The legal profession has never suffered from a lack of intelligence, effort, or commitment. What it has struggled with, historically, is agency or choice. Not in the formal sense lawyers understand so well, but in a quieter, psychological sense. Where does control live when the rules are rigid, the incentives are misaligned, and the profession itself feels slow to change?
For decades, much of law has operated inside a finite frame. There were limited seats at the table, limited prestige to go around, limited room for experimentation, and limited tolerance for failure. Scarcity thinking more adaptive and not viewed as a flaw. Billable hours rewarded extraction over creation. Hierarchies rewarded caution over curiosity, creating a predilection towards risk aversion. Stability was prioritized over reinvention or innovation.
And yet, alongside this tradition, a parallel body of work has been quietly accumulating, mostly in the realm of psychology and behavioural economics. Psychologists, leadership researchers, negotiators, entrepreneurs, and even actors have been circling the same underlying idea: what we often call mindset is better understood as choice or agency expressed under constraint.
Dr. Carol Dweck demonstrated that belief about effort determines whether challenge invites growth or avoidance, coining the word mindset and identifying growth and fixed mindsets on a spectrum. Adam Grant showed how professionals approach value itself as something to extract, trade, or create, representing giver, taker or matcher mindsets. Peter H. Diamandis, Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin Hardy reimagined a world of abundance rather than scarcity by shifting entrepreneurial language and thinking. Christopher Voss showed that a mindset of curiosity, not control, produces leverage when stakes are high. Liz Wiseman illustrated how leaders either multiply intelligence or quietly suppress it, examining multipliers and diminishers. Brené Brown revealed how gratitude competes with foreboding even in moments of success. Alia Crum proved that stress is not inherently damaging, but interpretation often is. Her mindsets were called stress as enhancing and stress as debilitating. Simon Sinek’s distinction between finite and infinite games has resonated deeply inside the legal industry, in part because it articulates something many lawyers already feel. Law isn’t a game to be won but a practice you sustain.
It’s telling that Clio CEO Jack Newton has spoken openly about the influence of The Infinite Game. It’s an acknowledgment that long-term trust, adaptability, and client-centered thinking matter more than short-term optimization, even in a profession built on precedent. We’re also seeing this shift modeled by lawyers who have stepped outside traditional assumptions. Lawyers like Brett Colvin and the team at Goodlawyer and Helen Mackay of Juno Legal have demonstrated what happens when a lawyers move from guarding position to creating value. Their work reflects an abundance orientation in a field long governed by scarcity, not by abandoning rigor, but by reimagining how legal services can be delivered, accessed, and scaled.
What connects these examples is not innovation for its own sake, but a shared answer to a deeper question. Where does control live? In effort or in innate ability? In stress or in interpretation? In hoarding clients or expanding access? In defending tradition or adapting with purpose? In waiting for permission or taking responsibility?
I’ve conceptualized these various “mindsets” popularized over the last few decades less as motivational concepts (though they are that which has resulted in them often being dismissed as buzzwords) and more as choices, showing that we possess agency over our own lives and practices. They describe how professionals behave when rules tighten, uncertainty rises, and systems begin to strain. This is where the conversation becomes more uncomfortable and more relevant for law.
What if many of the profession’s limiting postures aren’t merely cultural, but inherited? Not genetically in a simplistic sense, but biologically and psychologically, passed down through generations trained to survive scarcity, hierarchy, and risk aversion. For most of legal history, caution was wisdom, not conservatism. Hesitation protected careers, curiosity carried cost, responsibility was often something to explain rather than claim.
The world has changed faster than the profession’s nervous system. Today, lawyers operate in an environment where adaptability is rewarded, transparency is expected, and clients have more choice than ever before. Yet many still carry instincts shaped by a different landscape. Scarcity thinking persists where abundance is possible. Finite games are played where infinite ones are unfolding.
My working theory is this: what we call mindset is really better described as choice. The words we use, the thoughts we have, the framing we give our problems. I’m reminded of what Raiford Dalton Palmer said in I Just Want This Done, (I paraphrase) encouraging lawyers to drop “the petitioner” or “the applicant” or “the respondent” or “the defendant” in favour of using their actual names. Change your language. Change your thinking.
We struggle with this, not because lawyers lack courage or intelligence, but because the profession trained them well for a world that no longer fully exists or has drastically shifted. The opportunity now is not to completely abandon tradition but to update it and recognize when inherited protections have become constraints–to choose differently, deliberately, and professionally. That choice is already being modeled by those willing to rethink how law is practiced, led, and sustained over time. And it suggests that the future of the profession may depend less on new rules, and more on where lawyers decide control truly lives.