He has a few words for me, the only thing he can give. He says: Be prepared for the worst, but always hope for the best. See you in court tomorrow. He leaves as the guards are herding us back to our cells. The hope that the court tomorrow will end my misery buoys my spirits. I whisper to one inmate what I have learned. Soon everybody has the same news about the court tomorrow.

I am relentless. I feel a new power, the power of telling the truth. I can be consistent; he cannot. Through questions, my story unfolds up to and including their attempts to ask me to plead guilty. No, no, they were simply asking me to tell the truth. The court is so silent that one can hear a pin drop. When I finish, there is applause, which is met with a stern rebuke from the court.

I moved gradually to this action. I had watched the connections among my delegates and their connection to their learning dissolve as soon as the breaks began and the phones came out. After a few years I had become unwilling to foster this loss any more. And I realized I was willing to lose business if necessary in order to stop this infiltration of the platform system of interruption. I wanted to restore the full, attentive, undistracted human mind to every minute of our study and practice. I have lost no business.

One of the biggest mistakes that I see people make is they don’t want to learn from someone who has a character blemish or a worldview that doesn’t align with theirs. Seneca captured the right approach when he said in On the Tranquility of the Mind, “I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.” Or, as Cato the Elder put it, “Be careful not to rashly refuse to learn from others.” Don’t throw away the apple because of a bruise on the skin.

I don’t want to get rid of lawyers. Rather, I want to help lift the engineers (and also their technocratically minded brethren, the economists) back up. Not to raise them onto a pedestal but to elevate them so that there are other voices in the mix. The United States could use fewer lawyers who devote their careers to litigating the life out of government agencies and more lawyers of the dealmaker bent who are interested in working out how to deliver better services. Law professor Nick Bagley concluded his seminal paper on proceduralism (which I referenced in the first chapter) with a polite, but deceptively powerful, proposition that I want to echo: Lawyers should consider whether they could achieve more by stepping out of the way.