During the Conference on Psychology and Lawyering that Professor Jean Sternlight hosted at the William S. Boyd School of Law a few years ago, my friend Professor Nancy Rapoport and I spoke about the psychology of legal ethics. Drawing on my humanities background and her social science background, we discussed the importance of understanding the incentives that encourage lawyers to behave in certain ways. As we prepared for the conference and made our presentations, we realized that not only do the incentives that organizations develop—intentionally (through policies and procedures) or inadvertently (through the unintended consequences of those policies and procedures)—have profound effects on behavior, but that the classical concept of “virtue”—as the development of habits that shape character—can help people interact with those incentives. So we set out to explore the concept of “virtue” as it relates to how lawyers bill their clients. That exploration culminated in an article, “Virtuous Billing.” But I had been interested in the larger topic of “virtue in the professions” for several years (and remain so today) and believed that our article did not exhaust the generative possibilities of “virtue” as a touchstone for separating professionalism from self-interest. To that end, in what follows here and in future installments of this series, I will yoke my earlier thoughts (as helpfully edited by Nancy!) about a classical understanding of virtue to a contemporary conception of professionalism as interpretation.

Most everyone would agree, I think, that there are things about the practice of law that make it meaningfully different from other occupations and that there are things about law firms that—at least traditionally—make them meaningfully different from other organizational forms. These differences manifest in two ways that are important to our discussion. First, practicing law both ethically and with skill requires lawyers to develop and maintain law-specific habits of mind. Second, law firms mature into unique cultures that—depending on the shape and substance of that culture—either impede or promote the virtues congenial to those salutary law-specific habits of mind.