My Cousin Vinny: What Makes a Good Lawyer?

That was the question on the screen this week in Mark Lewis’s Law, Film, and Culture class at Capital University Law School.

Attorney Vincent Gambini from the movie My Cousin Vinny. There is plenty to criticize. Vinny is inexperienced, unprepared, unfamiliar with basic courtroom procedure, occasionally unethical, and spectacularly lacking in judgment.

And yet, somehow, he is also a pretty good lawyer.

Why?

Our discussion eventually moved toward four qualities on the screen: knowledge, attention, judgment, and character. Vinny’s knowledge is incomplete, and his judgment is sometimes questionable. But he pays close attention. He questions assumptions. He notices what others miss. He learns.

And when the accepted story doesn’t fit the facts, he keeps looking.

Perhaps that’s one of the harder lessons of good lawyering:

We need to know how to tell a compelling story. But we also need to know when not to believe one.