IMPORTANCE OF ANALYTICAL THINKING IN LEGAL FIELD
An English poet, Charles Lamb, once said – “He is no lawyer who cannot take two sides”. The above statement puts the concepts of analytical thinking and reasoning skills of a legal brain in a nutshell and this piece is all about how it is critically important to imbibe the reasoning skills for a lawyer. Reasoning is a skill with various essential branches, such as inductive reasoning, deductive reasoning, analytical reasoning, critical reasoning etc, to name a few. Although it is a necessary skill for a person associated with the legal profession, analytical reasoning and critical reasoning are equally crucial for persons across the entire professional spectrum as it is a life skill. Simply put, inculcating the skill of analytical thinking would mean, ‘how to think like a lawyer’. What makes Analytical thinking so important? For a budding lawyer, analytical thinking is the first step towards becoming a fine-tuned lawyer, and there is a strong reason behind it. When one goes to law school, more often than not, one carries certain personal opinions and dogmas or beliefs. This is a ‘raw form’in which a budding lawyer enters a law school, where their brain is already heavily influenced by the environment they come from and their surroundings. Developing analytical thinking is critical here because the first thing one needs to learn in a law school is to unlearn what they have learnt up until now and develop a rational brain and more sophisticated thinking. Being more open-minded, unbiased, seeing things the way they are and not the way they should be (according to one) are the traits that every budding lawyer should inculcate. Thinking analytically would undoubtedly help one developing oneself into a fine-tuned lawyer. A lawyer must be able to think of their feet and should know how to cleverly shift their stand, if presented with any contradicting evidence in a court of law. It takes a critical thinker to evaluate the strength and weakness of their arguments and one must also be able to think of the possible rebuttal arguments and form rejoinder arguments against such rebuttals. One needs to form arguments be keeping personal biases and views aside, which can jeopardize the decision of a case, and think analytically about every argument. A popular point of distinction between analytical thinking and critical thinking is that the former means breaking down complex information into smaller parts and making sense out of it while the latter involves taking some external knowledge into account while evaluating information and being a ‘critique’ towards the presented information and then reconstructing it. Critical thinking is also known as objective analysis thinking. It involves dissecting pieces of information and using that information to form ‘something new, fresh and innovative’.