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72 Temp. L. Rev. 785 (1999)
The Lawyer as Problem Solver and Third-Party Neutral: Creativity and Nonpartisanship in Lawyering

handle is hein.journals/temple72 and id is 795 raw text is: THE LAWYER AS PROBLEM SOLVER AND THIRD- PARTY NEUTRAL: CREATIVITY AND NON- PARTISANSHIP IN LAWYERING Carrie Menkel-Meadow** I. INTRODUCTION What is a lawyer for? What does it mean to be a lawyer? To what use should the lawyer put her technical skill, knowledge, learned craft, and professional gifts?' Should all individual lawyers answer these questions the same way or should we allow a variety of different answers and recognize a diversity of functions within a single profession? If lawyers perform different functions and serve different uses, by what rules, responsibilities, or moralities should they be judged? And, finally, how should we evaluate the efficacy, as well as the morality, of what lawyers in the aggregate, as a profession, do? I will suggest here, as I have in a variety of other venues, that our traditional conception of the role of lawyer as an advocate of his client and as someone else's adversary is a crabbed and incomplete conception of the lawyer's role; we need to expand and broaden the conception of what lawyers should do, as well as recognize more formally what they currently are doing. I will briefly describe some other formulations of what lawyers do and what more they might aspire to do and be. Sadly, lawyers may be limited in some of these other roles by the incomplete conception of appropriate lawyer work that is created by traditional lawyer culture and practice, especially as it is portrayed in the rules and regulations which govern the profession today. In other contexts, I have suggested that modern portrayals of lawyers in narrative forms in literature, popular fiction, movies, and television often help to perpetuate these cultural stereotypes of lawyers, but also show some promise of recognizing the greater * Copyright © 1999 Carrie Menkel-Meadow. ** Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, Phyllis W. Beck Chair in Law Professor, Temple University Beasley School of Law (1999); Chair, Georgetown-CPR Institute for Dispute Resolution Commission on Ethics and Standards in ADR. I present this Article with appreciation to Judge Phyllis W. Beck, the Independence Foundation, Dean Robert Reinstein, and the Temple Law School faculty, staff, and students, all of whom made possible a wonderfully enriching (hopefully mutual) year of engagement on so many issues as I joined the community they have all created. This Article and its message are dedicated, with love, to Eleanor and John Myers, who as lawyers, teachers, mentors, parents, and friends exemplify problem solving (both legal and human) at its best and make me proud to have been welcomed as a part of their family. Thanks to Rebecca and Jesse for sharing their parents with me. 1. Tim Green, a sports analyst, recently expounded on the differences between an athlete's inherited gifts and learned and practiced craft and skill. Tim Green, National Public Radio, Morning Edition (Nov. 2,1999) (transcript on file with Temple Law Review).

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