Incubator

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We Were Once Baby Lawyers

“Culture comes first.”

Every great group I’ve been a part of has reinforced the fundamental truth of this adage, a truth I relearn every time I join with others in common cause.

Perhaps the most enduring such experience came for me in 1979, when I joined what would become the Class of the 1981 at the University of Arizona College of Law, the group I have come to fondly remember as the “Never Again!” class.

Culture is the rubber band that bound our classmates together. But that rubber band also catapulted us into, and continuously shaped, the decades long legal careers we are only now winding down.

Our U of A Law School experience was the product of the “Never Again!” thinking that preceded our arrival.

Conventional wisdom, back then, was that good lawyering began with first locking your heart in the trunk before starting law school and the legal career to follow.

But divorcing one’s heart from one’s head has unintended, isolating consequences: A student in each of the two preceding law school classes had withdrawn from school – by means of withdrawing from life – in apparent response to the heartless future their chosen career paths seemed to promise.

So, before our class arrived, the law school engaged in some serious “Never Again!” soul-searching, out of which came its “culture comes first” approach to incubating its next batch of baby lawyers.

The law school’s message to us, in everything it did, was to apply our minds AND our hearts, in equal measure, to the journeys we were embarking upon.

Yes, a challenging curriculum honed our minds for what lay ahead, but our hearts were also in evidence in the many just-for-fun things we did: Pitching tents in the law library; unwinding each week over beer, chips and salsa at Gentle Ben’s with our small-section classmates, and its steward, Professor Kenny Hegland; attending tax class adorned in Halloween costumes; and hosting a desert fun-run in which most everyone, instead, just walked. And the courageously eclectic curriculum on offer by the school even included “Hot Tubs,” the derisive label we smugly gave to the school’s first of its kind in the country mediation program. (Mediation and collaborative lawyering have since become mainstream methods for engaging one’s compassion in the resolution of conflict.)

In all that it did, the school channeled our hearts’ earnest reminder to our rapidly expanding heads: “While ‘being a lawyer’ is the costume we will wear, it is not who we are.”

In a few short days, I will be reuniting with my law school classmates. And on the eve of this communal rekindling of our collective origin story, the countless ways in which our time together back then wove its way into the legal career that followed have begun to bubble up.

That the through line of that law school experience has been ever present in the long career that followed is apparent in ways large and small. Just two examples serve to illustrate the point.  

• The fountain pen with which I wrote this essay traces its lineage back to that first fountain pen, the one I bought mere minutes after outwardly scoffing at Kenny Hegland’s sage advice to our small-section Contracts class on the eve of our first law school final exam:  “Use a fountain pen,” he told us, in response to a question about what strategy he would recommend for doing well on the exam. “It will slow down your writing, which lends itself to composing a more thoughtful answer.”

• The career defining “Lassie Hypothetical” – a tongue in cheek soliloquy, used in a summary judgment motion, that spared the lives of Shadow and Fangor, two hybrid-wolves that an HOA had targeted for extinction – traces its origins back to Halloween of 1980, when I unintentionally “appeared” at oral argument before the Arizona Supreme Court dressed in an elephant costume.

Yes, on the eve of my first week of law school classes, I recall dreading the prospect of relegating my heart to the trunk for the duration of law school and my legal career.

But my great good fortune was that I had enrolled in a law school that had just become laser-focused on giving my heart a seat in the classroom, determined that it would remain engaged in my work and life long after I left the school.

And remain engaged it has.