“I became a lawyer so I wouldn’t have to do math” or “I went to law school because I hated math.”
These are words that every lawyer has probably either heard from another lawyer or perhaps uttered him or herself, sometimes jokingly but oftentimes with a strange sense of pride.
It should come as no surprise, then, that many lawyers have trouble with their personal finances when they don’t know or choose not to learn mathematical concepts.
This isn’t unique to lawyers, of course. The woeful state of math education in the United States is well documented – see, for example, here (NY Times), here (Scientific American) and here (UCLA).
We have trouble understanding probability and statistics, fractions, large and small numbers and doing basic arithmetic without our calculators.
You never hear a lawyer say (or at least no lawyer would ever admit) that “I can’t read” or “I hate reading.” In the same vein, I would encourage my fellow lawyers to not proudly announce or blindly accept their innumeracy, the equivalent of illiteracy when it comes to math and numbers.
I would further encourage the math-phobic lawyers to fight their allergy to math and to not automatically shut down their very well-educated attorney brains the moment any numbers or math concepts come up. After all, your money is counted in dollars.
As a part of my blogging, I am not going to shy away from math and numbers, but everything I talk about will be fairly simple – addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. I’m no mathematician, and the last math classes I took were more than 20 years ago. However, I do like numbers because they help me learn and quantify personal finance concepts.
To the extent you are one of those who hates math or became a lawyer so that you wouldn’t have to do any math, I encourage you to keep an open mind and learn something new. Not only will it help your personal finances, it will make you a better person (learning for learning’s sake!). It will probably make you a better lawyer too. Whether your practice is transactional or litigation-oriented, there are going to be some (and in many cases, a lot of) numbers involved, clients will want you to understand their businesses and interests and you’ll be a better advocate if you can grasp basic mathematical principles.
And, for those math geeks out there, I encourage you to call me out on my math mistakes.
