The Lawyer’s To-Do List

The best route to improvement of the next draft is economy. You use far too many words in this draft to say what can be said briefly. Everything before the jump can be reduced to: "Other's opinions about whether I am successful don't make me a good lawyer." Everything after the jump can be reduced to "Good lawyering is lawyering that is in furtherance of my personal goals." Developing the first point is not very difficult, and can be done in two paragraphs at most. The second part of the argument is more problematic. Good lawyering cannot be said to consist solely in its motivation, or in its consistency with personal ideology. That's evident once one clears away the extra words. Technical skill, social effectiveness, ethical integrity—a number of additional elements are immediately apparent, even before analysis begins. Once hard editing has created space, this is what it should probably be used for.