I have written about it many times here, including most recently last September when I posted: Are You Helping Your Young Lawyers Become Artisans or Virtuosos?
Most clients want to believe their lawyers are experts in their fields.
Recently I re-read Artisans and Virtuosos: Cultivating Adaptive Expertise in our Children–and In Ourselves. For the heck of it I decided to click on a link to a chapter from a book: How Experts Differ from Novices, which I had also referenced in the blog post last year.
There I found some of the ways experts differ from novices. As you think about them, consider how they apply to lawyers attracting clients.
- Experts notice features and meaningful patterns of information that are not noticed by novices.
- Experts have acquired a great deal of content knowledge that is organized in ways that reflect a deep understanding of their subject matter.
- Experts’ knowledge cannot be reduced to sets of isolated facts or propositions but, instead, reflects contexts of applicability: that is, the knowledge is “conditionalized” on a set of circumstances.
- Experts are able to flexibly retrieve important aspects of their knowledge with little attentional effort.
- Though experts know their disciplines thoroughly, this does not guarantee that they are able to teach others.
- Experts have varying levels of flexibility in their approach to new situations.