from the publisher via LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers Program. The opinions I have expressed are my own.