Law Lit
Inventing wise solutions
Do professionals define their roles too narrowly? Law doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Decisions integrate facts, assumptions, constraints, and human consequences.
In review
The personal consequences of abstract decisions
In Preventing nuclear war, Roger Fisher proposes a stark thought experiment. Instead of a briefcase containing nuclear launch codes, imagine what might happen if the codes were inserted into a capsule that was implanted behind a human aide’s heart. The President would receive a knife. To obtain the codes required to launch a weapon, the President must personally kill the aide.
What would you do if you were POTUS?
Fisher’s point: decision-makers might come to different decisions if they are engaged not only intellectually or procedurally, but also emotionally. The first innocent person to lose a life is the one slaughtered by your own hand. Faced with that up-close-and-personal reality, the decision takes a different form. Wisdom asks us to work with affection, to stay human when choices are abstract.
The role of the lawyer
Nero fiddled as Rome burned. What was the musician’s responsibility while the city was ablaze? Was it to critique the musical technique, or to fetch a bucket of water?
“That’s not my job” is rarely a wise answer. It might be safe. There might be a CYA element to staying out of problems that appear to be instigated by actions taken outside your lane. Responsibility can map to where the opportunity to contribute might arise: raise the issue, test the claim, correct the assumption, surface the constraint, invite the specialist to provide input.
Opportunity takes many different forms. When lawyers engage in the solution-design process they help to make a wise decision. That role is broader and more affectionate than the task of documenting terms. Recognising, and developing the EQ to act on it with role appropriate curiosity is the human element of practising in the profession.
Discussion prompts
Where in your practice are decisions abstracted from human consequences?
Which “that’s not my job” boundaries should be redrawn as “that’s my opportunity”?
What’s one activity you’ll add this week to strengthen facts, values, or options?
A chart of useful activities
Fisher offers a chart of useful activities as a tool to recognise the components of a wise decision.
The article outlines three areas of assumption that make decisions fallible. Poor decisions can be attributed to any of them being misconceived. It buils a framework for components of the activities involved in reaching a decision that clears the blindspots or weaknesses in each of these three areas.
When making legal decisions, the contribution of the lawyer can be to set a framework that solicits input from those who have subject matter expertise, or perhaps familiarity with the constraints of a particular feature in a proposal. The legal layer is one component of many that will go into refining a decision. Templated starting points are just that.
The decision matrix
The Toolkit contains an agentic decision matrix. Input the context of the decision you face and work interactively with the tool to address the assumptions and work through the activities that lead to your decision or use it to deconstruct the decision that has been imposed on you, to try and understand what lead to it being made.
Further reading
Thanks to Elspeth Kirkman's tiktok for sharing this paper. Her book, Decisionscape explores decision making in a refreshingly original way.
Last updated
October 2025