The Attorney, the Clerk, and the Grace of Being Seen

September 17, 2026

Welcome back to A Personal Elenchus.

There is a saying that gets passed around in professional circles like a cold nobody meant to catch: “nice guys finish last.” We hear it so often that it calcifies into common sense. The logic is simple, and that is exactly the problem. Be decent, and the world runs you over. Be kind, and you are weak. Win, or be forgotten. Underneath that little proverb is a whole anthropology—a theory about what human beings are for, and what it costs to succeed.

Let’s put that theory on the stand.

If the practice of law teaches you anything, it teaches you that the profession is, at least on paper, built on a kind of institutional coldness. Rules. Deadlines. Adversaries. Files that reduce whole human lives—marriages, children, livelihoods, inheritances, wounds—to a caption and a docket number. The temptation is to harden. To become the distance between yourself and the suffering that passes through your inbox. I have clerked long enough to know that distance is, in small doses, a survival skill. But I have also clerked long enough to know what happens when someone refuses to make it a way of life.

I will not name him here. He would not want the attention, and the irony of writing about a man of grace by performing a little attention-seeking of my own is not lost on me. He is an attorney. He is prominent. And he is, in the truest sense I know how to use the word, ethical. He is also my friend. Those facts do not usually live in the same sentence in this profession, and I think that is the whole point.

Here is the uncomfortable truth about watching a genuinely good attorney work: it ruins your tolerance for the ones who are merely good at it. You start to notice the difference between authority and theater. You notice that some lawyers raise their voices because the room has stopped listening, and some lower their voices because the room has started. You notice that correction can be a form of violence, or it can be a form of love. I have seen both, and I have come to understand that the gap between them is not talent. It is character.

When I clerk for him, I am doing the work that clerks do. Research. Deadlines. Drafts that come back with red ink and a question mark in the margin that is somehow more instructive than any answer could be. Documents. Arguments. The architecture of a case built brick by brick, with a clerk holding the mortar. It is not glamorous, and it is not supposed to be. But here is what I did not expect, and what I keep coming back to: the way he treats that work.

There is a kind of grace that shows up only when nobody is watching, and it has nothing to do with softness. Grace in a professional is not the absence of standards. It is the presence of standards held without contempt. He can tell you that you are wrong without making you feel small. He can reject a draft without rejecting the person who wrote it. He can hold a line that costs him something—time, money, an easier path—because the line was the right line to hold. That is not weakness. That is the hardest thing in this profession, and most people never even attempt it.

And then there is the other part. The part I have been circling around because it is harder to say plainly.

I live with Bipolar 1 Disorder. I have spent a not-insignificant portion of my life being evaluated, doubted, reduced to outputs, and quietly managed like a liability waiting to happen. I know what it feels like to be tolerated. I know what it feels like to be the person in the room whose presence is being measured against a risk. I know the particular exhaustion of performing wellness so that other people can stay comfortable.

So when a man whose time is worth more than I will ever calculate takes a moment to tell me that the work I did mattered—that is not a pleasantry. That is oxygen. That is the difference between being used and being seen. To be appreciated by someone whose judgment you respect, in a profession that trains you to treat everyone as a cost center, is a kind of grace I did not know I was starving for until I tasted it.

But that is not the whole story, and I would be lying to you if I let it end there. Grace is not the same as gentleness. Ethical lawyering still requires precision, boundaries, candor, and sometimes the hard advice nobody wants to hear. There are days he tells me, plainly, that I have missed something, that my reasoning will not survive cross-examination, that I have fallen in love with my own argument and forgotten the client on the other end of it. And that, too, is grace. The kind that does not flatter you into mediocrity. The kind that believes you are capable of more than your first draft.

I have thought a lot about why this matters to me, and I think it comes down to this: we tell ourselves the law is a cold profession because coldness is easy to defend. It is measurable. It is safe. But the moment you watch someone practice it with warmth and rigor at the same time, the whole excuse collapses. You realize the coldness was never a requirement. It was a choice. And the people who make the other choice—the harder choice, the one that costs more and pays less in the short term—are the ones who keep the profession human.

I am a better clerk because of him. I am, I suspect, a better person. Not because he set out to mentor me in some formal, structured way, but because he simply showed me, day after day, that competence and kindness are not opposites. That you can hold people to a high standard and still hold them. That the law, at its best, is still a human profession practiced by human beings who remember there is always a human being in the room.

To be appreciated in his practice is to be reminded that I am not just a set of hands at a keyboard. That the hours I spend in the margins of someone else’s case file are not invisible. That a mind like mine—which has been doubted often enough to doubt itself—still has something to offer a profession that does not always know what to do with people like me.

That is grace. Not the soft, sentimental kind. The kind that shows up early, stays late, and treats a clerk like a person.

If you are lucky enough to work for someone like that, you already know. If you are not there yet, keep looking. They exist. And when you find them, do not let go.

sincerely, with gratitude, chris