Page 64 - ACTL Journal Win24

those in this room have done so well in that game from being recognized as excellent lawyers and not just in terms of what they do in terms of the winners that have won awards for plaintiff’s work, as well as civil defense, recog- nition from law enforcement work, but being selected to lead the bars of Georgia, South Dakota, South Carolina, the incoming bar president in our class for New Jersey.
And in those fixed games and things they do, there’s also this other concept of infinite games that Carse and Sinek talk about. When you’re not playing to win – you are play- ing to win the finite game – but there’s this larger infinite game, which is to keep the game going, to keep the process going, to keep the access for other players. It’s beyond just the clients but for everyone else to have access, which for me then defines what this fellowship does: Taking teams of rivals, turning one finite game that we all play quite well, but with a different set of goals in mind, which is to make sure that this outlasts us.
And in doing so, the members of this class have received countless professionalism awards, mentorship of the year awards, lifetime achievement awards, ally awards, distinc- tive service in law enforcement, the local hero award by a state bar association, even being the boss of the year, in addition to pro bono awards. And that includes organiza- tions for self-governance between every single disciplinary committee, to CJA panels, to pattern jury instructions, to medical malpractice sections, to the admiralty section of the ABA and consumer protection. None of those neces- sarily benefit a single case or client in a finite game; they are infinite games.
Third, Arthur Brooks talks about the things that made you successful in life; he would call everybody in this room a striver. But in your twenties and thirties your fluid intel- ligence hits this first curve, which is why with raw intelli- gence, kids can create incredible programs and form fan- tastic companies. But professional and cognitive decline is happening sooner than you realize – it’s already here, right?
But there’s hope. During your forties, fifties and sixties you change from fluid intelligence to crystalized intelligence. It’s no longer about raw processing speed; it’s about wis- dom and connections and finding ways to be able to have the enlightenment of your years and taking that library of relationships and what you know to then give back, which seems to be exactly what this organization does.
There are those of us in this fellowship that have done so even prior to reaching those ages. We have Fellows that served in the Army and the Marine Corps. We have vol-
unteer firefighters. Fellows have constructed schools in Uganda, served on School Boards, raised $109 million to build public schools. We have served on the Twin Lakes Public Library, with the Presidents’ Council of Girl Scouts. We have a Board member of Girls Crush It, a nonprofit to raise girls’ self-esteem, and we help when times are bad by serving with Susan G. Komen’s affiliates in suicide preven- tion programs and Holocaust museums in Dallas and the Alzheimer’s Society of Prince Edwards Island.
And in the midst of doing these two things – a finite process and an infinite process – all the while one dad is so frequently at the side of the pool counting laps of his daughters long-distance swimming that he is known as the business suit dad. And a mother whose son is sta- tioned in Japan, hears a superstitious tale that if you don’t climb Mt. Fuji then you need to stay in Japan a little bit longer so she gets her hiking boots cause that boy needed to come home.
I close with this. I’m so grateful for all of the speakers we’ve had and I want to chew, maybe, on a slide that said technology makes us more human. And the predictive al- gorithm is to take all the books and read them and figure out what the next word is and predict the next word and that creates this raw intelligence; maybe it’s crystalized, maybe it’s fluid, I don’t know.
I’m just not convinced that ChatGPT knew that when a newlywed lost her legs the two sentences she was thinking about were what she was going to tell her husband in a selfless act of love to let her go. Nor do I think any algo- rithm predicts what her husband says when he said, “I didn’t marry your legs.”
What we do is complex; filled with paradoxes and peo- ple and contradictions. It is messy; sometimes we don’t always get it right. But the process of doing so creates incredibly rewarding work. We ingest other people’s trau- ma and pain for a living whereas other professions like oncology and radiology have a problem and a solution. It lacks moral judgment and condemnation that so many of us have to deal with, as well as untangling those problems.
Mankind through the years has attempted to resolve these conflicts in various ways. We tried trial by combat, trial by ordeal, and I fear that when we are told that the past is messy or complicated or that we are getting it wrong, technology makes us more human and at some point someone disagrees and takes the idea that what we do for a living can be replicated by a computer. After all, I think trial by algorithm is on the horizon.
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