Reflecting on Sarasvathy’s article, the ten reasons entrepreneurs hate lawyers began to make more sense.  Although it is often said that lawyers and entrepreneurs’ ways of thinking are antithetical, I think that antithesis is more a result of how lawyers are often taught to think rather than how a good lawyer must necessarily think.

Effectual reasoning, as Sarasvathy calls it here, can help to practice law by providing clients with more imaginative advice. Of course, a lawyer cannot engage in effectual reasoning to the same extent as an entrepreneur; you do have to take into account where the law is currently at. Unfortunately, the approach of many lawyers is to blindfold the client and only advise about immediate issues, engaging in a very causal type of reasoning. It is this failure that leads to over-lawyering small or non-issues, spouting useless legalese from past cases, and being deal-killers.

Being a deal killer is perhaps the clearest example of causal reasoning vs. effectual reasoning: causal reasoning predicts legal issues and tries to control the world based on those predictions, so a lawyer engaging only in causal reasoning will only see problems in a deal. By using effectual reasoning, a lawyer works toward a solution–a real solution that satisfies the client, not just the “solution” of killing the deal. Effectual reasoning asks: “Under the current state of the law in this area, and our situation being what it is, what can we do? If necessary, how can we make the law receptive to what the client is trying to do?”–within ethical bounds of course.)

By habitually engaging in this more creative type of effectual reasoning, we not only become less hated by entrepreneurial clients, but we can also become better lawyers as well.