Some Law Clerks That I Have Known our clerk's abilities.
521
As an assistant
At any rate the clients seem to like
to look up law or help in court, he was not the greatest success. His mark at Law School was not high and his efiorts
Mr. Stillman and Courts and juries are
of decisions he was almost no help. During the two or three years that he
deciding his litigations in his favor. He is doing good work and his practice is growing not too rapidly, but surely and constantly. In a few years he will probably pass by us, his former bosses, both as to income and quantity of work and clients. We can never be partners
was in our ofiice he never made any
because he doesn't do business our way,
serious mistakes nor was he ever of much real assistance. We were all very fond of him personally and were constantly surprised that so conscien tious a worker should be of so little real value. But the qualities which we needed in our clerk are not perhaps the only ones out of which a successful lawyer
but we agree with his clients that some how or other he is a good lawyer and if we had work or clients to turn away we would turn them towards Mr. Stillman's shop. The particular thing which Stillman has brought to my mind and has in delibly fixed there, is that a man may have the making of a good lawyer without being a brilliant student or a useful law clerk in our office and without having the faculty of looking at legal problems in just the way that we do. I am not going to tell you about all
with the authorities were very laborious and not brilliant. On close technicalities of the law, or in close discriminations
can be made.
Clients began to retain
Stillman long before he left us and he
got so much business of his own that it seriously interfered with his attention
to our work- in fact that was why he left us. His growing clientele was a real and continuing surprise to me until I began to know the service that he rendered. Whether his business was a trial in court, or was the negotiation of a difiicult deal involving many differ ing interests, he was almost universally and brilliantly successful. He will never win a case on technicalities, nor on very
close points of law but on the other hand, he will always work up his facts and more obvious law points so thor oughly that he will usually win in court or force an advantageous settle
ment without resort to difi‘icult reason ing or abstruse distinctions. It may be that with our mediocre judges a lawyer
of only moderate legal ability is at an advantage, for perhaps he understands the train of thought and the mental attitude of the Court better than the
of the clerks we ever had, because some
of them would not interest you and because some of them I am trying hard to forget. But there is one more young man whom I wish to parade before you, and that is Mr. Golightly.
He was the
quickest, cleverest and in many ways the most useless man we ever had. Whatever he undertook was easy for
him. In college it was easy for him to be a Phi Beta Kappa man and at Law School he had no difliculty in making
the Law Review. At golf he had won many prizes, in tennis he had won many tournaments and at whist, pool and many other amusements he was almost an expert. So, too, he was a musician
brilliant and close reasoner on deep
of far more than average ability, and I believe he could speak fluently in several languages. We didn't know all this when we hired Mr. Golightly, but we did know enough
legal subtleties.
to realize that we were getting an
