Like many of the baby boom generation in America, I was raised to believe that the alliances of evil had been defeated, that  goodness and order had been restored, and that hard work had won the day. In the sunny suburbs of the Midwest, our parents and teachers taught us children that the ethics of courtesy, fairness and compassion would lead to universal peace and prosperity.  Based on this optimism, I created a life of service to people and to just causes.

Well into my legal career, however, my optimism had turned sour. I didn’t become a snarling cynic overnight, but I did notice over time that I was practicing my profession with more and more wariness.  I had personally witnessed acts of deceit, greed and personal abuse.  I also found that telling clients about these bad things actually gave them greater confidence in my advice and motivated them to purchase preventive legal products that I recommended.  I had learned the use of fear as a motivator for sales.

My hope was never merely to sell preventive measures . . . it was to prevent the harms themselves.  And to achieve that goal, fear is not a good motivator.  Self-respect works better.  Today, I try and motivate my clients to have confidence in themselves and their own hopes and dreams. I assure them that they are up to the tasks ahead.

It has been proven true over and over that humans are imitative creatures. In peacetime, human  behavior falls into patterns of predictable, orderly flow as people learn from each other and copy what works.  I believe, along with my hero Eleanor Roosevelt, that such an orderly flow spreads peace as people see each other succeed.  On the other hand, when we are surrounded by war and unrest, it is hard to perceive whose actions are worthy of imitation, hard to know who is the right person to follow.  In times like our own today, the road to success is not paved for easy travel by following the pace car at a safe distance. We cannot know if we are going to be betrayed.  We do get caught up with stories of super-human heroes, myths and legends that make us feel limited and weak as mere humans.  None of these superguys instills our confidence in ourselves.  In our true selves.

 I believe our deepest sources of truth come from the heritage we were born to,  from the people closest to us whose homes, bodies and genes we share.  We are lucky when we have communities where we feel we belong.  We can sense in an inner way the choices our ancestors made.  We can remember the experiences that satisfied their souls at the end of a hard day.   

Now, later into my legal career, I no longer tell tales of what has gone wrong or what can go wrong.  I don’t look left and right to see what other lawyers are doing.  I look back at what was instrumental in building my respect for our legal system and I look forward to making the rule of law accessible again to ordinary people. I have seen my people demonstrate incredible resilience to live through tough times and to sort things out for themselves. 

I am again an optimist. Today, I only take clients who understand that law and order are not entitlements but are important parts of our American heritage entrusted to us to preserve.  Lawyers in general, and myself in particular, have to work very hard to maintain an orderly flow to business transactions, family inheritance, public health and safety. 

I am beginning my “encore career.”  This term often means providing services to the poor, saving the environment or solving global problems. But my encore career mission is more modest.  I just want to keep doing what I have been doing: providing expertise at reasonable cost to the middle class.  An encore is a performance piece that does again what we have done right already.