This blunt apothem by John Henry Schlegel, a fine legal historian, caught my retired lawyer’s eye today:
“ Good lawyers earn the big bucks . . . by putting their butt on the line, by exercising the best possible judgment in circumstances where answers are unlikely and advice only possible in terms of better or worse alternatives.”
-John Henry Schlegel, To Dress for Dinner: Teaching Law in a Bureaucratic Age, 66 Buf. L. Rev. 435, 453 (2018).
I don’t know about “big bucks,” but my experience in restructuring practice over 39 years bears out the rest of the assertion!