I guess it’s blind faith, but my presumption is that sharing knowledge and moving the ball forward is a good thing. If that knowledge gets into the hands of some ill-intentioned litigator we can only hope it’s also picked up by 10 or so decent folk. I’d imagine the same can be said for any knowledge.

At any rate, in my experience the truly nefarious types don’t bother to expand their mind so they would never find the book in the first place. That’s why they’re nefarious. Because they’re fools.

So, do you think reading / listening to a few “war stories” is really going to make a different, or is it a more in depth process (“mentoring”)?

Institutional/collective/public knowledge is great, but if it is sufficiently potent, then it can be abused to our detriment. I’d recommend that this man’s knowledge only be passed on to those that he mentors, trusts, etc. If there is no one that fits the bill, his knowledge dies with him. Granted it is a loss, but that’s better than it being marginalized, abused, or misapplied.

Discipleship (for lack of a better phrase) is a great way to pass along information, and it is a dying art itself.

http://ip.law360.com/articles/183644

I understand the takeaways to this post are not about lawyers or lawyering, but the views expressed by your friend are controversial ones among lawyers at least, so I’m not surprised to see others commenting on that aspect of the post. The reason they don’t teach war at Harvard Law School is because war was quite literally replaced by litigation. It was quite a development in the history of civilization when trial by jury replaced trial by ordeal and trial by combat. While the adversarial nature of litigation will never end, and while Sun Tzu is always an inspiration, there are some of us lawyers who aspire to conduct litigation in a way that would transcend the analogy to war.

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But those aren’t Steve’s stories to tell.

I guess I have a new goal to go fail at now

Now, can you step back, look at the forest, and see what the point of this story was? (Hint: it has ZERO to do with legal process.)

Yet there’s always a percentage of readers who I seem to miss. They focus on the minutia and miss the story. A few of them have commented above and below.

For those who missed it – The blog post was not about lawyers. Nor was about this lawyers detailed techniques and strategy in summary judgements. I surely don’t know enough about litigation to have summarized it correctly.

If those who made those comments really are lawyers you seem to reinforce Scott Walker points #5 and 7 in his blog: http://venturehacks.com/articles/hate-lawyers

steve

I’d love to get your course materials on there as well!

Making our successors smarter could be a worthwhile endeavor, but not necessarily so. For example, having medically-smarter doctors would be good, but legally-smarter patent trolls not quite. Intelligence is just part of the picture. Aren’t superbly-smart, yet supremely-self-centered financial analysts largely responsible for the world’s current economic crises? Building character among our successors is more incumbent on us than making them smarter. An ideal future would be inhabited by smart, yet virtuous people who know not just how to advance their individual interests, but to collectively cultivate a beautiful society.