Great Books Help Make Great Transactional Lawyers [Gaille Energy Blog Issue 100]

When I am interviewing young lawyers, I want to know about their lifelong reading habits.? What books have they read?? Do they read for enjoyment?? What are they reading now?? And I mean real books—not social media feeds.??

I do this because the most important skill for a transactional lawyer is reading stamina.? By reading stamina, I mean the ability to read and comprehend for 8, 10, or more hours a day.? Reading stamina is very much a product of experience:

“Reading books is both a skill and a habit. As an acquired skill, reading is initially effortful but becomes easier as we become fluent, recognizing words and building background knowledge of the matters discussed. As a habit, reading is something we choose to do (or not) in our moments of downtime.? But both skills and habits can atrophy.?If you spend less time reading, it takes more effort to work through challenging texts. If you decide to read less often, choosing to read becomes more effortful. Reading books, and the opposite, can both become self-reinforcing actions—readers read more books, while nonreaders find it increasingly hard to do so.”? Scott H. Young, Are We Losing the Ability to Read Books? (2023).

Yet, the data continues to indicate that reading is in decline:?

“The Bureau of Labor Statistics most recent American Time Use Survey found a decline in leisure reading—a record low 19% of Americans age 15 and older reported that they read for pleasure?.?.?.?42% of college grads never read another book after college.”? Michael Kozlowski, Reading Books Is On the Decline (2018).

Reading of the “great books” is rarer still.? Great books are those that have been used for generations to sharpen minds.? Great books require more attention and care than say, blazing through a John Grisham legal thriller.? Great books require a great deal of focus.? You do not have to enjoy a great book.? Just the process of carefully reading a great book improves reading stamina.?

Back in the late 1980s, most of my liberal arts classes at The University of Texas mandated the reading of great books.? In a single literature class spanning only one semester, required reading included Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Voltaire’s Candide, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.? ??????? ??

In the 2010s and 2020s, I was surprised by what my children were reading—or rather, not reading—in college.? They took many of the same courses as I did, but instead of reading the great books, they mostly read articles by professors interpreting the great books.? This is like reading a travel article about a place instead of traveling there yourself.? It makes for lazy minds.? ??

There is no substitute for first-hand reading of complex literature, history, and philosophy:

“If you are reading in order to become a better reader, you cannot read just any book or article?.?.?.?[y]ou must tackle books that are beyond you, or, as we have said, books that are over your head. Only books of that sort will make you stretch your mind. And unless you stretch, you will not learn.”? Mortimer Adler and Charles van Doren,?How to Read a Book (1972)???????

Working with long and complex agreements is similar to reading a great book.? Take Dickens, for example.? His longest novel, David Copperfield, is 357,489 words.? In order to appreciate a novel like Copperfield, a reader has to remember the many story threads that lead up to its ending.? The contracts I work with often exceed 100,000 words.? I have to think about how a sentence on page 73 interacts with one that I read hours earlier on page 12. Reading great books prepares the mind for this kind of work:

“At the start, reading the great books will likely feel like slogging through thick mud, as our minds engage with new words and names, complex arguments, and antiquated language; however, with persistence that resistance will lighten. As a sprinter trains with weights and finds himself faster when the weights are gone, so too do we read faster when returning to familiar, modern writing. Our minds sprint where once they jogged.”? Christian Poole, The Benefits of Reading the Great Books (2022).

University of Chicago educator Robert Maynard Hutchins summed up the importance of reading the great books:

“Great books teach people not only how to read them, but also how to read all other books.” The Great Conversation (Great Books of the Western World (1994)

?I’ll add a legal spin to Hutchins’ wisdom:

Great books help make great transactional lawyers.

A few years ago, The University of Chicago Law School’s alumni Visiting Committee discussed a noted decline in the writing skills of incoming students.? The Committee learned from writing experts that good writing is highly correlated with how much (and what) people have read over their lives.? As students increasingly scrolled social media and undergraduate reading of great books declined, the writing skills of new law students weakened relative to their predecessors.

Young lawyers unaccustomed to complex reading will struggle to comprehend long contracts—let alone draft them.? This means that fewer lawyers will want to do transactional legal work, and even fewer will succeed at it.

Yet demand for complex contracts keeps growing.? The more dollars at stake in a contract, the more detailed it needs to be—to ensure that the parties’ respective investments are protected.? After adjusting for inflation, the American economy grew by about 18% between 2010 and 2020 (https://usafacts.org/data/topics/economy/economic-indicators/gdp/gross-domestic-product/).? The number of businesses in the United States with more than 500 employees increased by almost 25% between 1999 and 2019.? Thomas Dudley, How Many Businesses Are There in America and What Does it Mean for Employee Ownership? (2022).? These trends are matched by relative increases in the amount of corporate and transactional work done by major law firms—which also increased by about 19% during this period.? Brent Turner, PMI Q4 2021 Analysis: How the Rise of Transactional Work Accelerated a Decades-Long Break with Litigation (2022). Higher interest rates may have checked deal flow, thereby reducing demand for transactional legal work—but for how long??

Economics 101 says that the combination of growing demand and shrinking supply should result in price increases.? Fifteen years ago, the highest rates for senior partners were ~$1,000 per hour—in 2023, rates for lawyers fresh out of law school are now up to $1,000 an hour.? Debra Cassens Weiss, Nearly $1,000 an Hour Is Rate for Second-Year Associates at These BigLaw Firms (2023). Is the demand for great lawyers exceeding their supply? And, if so, to what extent is this attributable to changes in reading habits??? ????????????????????????????

About the Gaille Energy Blog.?The Gaille Energy Blog discusses issues in the field of energy law. Scott Gaille is Managing Partner of GAILLE PLLC (a transactional boutique law firm), a Lecturer in Law at the University of Chicago Law School, the author of eight articles in the Energy Law Journal, and co-author of the award-winning travel book,?Strange Tales of World Travel?(Bronze Medalist, IPPY Awards for Best 2019 Travel Essay;?ForeWord Magazine?Finalist for Best Travel Book of 2019; North American Travel Journalists’ Honorable Mention for Best Travel Book of 2019).