Ben Kassis
Partner
Frost LLP
Appellate, Complex Business, Intellectual Property, Labor & Employment
Email: ben@frostllp.com
In recent years, I've taken an interest in ancient spiritual traditions and philosophies such as meditation and Stoicism to help guide my relationship with my career as a business litigator. I am surely not alone. As attorneys in high-pressure situations and under daily deadlines, we have all felt the stress and anxiety that can come with a career in law.
This makes the effort to understand the nature of our minds, and learning practices to achieve equanimity, all the more salient. If our lives consist of what we pay attention to in each moment, it follows that our experiences practicing law can be marked by how mindfully (or unmindfully) we choose to engage each day with our work. It's a project that, if sincerely attempted, begins again each day.
Accordingly, I've recently reflected on my day-to-day approach to law practice, and how I've continued to hone my relationship to my work, through meditative and Stoic techniques.
Meditation and the philosophy of Stoicism are of course distinct but have fundamental similarities. In meditation, the practice focuses on noticing the contents and quality of your mind in a clear, objective and detached manner. The idea is to neutralize reactive states of mind like frustration or stress and instead settle more quickly back into a much less contracted, much more open state; think the mind-state that comes online after a good workout or on noticing how the wind whirls around the leaves of a palm tree.
On the other hand, Stoicism offers a set of practical tools designed to facilitate the goals of meditation--that is to transition from the default reactive, contracted states of mind we all periodically experience to calmer, more creative ones. In this way, the tools are useful in navigating everything from relationships with clients to less-than-ideal rulings and interactions with opposing counsel. Personally, I have found meditation and Stoicism highly complementary, in that the former helps to identify opportunities to employ the latter.
Here are a few fun examples.
Negative visualization
Here the idea is to contrast a real-life situation with an objectively worse imagined one. For instance, you've received a bad ruling on a discovery motion; the court found against you and awarded the other side $5,000 in sanctions. Worse, you've now got 100 supplemental responses due in five days. This is sure to ruin your morning as you ponder the late nights ahead and the dozen other unrelated urgent needs of the day--eroding your focus for potentially hours. Here, a Stoic practice would be to vividly (this is key) imagine the court issued a drastic evidentiary sanction torpedoing your most promising defense and setting the other side up for an easy kill on summary judgment. When you return to reality a minute or two later, you might find your prior devastation is replaced with relief. You grin, tell yourself it's "okay," put your head down and get back to work.
Humor and levity
The Stoics teach to confront a difficult or intimidating adversary with lightness. The Stoic Cato the Younger was once presenting in court when his rival Lentulus approached and spit in his face. Rather than erupt in anger, Cato responded calmly, "I will swear to anyone, Lentulus, that people are wrong to say that you cannot use your mouth!" If a retort as witty as Cato's isn't forthcoming (it never has been for me), then silence may be the next best response--as either approach will leave your adversary disoriented and confused, or even ruminating. You, meanwhile, have already moved on and are back to work, focused on developing that creative strategy sure to deliver a jab that will benefit your client, rather than offend your adversary. A related technique advised by the Stoics is to picture your opponent engaged in an unexceptional out-of-context task, like brushing their teeth or cooking bacon--doing so replaces a reflexive emotional reaction with a sense of apathetic amusement; their tactics are not worth your energy.
Anger and delay
There is no question that in the midst of a hard-fought, high-stakes litigation the temperatures can rise. Put bluntly, our adversaries are sometimes capable of soliciting anger and mental strife. We've all received that blistering email--surely many of them--that triggered a hostile, knee-jerk response. But I can't think of a less productive mindset in our work than anger, as so many conflicts we face as lawyers require creativity and thoughtfulness, not frustration or pettiness. And thus, here, we are advised to wait. As Seneca taught, the greatest remedy for anger is delay. The stoic approach to that scathing email from opposing counsel would be to shelve it for at least an hour. Return to it later and find yourself armed with the clarity of mind to execute the optimal written record for the dispute at hand.
To be sure, I'm light years from being an expert meditator and certainly do not always deploy the tools Stoicism advances. It's not easy. The goal is practice and progress. The Stoics suggested anyone interested in Stoic practices should meditate each night on their performance that day by recalling the obstacles that arose and how they were managed. So, if during today's heated meet-and-confer you failed to come up with the perfect Cato-esque retort to a rude remark by opposing counsel, there's always tomorrow.