The Chicken or the Client?

By Gerald Hecht

There’s an old tale of a poor widow who saves for months to buy a chicken for her family for Sabbath dinner. While preparing to cook the chicken, she accidentally drops it on the floor.

She takes the chicken to the village rabbi and asks him if the chicken is still fit to eat. The rabbi thoroughly inspects the chicken, looking inside it, holding it up to the light, turning it over. After an hour of watching the rabbi do this, the widow exclaims, “Rabbi, I’m the one with the problem, not the chicken.”

I repeat this story frequently to clients, friends and family members, because it succinctly summarizes what we do as lawyers. Unlike the rabbi, whose focus was entirely on the chicken to the exclusion of the troubled widow, us attorneys focus exclusively on the widow.

Doctors, dentists and computer consultants, to stretch the analogy, only deal with the chicken and its problem. The person who houses the bad knee or bad tooth is given short shrift in lieu of the professional’s target goal to remedy the ailment.

Not for us lawyers. The client is the problem, not the lawsuit, or the indictment or the intended transaction. We have to deal with the client before we can deal with the legal problem.

When I was a young lawyer, I was petrified of saying to a client: “Give me $1,000, and I’ll solve your problem for you.” No more. Not for the pecuniary aspects of the profession, but for the pas de deux between lawyer and client; one who is troubled and one who is a healer.

People frequently ask, “What kind of lawyer are you?” (I sardonically answer “A good one”), or “What kind of work do you do?” and my initial response is “Forget television and the movies, and I’ll tell you.” It is a constant battle between what we are perceived as doing and what happened on Court TV last night.

The profession has taught me, or at least after 30 years I like to think I’ve been taught, that reality is far more “real” and interesting than the law on television. As a general practitioner, I help “real people with real problems,” and I have adopted that slogan as my professional credo. And it is a great answer to the inquiry “What kind of law do you practice?”

Grappling with the client, and not the chicken, enables the attorney to deal with the divorcing mother of three, the debt-ridden restaurateur and the juvenile offender. Another lawyer once told me, “We all know what the law is—the hard part is finding out what the client is.”

The public does understand this: but they just prefer to be entertained by that old razzle-dazzle (like the lawyer in the musical Chicago) and ignore the realities of the profession. It is said that people hate lawyers as a group but love their own lawyers.

For me and my practice, the proof of that is in the telephone. It rings. People want advice. People send money for that advice. It’s a nice system.

I have learned that the system is geared for the lawyer to assist the client, salve their wounds, remediate the problem and to obtain a goal. It’s almost spiritual.

But it only works when we don’t confuse the chicken with the client.

Gerald Hecht is the head of a small firm in Danbury, Conn., and a member of the ABA General Practice, Solo & Small Firm Division.


©2007 ABA Journal


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