When my brother lawyer Bashiru Zakaria advised me to study law-nearly rejected the idea at the Accra Business School Boardroom.
Now, let me share with you my experiences so far in my LLB Law pathway and in relations to my practice in holistic medicine.Before law school, I might have thought of certain issues as they came up, or maybe not at all. This time I started thinking through the rules right away. Law school gets you to start thinking about the logical extensions, limitations, and ambiguities of rules as soon as you hear about those rules.
You start thinking of various problems that come up in your life or practice and your friend’s lives from a legal standpoint. Even my field of medical practice in holistic medicine has changed drastically. Law school changed me in a number of very remarkable ways. In this regard, I have found great similarities between and PhD education and a legal one. Both disciplines train students how to approach and solve problems. You are taught to analyze problems objectively and look at things from every side of the issue. This approach to analyzing legal problems has–quite literally–helped me analyze the non-legal problems in every aspect of my life.
Legal studies and legal work require enormous amounts of effort and organization. Inside and outside the law, diligence and organization are two of the most important virtues of success.
Also realize that, law school training provides a solid frame work for interpreting the meaning of texts. Law students are required to read a lot and we pore over every single word and item of punctuation in those texts. That makes lawyers really annoying to communicate with sometimes, but it also is a powerful tool that enables law students and lawyers to understand things at a very deep level.
Law school developed leadership skills, particularly confidence, boldness, and decisiveness. law school training help you learn to stay calm and focused under tremendous stress. That enables you to think clearly in tough situations, manage your own reaction to stimuli, and reign in fear. Legal training helps gives you confidence because you appreciate that you will have an opportunity to address and correct almost any kind of mistake or problem that may arise in life. Those things are all great, but they are just skills. Besides skills, legal training helped me to be…
i. more understanding and compassionate (because you are trained to look at issues from multiple perspectives);
ii. less dogmatic because most issues are not black and white, but shades of gray;
iii. more sensitive in resolving disputes, because (since things are not so black-and-white) it’s better to find practical, voluntary-chosen (rather than court imposed) solutions to problems that are fair and, as best as possible, meet the needs of all the parties to the dispute, than insisting everything be “your way or the highway”; and
iv.
More aware of the fact that sometimes practicality is not a viable solution and you must take a stand and not shy away from a fight. There are plenty of things worth fighting for, and our justice system–flawed as it may be–still gives everyone the power to take that stand in a forum that is purposefully-designed to give them a fair hearing.
All of this is just meant to illustrate that I’m finding law school has changed the way I think about games, goals, and solving problems. I often look at risks now in terms of cedis at risk, cedis that might be won, and the probability of loss or gain. I think about rules in terms of how they might be used to someone’s advantage, or how they might be limited and defeated. Only some months ago I didn’t really have these ideas or tools to work with – at least, not to the degree I do now.
The more I learn in law school, the more aware I am that there is so much substantive law a lawyer must know about in order to best represent his or her client and especially in my medical practice in holistic health. These moments where I notice myself thinking differently from before, though, excite me, as I know I am learning not only substantive areas of the law but also how to think like a prospective lawyer.
