This is not being partial in favor of the legal profession but as between the two degrees in which students really burn their midnight candles – law and medicine – law is more difficult.
Don’t bash me my dear doctors. Medicine is a science, and it’s mastery depends on physical and observable phenomena. More, save for the physiological processes, human anatomy as a whole is the same, except for the quirks of nature. The human heart, though it’s size may vary from one person to another, is essentially the same in structure and function.
Law is entirely different animal. Architects design buildings based on imagination but the result is tangible. Law is purely an abstraction, and its effect is something which cannot be touched. It remains in the realm of the abstract. Laws and their results in society remain to be intangible.
Way back in my first law school, my civil law professor always told us that we were building a house. The subjects of law that we were studying were at best sketchy. But later on we would realize that we were building a house of legal concepts. True enough, during my review, the legal concepts fell in a frame of an imaginary building.
Starting from the philosophical basis of law as the foundation, to the constitution as the pillars of the imaginary house, to the statutory laws, and the executive and administrative issuances, and jurisprudence as finishing touches, a lawyer must be able to construct and imagine this house in his mind.
But the practice of law demands more than the capacity to imagine the house of laws. The trend in private law practice is towards writing the arguments including the testimonies of witnesses. One can argue orally all he can in court but at the end of the day, the judge reads the memorandum of arguments and come up with a resolution or decision.
Writing skill is a must in private law practice. I know of lawyers who spend nights and days just to write one extensive memorandum. But there are lawyers who can do it in just one day. The difference is the skill level. Writing pleadings is not your ordinary writing. It demands mastery of the applicable laws and shape them into one persuasive piece.
A private law practitioner must me an expert in legal writing. The expertise does not come overnight. Having the mastery of the laws, the daunting challenge is to come up with a persuasive pleading. This takes time and practice plus the attitude for excellence. A young law private practitioner must spend time and effort to come up with well-written pleading. Early on, he should not be content with the run of the mill pleadings, something that one copies, cuts, and pastes into a pleading. While technology makes writing convenient, it brings with it the scourge of laziness and mediocrity.
After years of writing excellent pleadings, the lawyer slowly but gradually makes mental constructs on how to approach an argument and come up with a persuasive piece. Confronted with set of facts, the lawyer can readily come up with an idea on how to argue for a client. Instead of spending nights and days, a major pleading may be written in one early morning. Well-written piece becomes his second nature that it does not take him extra effort to write.
From building a house of laws, a diligent young lawyer will later on become an architect of the law, capable of imagining the shapes and curves of a legal argument and fashion them into both entertaining and persuasive pleading, doing it with less effort than when he started his career.
