Rumour has it, lawyers have it

It’s not once or twice in my 25+ year career that I have been asked to adopt a role other than legal, because of my allegedly analytical and logical thinking and coordinating and organizing skills, which tend to be typical for lawyers. Those job opportunities have been more business and/or technical natured than involving dealing legal issues. As flattered as I have been for being considered for these positions, I’ve rejected the offers. Why? Because I wanted to deal with law, and legal issues. For me it has always been clear that I want to be a lawyer. It could be that back in 90’s I imagined my career a bit different from what it has been formed (as there were no such thing that patent lawyers at that time) but in any case, I like applying law and legal rules and finding solutions to variety of legal problems.

How has my reluctance been addressed by my managers? Very well. Especially in my very early career the persons that saw my potential to positions requiring capability of systematical coordination and managing of large volumes, thanked me for being honest and appreciated the fact that as a very young lawyer I already knew what I wanted. One of my managers even said that he could not have made such a mature decision at my age. But it is only because I knew that I wanted to be a lawyer. I know many who have started to study law, because they haven’t had clear vision of their future dream profession, and law school opens doors to many opportunities. Indeed, many of my fellow students are working in managerial positions, even with very technical stuff, and they are good in what they are doing and perfectly happy too. Legal degree qualifies for doing so many things, and understanding law is big plus. After all, everything we do is in the end regulated by laws, and corporate world as such is one big legal environment with different branches of law, be it commercial law, employment law or tax law.

In light of aforementioned, it is a bit funny that in my current role as a patent lawyer, I am working in the intersection of business, law and technology. In other words, I am now working with those issues that I rejected on working in the past. But there’s no way I could have dealt with these issues 20 years earlier, as my expertise and knowledge has been gained over the years, in variety of roles and organizations. It has also required fair amount of continuous learning and training and professional networking with like minded community of legal and patent professionals – in my case also academics at the university.

What is it with lawyers’ and analytical thinking then? Well, most of the time law follows logical path: “If you do this (crime), this (sanction) happens”. In fact, in many ways law resembles coding: “If X, then Y”. Admittedly, written law gives room for more interpretation than functional programming, but in the end, both follow logical reasoning (in legal terms, causality) in an attempt to solve the problem at hand. In coding, it is only easier to come up with creative problem solutions. If coders face a dilemma, they can solve it by coding a function. Law making, on the other hand, is a much more bureaucratic process. Then again, sometimes law does not provide answers to all real-life problems and thus, there is need to create practical solutions to address the legal challenges faced in practicing profession (my dissertation thesis is one example of such an industry practice solution to those challenges).

Another reason for logical thinking of lawyers (and others) could be math. What’s math got to do with law? Well, in Finland, during the recent years, grade in advanced math has provided most points when compared to other fields of studies, including basic math, when applying to law school. This practice has been widely questioned and objected to, as math skills hardly can tell anything about one’s ability to work as a lawyer. Or does it? I agree that you can be a good lawyer without having studied advanced math or even being a mathematically skilled person, but when I think of it, it could be that my own studies of advanced mathematics might have been partial reason for being able to apply analytical and logical thinking that I have thought to be derived from studying the law. Or put another way, studying complex mathematical functions may have helped in understanding legal dogmatics and empiric studies of law.

Does applying or studying law require analytical mindset, or does it teach you to think analytically? It would also be nice to know the variety of professions lawyers have populated.

For this article, I created my first ever own AI generated picture. I tried several tools, and the common nominator there was that “a lawyer dealing with business, law and technology” was always a male. So, I defined the specifications to generate “a female lawyer”. There is lot to learn still, for these AI guys. Photo credits go to ChatGPT.