When you think of the law, you don’t often think of humanities. You might think of difficult court battles, historical proceedings and a labyrinthine system that’s designed to confound anyone who enters into it. But you don’t think of emotion . Knowledge is important, of course. The most important thing any lawyer can have is a wide-ranging and wide-fielding knowledge of the law on every level. Local, state and federal laws are all different and can be enacted in different areas and at different times. But it’s the inner constitution of the lawyer that really matters. Morals are different across the board and it’s impossible to debate most of those. That’s a larger legal issue too complicated to get into here. Divorce attorneys, the reckless driving attorney, dui lawyers, all of these different professions require a few certain inner qualities that you should look for in your representation. What follows is a list of just a few of these qualities, how you can tell and how important they are to legal proceedings.

Keeping Calm and Keeping Zen Under High Pressure
Of course, it’s impossible to keep calm in all situations. While the cool or laid-back character in a movie can do that, it can’t happen for most of us. Court cases, or just legal cases in general, are high-emotion situations that tend to bring out the absolute worst in everyone involved. That is why you want a lawyer who can take all of that pressure and let it slide right off of them. Ideally, you want a lawyer who can take all of that pressure and do something productive with it. Instead of letting it get to them, they understand it, process it, and turn into something they can use. This is one of the true meanings of calm and not every attorney can pull this off. Even with the right amount of knowledge, it can be difficult. The divorce attorney, or divorce attorneys, especially need this and, in you are in a divorce case, you’ll need it as well. Family chaos can drag you and your representation down otherwise.
Compassion
The divorce attorney, or the team of divorce attorneys, also needs a huge amount of this although the same can generally be said of all people working within the legal profession. This isn’t to say they need to automatically treat everyone as right or innocent. Far from it. If someone did something wrong then they broke the social contract and should be punished for it. Compassion in this sense is more an understanding of what would drive someone to do something terrible and actively working to protect other people from befalling the same harm. It’s a willingness to care about everybody involved, whether they are a danger to themselves or not. A drug lawyer, for example, should understand the wider scope of, say, the opioid epidemic so they know how and why their client, or their opponent, got addicted. It’s not a sign of weakness. It’s a sign of empathy and strength that they are willing to go to great lengths to understand everyone.
Courage
In some ways, this can seem like the flipside of compassion but it isn’t. Divorce attorneys, drug lawyers, they all need to able to stand up for what’s right even when it’s incredibly difficult. Whether their opponents are acting unconscionably or the courts themselves are being staid, corrupt or difficult, a lawyer should be able to look up to them and say that they won’t stand for rights being infringed upon. They won’t let a court or another person make a decision based off of someones ethnicity, sexual orientation or religion. This happens all too often and courage means knowing that it might put their career on the line but they’ll do it anyway. It can be hard to spot this quality in anybody, regular person or legal representation notwithstanding, but it always pays to try. Watch to see if your lawyer speaks up when she or he talks. What she sounds like when under pressure. It’s only in there that you’ll see the inner truth.