The Servant Lawyer: Facing the Challenges of Christian Faith in Everyday Law Practice. Foreword by John Inazu. Downers Grove
Part guidance to young lawyers and law students and part Christian apologetic for the legal profession, Robert F. Cochran, Jr.’s new book, The Servant Lawyer, is a much-needed addition to the dialogue between the church, the legal profession, and the communities they both serve. The overall tone of the text is prescriptive. Cochran argues that Christians practicing law are best understood through rhetorical constructs like “servant,” “peacemaker,” or “friend,” rather than with terms like “hired gun.” By sequentially reviewing some of the different roles lawyers play and some of the contexts in which they practice, Cochran argues for a Christian reframing of the community’s understanding of the legal profession and challenges lawyers to adopt that Christian framework for their practice. While The Servant Lawyer could understandably be confused with one of Robert Greenleaf’s famous monographs such as The Servant as Leader or The Institution as Servant,1 it could not be more different. Greenleaf’s texts use Christian theology only as an occasional support for his theory of servant leadership. Cochran’s book is unabashedly Christian in both its argument and its point of view.
Cochran’s dual experience as a professor at Pepperdine University’s Caruso School of Law and as a practicing attorney have both influenced a healthy synergy in this text. The Servant Lawyer is rich in professional stories, both Cochran’s and his former colleagues’, and those stories provide both explication for his principles and a real-world sensitivity for applying his argument. Cochran also marshals points of view and relevant quotes from ministerial sources as diverse as John Calvin and Dallas Willard, and relies heavily on Scripture to advance his ideas.
In the Introduction, Cochran clarifies that he is writing about “everyday” lawyers, not lawyers who are engaged in practices specifically to advance the Kingdom—such as lawyers advocating for religious freedom or international justice (2). The book is intended to speak to lawyers in what many would consider a secular practice—writing wills, closing real estate transactions, representing individual or corporate clients in litigation, and other common areas of the legal profession. This focus should serve to extend the audience for the book beyond that select group of lawyers engaged in a more explicitly “religious” practice.
The first chapter of the book focuses on the lawyer’s relationship with his or her client. Cochran presumably begins here because the client relationship will be key to understanding his vision for a Christian legal practice. Putting that relationship on biblical ground will be a prerequisite to his explication of the many ways lawyers can contribute to their clients, to the larger society, and to the Kingdom of God. Many lawyers may see their clients as someone who pays their fees or directs their labors, or someone whom they must manage to accomplish corporate goals. Cochran describes the client as “this person God has brought into my life” (8) and seeks to create a contrast between that description and those more typical relationships lawyers hold with their clients. As he often does, Cochran uses a personal story, this one of a former criminal defendant, to cement his ideas, describing how he extended himself beyond serving as the man’s lawyer to acting as his friend, visiting with him even after a conviction landed the man in prison.
For the next five chapters, Cochran applies his lawyer-as-servant model to different activities that lawyers typically perform. In Chapter 2: Lawyers as Builders and Trustees, Cochran applies his servant model of legal practice to the work lawyers perform in structuring business transactions, lawsuits, and organizations. He also applies it to the concept of lawyers serving as trustees, not so much in a literal sense as the trustee of a trust, but to describe how lawyers should relate to the world around them as caretakers of God’s property, rather than as owners who are unaccountable for how they treat the world and their fellow human beings. In this chapter Cochran also takes on the question of whether legal practice can be described as a calling in a broader Christian sense. Not surprisingly, he applies a reformation theology to answer that question in the affirmative.
In Chapter 3: Lawyers as Advocates and Peacemakers, Cochran wades into the litigation practice and takes on the popular characterization of trial lawyers as duplicitous or shrewd. He relies on a common understanding of lawyers’ partisan role in a larger truth-discovering system but also evidences a sensitivity to the need for Christian lawyers to maintain their biblical values while playing that role. His experience as a practitioner comes into play here and, using some examples, he offers a nuanced view of how lawyers might advocate forcefully while recognizing biblical limitations. He sharpens this discussion in the criminal trial context in Chapter 4: Lawyers as Prosecutors and Defense Attorneys. In this chapter Cochran seeks to align the biblical goals of attaining both mercy and justice with the work of criminal lawyers and the criminal justice system. He again adopts a common approach to the popular question of how lawyers should represent criminal clients they know to be guilty, fitting the lawyer’s advocacy role in a larger, adversarial trial system. At the same time, Cochran also offers a strong argument for restorative justice programs in which guilty clients confess their wrongdoing and seek both forgiveness and reparation.
In Chapter 5: Lawyers as Counselors and Colleagues, Cochran zooms back out to the relational aspects of client representation common to all kinds of legal practice. This is the chapter in which he contrasts popular characterizations of lawyers as godfathers, hired guns, and gurus, with his preferred characterization of lawyers as friends. Here again Cochran demonstrates his practical experience to deliver a nuanced view of how Christian lawyers can serve their clients’ ends but also serve to advance the Kingdom through delivering biblical wisdom along with their legal advice. He focuses particularly on how this more nuanced form of representation can be achieved when advising a fellow believer.
In Chapter 6: Lawyers as Prophets and Advocates for “The Least of These,” Cochran seeks to extend his goal of addressing lawyers in everyday practice and focuses on how lawyers can be instruments of justice for the poor and disenfranchised. While some of his examples involve not so everyday events, like the English abolitionist movement, he tries to highlight individuals contributing to that movement who did so outside their ordinary practice. Modern lawyers have several established systems of pro bono representation and Cochran brings a Christian argument for lawyers to invest themselves in those systems.
Cochran turns his focus to the internal life of lawyers in Chapter 7: The Moral and Spiritual Challenge of Law School and Law Practice. In this chapter Cochran identifies common moral and epistemological temptations of law school and law practice and provides some useful guidance for how the Christian lawyer can avoid those temptations. He focuses on the pitfalls of cynicism, materialism, pride, insecurity, and temptation to live a divided life. As a longtime member of the bar and former practitioner, this reviewer can attest to the validity of each of these temptations. Particularly troubling from a Christian perspective is the common pitfall of personal pride, which can put lawyers in opposition to the God who should be animating and supporting their work.2
In his Conclusion to The Servant Lawyer, Cochran takes a brief societal view of how the Christian lawyer can positively impact the community by upholding the rule of law. He returns to the first chapter story of the criminal defendant with whom he established a friendship beyond his representation and provides a heartwarming epilogue of the defendant’s salvation and their eventual brotherhood in Christ. It is not a common story, but it could certainly provide lawyers with hope and an inspiration to seek that kind of eternal relationship with those they represent.
This book would be a great resource for Christian lawyers and law students seeking to frame their practice in their Christian faith. For law students, it would be an excellent counterweight to some of the more self-focused books about the formation of lawyers, such as Scott Turow’s One L.3 My own time in law school proved a particularly challenging period for remaining devoted to the faith. Law professors, from their position of educational advantage, tended to undermine the biblical worldview, and sometimes presented the law as an alternative frame of reference to Christianity. Even after law school, more senior lawyers, whose approval young lawyers professionally need and emotionally crave, can produce a strong encouragement to compromise the faith in the name of better law practice. Faithful Christian counsel like Cochran’s The Servant Lawyer might provide fair warning to incipient lawyers and serve as a continuing source of encouragement that devout Christian lawyers can serve God and their community in their everyday practice.
One weakness is that the book is somewhat limited by Cochran’s own ex- perience as a lawyer and law professor and the areas of his practice. It does not address, for instance, how lawyers serving as corporate compliance officers, as industrial general counsels, or as federal agents might integrate their practice with their faith. It also is limited in the depth of its theological argument by its purpose to serve as a practical guide, rather than a systematic work on the theological integration of Christian faith and law practice. Scholars seeking that kind of resource should know that this is not Cochran’s first book on the intersection between Christianity and law practice. Some of his past works were more focused on an academic audience of law students; however, if a reader found The Servant Lawyer disappointingly narrow in its scope, expanding one’s search to some of his prior works, such as Law and Community: The Case for Torts,4 could help fill in some of the academic gaps.
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Footnotes
- Robert K. Greenleaf, The Servant as Leader (Newton Center, MA: Robert K. Greenleaf Center, 1973); Robert K. Greenleaf, The Institution as Servant (Newton Center, MA: The Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership, 2012).
- James 4:6.
- Scott Turow, One L: An Inside Account of Life in the First Year at Harvard Law School (New York, NY: Penguin, 1987).
- Robert F. Cochran, Jr. and Robert M. Ackerman, Law and Community: The Case for Torts (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004).
