Saturday, February 23, 2008 10:33 AM
Blawg Book Highlighter #23: Lawyers' Poker: 52 Lessons that Lawyers Can Learn from Card Players You got to know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em, Know when to walk away and know when to run. You never count your money when you're sittin' at the table. There'll be time enough for countin' when the dealin's done.
- lyrics from "The Gambler"
Don Schlitz wrote those lyrics. But it was of course country crooner Kenny Rogers that made them famous.
As Wikipedia notes, the song is often characterized as a metaphor for life in that you need to know when to stand your ground (when to hold 'em) and when to retreat (when to fold 'em).
Northwestern University law professor Steven Lubet isn't bluffing when he says that lawyers can learn from card players. He's got 52 lessons, one for each card in the deck, that lawyers can glean from the poker table. These lessons he gives in his book, "Lawyers' Poker: 52 Lessons that Lawyers Can Learn from Card Players" (Oxford University Press, May 2006).
In the book, Lubet, a nationally recognized expert on trials and trial strategy, makes the case that lawyers can benefit from the same strategies that make for good poker players. Like Kenny Rogers' Gambler, lawyers need to know when to hold them and know when to fold them.
Interspersed throughout the book, Lubet offers real-life experiences of gamblers playing the odds at poker and lawyers in historically significant cases gambling on particular legal strategies in their cases.
"Poker players know that you can maximize your winnings by careful 'hand selection,' he writes, "meaning that you must avoid playing potential losers while backing your likely winners (often called 'premium hands') to the hilt. Lawyers could often benefit from the same approach, abandoning weak or questionable positions in order to concentrate on stronger claims."
Lubet goes on to illustrate how famed trial lawyer Clarence Darrow successfully employed this strategy in his defense of Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, who were being tried for murder. The evidence against the two was too strong to defend so Darrow surprised prosecutors by convincing them to plead guilty to murder and instead concentrated on defending them against the death penalty. He succeeded and the lives of Leopold and Loeb were spared.
On the book's website, Lubet offers some interesting current events examples of how law and poker strategies can play together. Check out Ripped from the Headlines: Top Ten Law and Poker Lessons (in progress).
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Randy Richardson is an author, humorist, former journalist, and a lawyer. His fiction debut, Lost in the Ivy, a murder mystery set against the backdrop of Chicago's storied Wrigley Field, won the Writers Marketing Association's “Fresh Voices” Book Award and the Illinois Woman's Press Association's Mate E. Palmer Communications Contest. He writes the Dad Libs column for SanityCentral.com and is a frequent contributor to Chicago Parent magazine. In his day job, he is an attorney for the Social Security Administration’s disability appeals branch. At night and during lunch breaks, he serves as president of the Chicago Writers Association (chicagowrites.org) and works on his second novel while a 4-year-old tugs on his legs. Visit his website at www.lostintheivy.com.
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