To love the law is to love the past. Even for those who were inclined to fall asleep in history class, the preparation of a thorough brief requires detailed understanding of disputes long forgotten and authorities otherwise obscure. In a courtroom, the past isn’t dead. As William Faulkner said in a different context, “it’s not even past.”

On September 16, Insight Labs partnered with Generation Generosity, Akina, and a roomful of estimable esquires to re-imagine the legal profession. In advance of the Lab, Content Director Andrew Benedict-Nelson asked each participant – whether trained in the law or not – to identify a person that he or she considered to be the paragon of all that is good about lawyers and lawyering. Here’s what Bryan Schwartz of Levenfeld Pearlstein had to say. Click here to see the other interviews.

Andrew Benedict-Nelson: Can you think of a lawyer who for you, really embodies what is best about the legal profession?

Bryan Schwartz: My view of a lawyer is really different from somebody who stands up in a courtroom and is really impressive. To me that is one aspect of being a lawyer, but it is not really representative. To me, it’s someone who cares about people first, before money. It is a person whose integrity is beyond reproach. It is a person who has emotional intelligence about what the client feels and what they’re going through.

On top of that, they should be a phenomenal practitioner, who has made being a good lawyer their primary focus rather than just trying to scheme together business. When you put all those factors together, there is not one person who pops into my head. That’s what I’m trying to create.

ABN: So is there any person who might inspire you in seeking out those qualities?

BS: Well, my dad has a lot of those qualities. He wasn’t a lawyer, but he had integrity and cared about people more than money. I would say a lot of those qualities are embodied in the way I grew up. Though he’s a human being with faults just like anyone else.

I have a partner with a lot of those aspects, but I can’t think of any one person who has them all in one package. It may be a work in progress. Kind of like golf.

ABN: I’m just curious – what did your dad do?

BS: My dad was an engineer. He also ran companies. He is now retired.

ABN: So when you look out at the system we have that maintains the legal profession today, from law school to the partner level, do you think it encourages the development of the kind of qualities you talked about?

BS: Not at all.

The best system was the apprenticeship system. We have largely eliminated that. With the financial pressures of practice today, we lose that integrity. We lose that continuity where clients come first. The demand for income has taken on a role in the profession that has hurt it really badly.

ABN: How would you recommend improving the system? 

BS: You have to start by looking at who becomes a lawyer before you do something like start to tell lawyers that they should become more entrepreneurial. If you ever did psychological testing in a firm, you’ll find that most lawyers all fall into the boxes of safety and linear thinking. In most firms you are going to get one or two people in the holistic box and four or five people in the emotional box. Everyone else will be in the safety and linear boxes. If you look at why people become lawyers, you will find that they want affiliation with and acknowledgement from other people with high achievement.

Now does that sounds like an entrepreneur? To be an entrepreneur, you have to be unafraid to fail. You can’t take someone whose career has been built around safety and then make them into an entrepreneur. It’s not going to happen.You’ll find that lawyers are a phenomenally strong group in certain aspects and unbelievably unprepared in other aspects.

ABN: If you had to find a place to start improving the profession among the strengths you see lawyers having now, what would it be?

BS: Lawyers are by and large a hard-working, honest, great group of people. If you want to take a group of people and try to implement some change with them, this is a good group of people. Just don’t ask them to be entrepreneurs.

Lawyers are very linear, but things like the compassion you show for a client doesn’t show up on the scorecard. The scorecard is terrible in most law firms. We need to build a better scorecard. That’s what we’ve really concentrated on here. We might be able to move the next generation over time. I am sure that the younger generation is going to be stronger than the existing generation. I am sure that when I am no longer a managing partner that this will be a much better law firm.

We are doing training in emotional intelligence. All these things take time. We do surveys that are shared by everyone, and you will see if someone is an jerk – you’ll see that everyone agrees – and then that person will either change or leave. So when we talk about a better model, I see the big change starting with leaders being dedicated to a different kind of workplace that breeds the best in lawyers rather than the worst. The best is already there, but it needs to be pulled out and focused on.