Today it is time to talk about specialist lawyers, and to do so, nothing better than to start with a quote from the mathematician Whitehead:
“People destined for a single task
if in ancient societies they were a godsend,
in the future they will be a public danger.”
We live in a world dominated by specialists, which is paradoxical in a society that sees itself as transversal. The specialist is given a more than deserved prestige; he becomes a recognized and necessary human typology and yet we live in a society in perpetual transformation (rather than change) and increasingly willing to broaden its horizon. Recent events seem to have proved right those who advocate a totally connected world where everything flows horizontally.
In medicine, where the specialist has long been a presupposition, specialization is increasingly in demand. The complexity of medicine makes it possible to isolate pathologies, requires precise knowledge and increasingly deep and watertight vertical cuts. Depth is a highly valued and admired asset. In a society in which everything seems to float, the force of gravity continues to have a great attraction. The specialist digs, digs and, fortunately, almost always finds.
The generalist, on the other hand, is basically seen as a man of the surface. He almost never goes into the depths to which the specialist so willingly submits himself. He is a kind of surrogate physician, and the very term “generalist” is certainly not well publicized. In a society where everything is classified and ordered, generalists have been relegated to a minority group that we are not quite sure how to classify, and yet they still generate mistrust.
The same is true in modern law. The prestige of new technologies has boosted the figures of technological lawyers and lawyers specialized in each of their variants. In general, lawyers have almost always presented themselves with a label: “environmentalist”, “competition”, “telecommunications”, “criminal” and among them “economic crime” (as if they were not equally criminal, after all, said , Bespaloff that the peoples who fight for markets, raw materials, fertile lands and their treasures, battle first and foremost always for Helena”) “compliance”, “labor”, “procedural” and within this category there are even “arbitration” ones, but in modern times this seems to have become more accentuated and lawyers are “technological”, “e-lawyers” or “digital” and no doubt, these categories are necessary because the lawyer has to keep pace with his clients. The legal science, the wide range of its field of intervention, has branched out in such a way that specialization is highly and totally demanded. The speed with which the profession has responded to these needs demonstrates its enormous capacity for adaptation.
Here too, generalists remain as a minority race and, perhaps, somewhat clueless, out of their time and located on the surface, with little ability to dig beyond the crust of things. In the world of lawyers it seems as if the last name defines them, not necessarily their first name, when in any humanistic discipline, and law is one of them, the first name, with or without a last name, is what truly defines the professional, because that is what it is all about, professionalism.
We live in times in which we speak, together with the traditional and boutique law firm, of ALSPs (alternative legal service provider), which are nothing more than an attempt to offer a horizontal vision of law as one of the many elements to be taken into account in the achievement of any professional objective. Similarly, technological services are nothing more than the use of new digital tools and strategies, with all that this brings with it in terms of transformation and new services, which in the case of legal services is materialized in the knowledge of the digital environment and its transversal analysis with a broad legal perspective.
However, in the face of specialization, generalization should also be demanded. Every crew needs to have its captain, its sailors, its engineers, its soldiers, its welders, its carpenters, its deck officers, its doctors, its pilots and its radio-electronic officers, each one with his assigned task and his specialization, but there should never be missing, equally, the one who looks at the horizon (I am not referring to a point on the horizon, but the one who contemplates the horizon to see all its points), no matter what he is called in nautical terminology. The Titanic may have lacked that person and we all know how it ended. Perhaps he could not have saved the liner from disaster, since one can never be sure that one is not contemplating a “false horizon” as some say happened, but who knows if with a timely move, with a broad vision, the tearing of one of the three bulkheads, which seems to have precipitated its sinking, could not have been avoided.
Transversal legal services make it possible to go through the whole framework and, often, to see if it can be expanded. Paul Valéry said that “a state that does not have a few improvisers in reserve is a state without nerves” and so every project needs a transversal vision to avoid that the performance, as the actor and director Yoshi Oida said “is correct and beautiful but they don’t know how to fill the box with life”. To bring life to projects is what generalists or “transversalists” are for, who in short, are those capable of assembling all the raw material that only specialist lawyers are capable of extracting. Generalists are those who ask the questions, who question the answers, who relate them and make new ones, who, in short, are capable of making them “tangible” because, as George Braque would say, “it is not enough to show what is painted, you have to make it tangible”.
In law, as in almost all human disciplines, nothing can be done without specialist lawyers, no result can be obtained without their help, their knowledge and their depth but, like the Titanic, the important thing is to remain on the surface and for that there is the transversal, horizontal view of the generalists. The new legal services require the participation of both. Let us not forget that in front of or better, together with, the “esprit de géometrie” is required, not always so easy, the “esprit de finesse”.
