Good lawyering means never being satisfied with one answer.

At Drinking Song, the blog of an advertising copy writer turned law student, John Johnson has developed a theory that proves to me he’s ahead of the game: “a good lawyer needs to do just as much-if not more-creative thinking as any Madison Avenue soap huckster.”  Even more importantly,

One of the things I learned [as an apprentice copy writer] was: Don’t stop at the first good idea you have. Keep going. Keep asking “what if . . . ” until you have a dozen ideas that might be something. But what you should never do is delude yourself that your first decent idea is enough, because chances are, it’s a fairly obvious one that pretty much anybody could come up with. This, it seems, is the very thing that hobbled my exam performance. And the reason I’m likely, as Al Franken/Stuart Smalley would say, to die homeless, penniless and twenty pounds overweight. I have a tendency to be what we in the law biz call “conclusory.” In other words, once I see a solution, (particularly under the fairly intense time pressure of an exam) I stop thinking about other possibilities. This is bad in advertising, but it can be fatal for a lawyer. In advertising, assuming you operate at fairly high level of conceptual sophistication to begin with, your one good idea might turn out to be the best solution and get you fame and awards and a coterie of nubile co-ed interns. And if not, no harm done; it’s probably still a serviceable solution and it moves the needle* for your brand. But for a lawyer to focus on just that one idea, he’s leaving himself (and his client) vulnerable to the other side by not seeing other ways an issue can be argued or the facts construed, not seeing how the other side can defend against his idea. I’m sure there are other possible permutations of prospective doom, but I’m too tired to think them all through just now.

I always tell my students: one good answer is a good answer.  Two good answers are better.  The more good reasons you have for you’re client being right, the better off your client is.  So if any of my students are reading: don’t be satisfied with the first half-decent answer you come up with.