How to Think Like a Lawyer

Law professors and practicing attorneys in the United States cannot talk about “thinking like a lawyer” without mentioning the 1973 movie “The Paper Chase.” ^{[1] X Source of Research} In this film, Professor Kingsfield told first-year law students: “You come here with a rotten brain and leave with a lawyer’s mind.” While law professors pride themselves on teaching students how to think like a lawyer, you don’t have to go to law school to strengthen your logic and critical thinking.

Table of Contents

Detecting the problem

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Approach a problem from every angle. To be able to see the full range of potential problems in a sequence of events, attorneys look at the situation from different perspectives. Putting yourself in everyone’s shoes allows you to understand different points of view.

With the exam at law schools in the United States, students must learn how to construct an answer structure based on the acronym IRAC , which means Issue (problem), Rule (rule), Analysis (analysis). and Conclusion (conclusion). Failure to spot all potential problems can throw the whole answer off track. ^{[2] X Research Source}
For example, suppose you are walking down the street and see a ladder leaning against a building. A worker is standing on the top step, leaning to the left to clean the window. There weren’t any workers around, and the bottom of the ladder stretched out onto the sidewalk where people walked. Spotting the problem does not stop at just looking at the situation from the perspective of workers and passersby, but also from the perspective of the building owner, the worker’s employer, and even the city where the building is located.

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Avoid emotional troubles. There’s a reason to say you’re “blind” from anger or any other emotion — because emotions aren’t based on reason and prevent you from seeing the facts that are important to solving problems.

Correctly detecting the problem is an important step in determining the relevant and necessary event. Emotions and feelings will make you pay attention to details that are of little or no importance to the outcome of the situation.
Lawyer thinking requires you to put your personal preferences or emotional reactions aside to focus on real and provable facts. In the United States, for example, suppose a defendant in a criminal case goes to court for molesting a child. The police arrested the man near the children’s playground, and immediately questioned why he was there and his intentions with the children playing in the yard. The man was distraught and admitted he intended to harm the children. The details of the case may be infuriating, but the defendant’s attorney will ignore the emotional trauma and focus on the fact that the defendant was not aware of his or her right to remain silent before being questioned. ^{[3] X Research Sources}

Using Logic

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Infer specific conclusions from general principles. Deductive reasoning is one of the standards of lawyers’ thinking. In the legal profession, this type of logic is used when applying a rule of law to a particular event.

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Construct a syllogism. A syllogism is a specific form of deductive reasoning, often applied in legal thinking, with the following content: what is true for a general group will also be true for certain individuals in the group. there. ^{[5] X Research Sources}

The syllogism structure consists of three parts: the major premise, the minor premise, and the conclusion about the minor premise based on the major premise.
The grand premise is usually quite broad and holds true in most situations. For example, you could say, “Every dirty floor represents carelessness.”
The minor premise is often related to an individual or a sequence of events, such as “The floor of this restaurant is dirty.”
The conclusion connects the small premise with the big premise. When you come up with a principle that is universally applicable, and verify that the individual under consideration belongs to a group that is governed by that principle, you can conclude: “The floor of the restaurant represents the negligent.”

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Deduce general principles from the signs of specific things. Sometimes you don’t have a general rule, but you can observe some situations with similar facts. Inductive reasoning allows you to conclude the following: if an event happens often enough, you can make the general rule that the event will always happen.

Inductive reasoning does not allow you to make any guarantees about your conclusion. However, the fact that a certain event occurs often enough is the basis for your principle.
Let’s say no one tells you about the general rule: dirty floors represent some sort of negligence on the part of a store employee or store owner. However, you observe the following: in some cases when a customer slips and falls, the judge decides that the store owner was at fault by negligence. Because of his negligence, the shop owner must compensate for the customer’s injury. Based on your knowledge of those incidents, you conclude: if the store floor is dirty, the store owner was negligent.
A few examples are not enough for you to create a reliable enough principle. The large proportion of independent cases in a group with the same characteristics will make your conclusion more accurate. ^{[6] X Research Source}

Question everything

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Stop admitting. Similar to emotions, admissions blind spots to your thinking. Attorneys look for evidence for all true claims, and argue that nothing is true without being proven.

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Ask why. You may have met a child who asked “why?” with all the things you say. While it’s frustrating, this is part of the lawyer’s mindset.

In the United States, lawyers often refer to “policy” as the reason for a law to be enacted. The policy of a piece of legislation can be used to argue that new facts or circumstances arise that are also subject to the legislation.
For example, suppose that in 1935, the city council issued a document banning vehicles in public parks. This law was enacted mainly for safety reasons, after a child was hit by a car. In 2014, the city council was asked if the 1935 legislation would ban autonomous drones. Are they means of transport? Does banning these devices promote policy implementation of this legislation? Why? If you’re asking these questions (and identifying possible arguments for each side), you’re thinking like a lawyer.
Thinking like a lawyer also means not taking anything lightly. Understanding why certain events happened or why a law was enacted allows you to apply the same factor to other facts and draw reasonable conclusions.

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Accept ambiguity. Legal issues are rarely black and white. Life is too complicated for legislators to consider all possibilities when drafting legislation.

The ambiguity allows for flexible application, so that there is no need to rewrite the legal text every time a new situation emerges. For example, the United States Constitution has been adopted in relation to electronic means of surveillance, a technical advance unimaginable to the writers of the Constitution.
Much of thinking like a lawyer is about being comfortable with nuances and ambiguities. However, the fact that these exist does not mean that all distinctions are meaningless. ^{[8] X Research Sources}

Warning

Thinking like a lawyer also requires judgment. Just because a valid argument is made doesn’t mean it’s good. Judgment is needed to determine a line of thought or conclusion that can best benefit someone or advance society, or be destructive and dangerous. ^{[9] X Trusted Source Princeton University Go to Source}
Thinking like a lawyer is beneficial in many different situations. However, cold and rational critical thinking is often not suitable for solving problems involving personal relationships or ordinary social situations. ^{[10] X Research Source}

Steps

Detecting the problem

Using Logic

Question everything

Warning

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