After two decades in legal practice, you stop being surprised by the law. What continues to surprise you are people, writes Tony Taouk.
When I was first admitted, I assumed disputes were driven by logic: money, risk, evidence, and incentives.
With time, it became clear that those are often the least important forces at play. Pride, fear, embarrassment, belief, and stubbornness usually matter far more. The law is just the framework through which those forces collide.
Over the years, I have seen patterns repeat themselves so consistently that they have reshaped how I practice.
The law is rational. People often are not.
One of the earliest lessons I learnt was that enforcement power does not always work the way textbooks suggest.
I once pursued a debtor who was technically judgment-proof. He had no assets in his own name, and every conventional enforcement step led nowhere. The final option was an examination order, requiring the sheriff to physically bring him to court.
What no statute anticipates is timing. The sheriff attended while the debtor was hosting a Christmas party at a restaurant. He was escorted out in front of his guests and brought to court. The matter was resolved shortly afterwards.
Nothing about that outcome was financial. It was social. The law succeeded not because of its coercive machinery, but because of embarrassment. That dynamic repeats constantly. People comply not when the law is strongest but when the consequences become personally uncomfortable.
Fear distorts decision making
Fear is another powerful driver, and it rarely attaches to the thing lawyers expect it to.
I have had clients facing minor criminal charges who were inconsolable, not because of the likely outcome, but because of some deeply personal concern that eclipsed everything else. In one instance, a client’s primary anxiety was who would feed his pet bird if he were remanded, despite the fact that custody was extremely unlikely.
At the other end of the spectrum, I have advised people so terrified of being accused of wrongdoing that they tried to engineer absolute certainty into intimate human interactions: recording conversations, insisting on written permission slips, attempting to contract their way out of trust. Unsurprisingly, those measures protected nothing and alienated everyone.
The law can manage risk. It cannot eliminate fear. Treating human relationships as legal transactions almost always makes things worse.
Belief beats evidence more often than we admit
With experience, you also realise how often belief triumphs over evidence.
I have acted for people who made life-altering financial decisions based on extraordinary convictions: moving towns because of a reported UFO sighting or staking savings on speculative investments driven by online mythology rather than fundamentals. I have also seen business partners destroy viable enterprises simply to ensure the other party did not win.
In theory, rational actors do not behave this way. In practice, people act on stories they tell themselves. Once that story hardens, legal advice struggles to compete.
Procedure matters, but small details matter more
Some of the most consequential outcomes I have seen turned on details that had nothing to do with merit. A delivery of building materials worth thousands of dollars went unpaid, yet the claim failed because a signature was never obtained on a delivery docket. The materials were installed and visible, but proof is procedural, not intuitive.
These moments are humbling reminders that justice and outcome are not the same thing. Lawyers may know this intellectually; experience teaches it viscerally.
Power is contextual, not absolute
Early in my career, I believed authority came from position: the robe, the courtroom, and the letterhead.
Experience corrected that assumption quickly.
I have been in settlement conferences where legal authority dissolved entirely once emotion and intimidation entered the room. I have also stood in the witness box, being cross-examined by senior counsel, and learnt firsthand how exposed even experienced practitioners can feel when roles reverse.
Those experiences recalibrate your sense of power. They teach caution, empathy, and restraint far better than any ethics seminar.
What longevity quietly teaches
After enough years, you stop thinking of law as a tool that fixes people. It does not. At best, it contains damage, channels conflict, and occasionally nudges behaviour in better directions.
Good legal practice, I have come to believe, is less about cleverness and more about judgement: knowing when to push, when to pause, when a client needs certainty, and when they need realism.
The law gives us rules. Time gives us perspective. The longer you practice, the clearer it becomes that the most important skill is not knowing the answer, it is understanding the person asking the question.
Tony Taouk was admitted as a lawyer in 2005 and has practised for two decades across a broad range of areas, including commercial litigation, criminal law, business law, and property law. He is the principal of Magna Carta Lawyers.
