From the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago's Chicago Booth Review, February 25:
The Valedictorian’s Fallacy
A few years after graduating from law school, I was having a long overdue dinner with a friend and former classmate of mine. (We’ll call him Skip.) After trading updates on family and friends, we turned to the preoccupations of our professional lives. Skip told me about the daily grind of being a corporate lawyer—a world of endless memos, legal minutiae, and billing in six-minute increments—and I told him about the courses I was teaching at the University of Chicago.
Skip took a special interest in my leadership class: How exactly did I approach that tricky subject? I told Skip that I focused on helping students develop the self-awareness and empathy necessary to connect with, gain the trust of, and ultimately inspire their peers, all while keeping a close eye on the values they held dear.
As I spoke, my dinner companion grew pensive. “I wish they had taught us those things in law school,” he grumbled. Skip, it seemed, had learned the hard way that the capacity I was describing was far more central to one’s success as a lawyer than he had ever imagined when we were busy cramming for finals. In law school, writing the very best legal brief or most adroitly assembling the facts of a case put you, quite literally, at the head of the class. At the firm, however, these things didn’t seem to matter—at least not as much as they did when we were students.
As a counterpoint to his experience, Skip mentioned one of our classmates. (We’ll call him Artie.) Artie was a swell guy, someone as quick with a quip as a helping hand, but his knack for legal analysis seemed wanting, at least as far as Skip was concerned. The two of them had entered the firm at the same time, and while Skip had struggled, his colleague had soared. “He’s really good at the kinds of things you’re talking about,” Skip admitted. Artie had a gift for gaining the trust of clients, impressing senior partners, and bringing in new business. Yes, Skip could still write a better brief, but unfortunately for him, writing a better brief was clearly no longer key to continued advancement....
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Pro tip: Arrange for your future parents to be multi-billionaire company founders and then take that company's legal work to your chosen employer while introducing yourself as their next rainmaker partner.
