Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 19.pdf/186

 THE IMPORTANCE OF MENTAL ATTITUDE

LITTLE

JOURNEYS

TO

THE

LEGAL

PROFESSION

THE IMPORTANCE OF MENTAL ATTITUDE By Stanley E. Bowdle MENTAL ATTITUDE is a great matter. Mary Baker Eddy says that it is everything. Elbert Hubbard — that book binder to the leisure class who freshens up old ideas with slang, and "does" them into an occasional beautiful volume "at the Roycroft Shop which is in East Aurora" — says that mental attitude is nearly every thing. Doctor Dowie and Madam Tingley, indeed all the impresarios of the great cults, say that mental attitude is genius, power, success, and as essential to a Saint Saens concerto as to a well-digested meal. Now surely all these high appraisals will sustain for mental attitude the general average statement that it is a number one concern and well worth considering for an evening or two. Heretofore we have shown that dining, reputable and conspicuous dining, occupies a leading place as an impression maker for the young lawyer. And we have touched up Clothes and the Green Bag as next in prominence, though no law professor has taken time to say one word about these things. Mental attitude now completes a triumvirate of aids to legal life untouched by legal pens, and into this virgin land I now propose to timidly blaze a way for some legal genius with a gang plow. I am not now speaking of mental attitude as affecting health or nervous power. Its effect upon fees and relations with clients is my subject — so let's at it. The lawyer's static mental condition is of. no importance — what he thinks in the undisclosed recesses of his soul matters not, (though it might be shocking to his client). It is his dynamic mental state that counts — the state manifested in his conversation with his client. My theme, then, might more properly be called Legal Conversation, and its fee-getting and client-keeping power.

My observation is, that to the lawyer there is nothing so valuable, so potent in his dealing with clients, as a conversational attitude of contempt for judges and courts. At once the untutored legal yearling inter rupts with a ponderous "why?" Well, such an attitude taken with a client whose case is pending, convinces him in advance of your prowess, and dauntlessness, your ability to bear his cause through fiery perils, even "As .(Eneas through the flames of Troy the old Anchises bore." And you shortly find that your client believes in you, that your make-believe opinion of yourself has become his opinion. You have moved him from the miasmatic fogs of doubt, and he now lives in an atmosphere of victory. He sniffs the battle from afar, sees himself upon the heights, under the protecting aegis of your intrepid genius, and anon, in the calm, he counts the swag of victory, apprehensive of nothing but your bill. Yea, the results are even more: He there after entereth your office deferentially; he speaketh quietly, and with no assurance; he ventureth no opinions on his own account, and troubleth you no more with the hap hazard opinions of friendly lawyers who hand him their un-feed views at club and church; he tarrieth not long in your office, seeing that you are a man of visible impor tance; and he boweth himself out as he would from the chambers of a Supreme Court Justice. You are to him a Jeremiah Mason, a Rufus Choate, an undiscovered Webster — for the case has not been tried. His deferential visits are oases in your businessless Saharah, and you are radiant in the contemplation of yourself, fearing only the disillusioning day of trial. This attitude always decorously observed by the best lawyers (for the habit formed in youth clings to them through life, and