OPENING THE MIND'S EYE
Steven Keeva
ABA Journal, June 1996
With clients demanding more and competitors cutting in on lawyers' turf, any practice can thrive by dumping rote thinking and getting creative.
Ask Sam Guiberson about creativity. He'll tell you that all the rules are about to be rewritten. That technology is in the process of transforming the role of lawyers in society. That only the open, the adaptable, the creative will thrive. And that the old way of doing things is no longer an option.
Guiberson, whose eight-lawyer Houston firm has achieved virtuosity in applying technology to complex, white-collar criminal and other document-intensive cases, lectures widely on the importance of unconventional thinking.
"Most of the professional dilemmas we face could be resolved by recognizing that we need to be not more conventional but less conventional," Guiberson says. " We've painted ourselves into an intellectual and creative corner, and we need to become more unconventional, more interdisciplinary and take more risks, not entrepreneurially but intellectually and philosophically."
This is crucial, Guiberson says, because in the future lawyers will become less scriveners than philosophers. "We will have to guide our clients, individual and corporate,in business judgments that will have to anticipate future changes rather than research past precedent. If you can understand the form of the future in the face of chaos, then you will succeed. If you cannot, you will not be able to lead because the only thing lawyers can ultimately offer the culture is a philosophy of change."
This is why, Guiberson says, intuition will become increasingly important for lawyers. "We'll have to exercise the senses that help us understand the future."
