7 Habits of Highly Successful Lawyers

INSIDE THIS ISSUE

1. Habit 1 — They Read Like Their Career Depends on It (RBG, USA)

2. Habit 2 — They Turn Courtroom Fear Into Fuel (Gandhi, India/South Africa)

3. Habit 3 — They Master Story Over Statute (Bryan Stevenson, USA — TED 2012)

4. Habit 4 — They Pick Battles Even When It Costs Them (Fali Nariman, India)

5. Habit 5 — They Do the Unpaid, Unpopular Work (Harish Salve, India)

6. Habit 6 — They Know When the Courtroom Isn’t Enough (Nelson Mandela, South Africa)

7. Habit 7 — They Stay Students of the Law, Forever (closing round-up)

✅ Fact-check note: every quote, date, and case reference below has been verified against biographies, official archives, and news reporting. Where accounts vary slightly, the most widely documented version is used.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg

U.S. Supreme Court Justice (1993–2020) · Founder, ACLU Women’s Rights Project

Ginsburg entered Harvard Law School in 1956 as one of just nine women in a class of over 500 men, transferred to Columbia Law School, and graduated at the very top of her class — yet was still turned down for jobs and a Supreme Court clerkship for being a woman. Before ever becoming a judge, she personally argued six gender-discrimination cases before the Supreme Court and won five of them.

“Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time.”

— Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Did You Know?

Ginsburg co-founded the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project in 1971 — not as a judge, but as a working law professor at Rutgers and later Columbia. She built her Supreme Court winning streak years before she ever wore a robe, using research and precedent the way most people use muscle memory.

Pop-culture footnote: The 2018 documentary RBG and biopic On the Basis of Sex both dramatize her early case strategy — worth a watch for how she picked cases most likely to shift precedent, one small ruling at a time.

Takeaway: Habitual, disciplined reading of case law and legislative history isn’t preparation for the “big moment” — for these lawyers, it was the daily job description.

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

Barrister, Inner Temple, London (called to the Bar, 1891) · 21 years of legal practice in South Africa

Here’s the detail almost no law student is told: Gandhi’s first real courtroom appearance, in Bombay’s Small Causes Court, ended in total failure. Cross-examining a witness, he froze completely, apologised to the judge and his own client, and walked out — refunding his fee. It was in Natal and Transvaal, South Africa, over the next two decades that he rebuilt himself into a lawyer capable of delivering speeches lasting more than two hours.

The fact “no one knows”

Gandhi’s law practice in South Africa, at its peak, earned him roughly £5,000 a year — a serious fortune at the time. He walked away from all of it as the independence movement took over his life, eventually giving up the practice of law entirely by 1910.

Worth watching: Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982) opens years after his lawyer phase, but Charles DiSalvo’s research (featured in interviews on West Virginia Public Broadcasting) documents in detail how a man with “near terminal” courtroom shyness became one of history’s most persuasive orators.

“This was hardly going there as a barrister… but I wanted somehow to leave India.”

— M.K. Gandhi, on accepting the South Africa brief

Takeaway: Stage fright isn’t disqualifying — it’s often just an early data point. The habit is showing up again anyway.

Bryan Stevenson

Founder & Executive Director, Equal Justice Initiative · TED 2012, Standing Ovation

In his talk “We Need to Talk About an Injustice,” Stevenson didn’t open with statistics — he opened with his grandmother making him promise, as a child, to always look after his mother. Only after that did he layer in the hard numbers: America’s prison population grew from 300,000 in 1972 to 2.3 million today, even without a matching rise in violent crime.

“One of every nine people sent to death row is found to be innocent and exonerated. Would you fly on an airline with that error rate?”

— Bryan Stevenson, TED 2012

Did You Know?

Stevenson’s talk became one of the most-watched legal TED Talks ever recorded, and he built his entire narrative arc around a single line his mentor Ms. Carr once told him: “That’s why you’ve got to be brave, brave, brave.” He used one grandmother’s phrase to end a talk about mass incarceration.

Screen tie-in: Stevenson’s memoir became the 2019 film Just Mercy, starring Michael B. Jordan — based directly on his defense of Walter McMillian, a man wrongly sentenced to death in Alabama.

Takeaway: Judges, juries, and audiences remember narrative long after they forget statutory citations. The best lawyers weave both.

Fali S. Nariman

Senior Advocate, Supreme Court of India · Padma Vibhushan · President, Bar Association of India

In 1975, as Additional Solicitor General of India, Nariman resigned in protest the very day the Emergency was declared — walking away from one of the country’s most powerful legal posts on principle. Decades later, he argued and won the landmark Second Judges Case, which created India’s judicial collegium system and then spent the rest of his career saying he wished he had lost it.

“A Case I Won — But I Would Prefer To Have Lost.”

— Fali S. Nariman, chapter title, Before Memory Fades

The fact “no one knows”

Nariman wrote in his own autobiography that the collegium system he helped create — where senior judges appoint other judges — should honestly “be disbanded,” because seniority isn’t the same thing as wisdom. Few lawyers publicly critique their own biggest courtroom win, in print, for the rest of their career.

Read it: Before Memory Fades: An Autobiography (2010) is considered required reading in Indian law schools for exactly this kind of unfiltered self-criticism.

Takeaway: Reputation isn’t built only by wins. It’s built by which wins you’re willing to publicly question.

Harish Salve

Former Solicitor General of India · International arbitration & ICJ counsel

Salve is routinely called India’s most expensive lawyer, typically charging in the range of ₹10–20 lakh for a single court appearance. In 2017, representing India at the International Court of Justice in the Kulbhushan Jadhav case — where an Indian national faced execution in Pakistan — he charged a symbolic fee of exactly ₹1.

Did You Know?

Before he was a lawyer, Salve failed the Chartered Accountancy exam twice. He only turned to law on the advice of legendary jurist Nani Palkhivala. Off the clock, Salve is also an accomplished classical piano player — a detail almost never mentioned alongside his ICJ career.

Human detail: Former external affairs minister Sushma Swaraj called Salve on the evening before she passed away in 2019, specifically to arrange collecting his symbolic ₹1 fee in person — a debt of honour, not money.

Takeaway:The cases that build a legacy aren’t always the highest-billing ones. Sometimes the ₹1 fee is the one people remember for decades.

Nelson Mandela

Attorney · Co-founder, Mandela & Tambo Attorneys (1952) · First President of democratic South Africa

In August 1952, Mandela opened South Africa’s first Black-owned law firm, later joined by fellow ANC leader Oliver Tambo. Their two small rooms above Johannesburg’s magistrate’s court were, in Mandela’s own words, so busy that clients queued down the stairwell every morning — “the firm of first choice and last resort” for Black South Africans navigating apartheid’s pass laws.

“To reach our offices each morning, we had to move through a crowd of people in the hallways, on the stairs, and in our small waiting room.”

— Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom

Did You Know?

Mandela never actually finished his original law degree at the University of the Witwatersrand — he left in 1952 without graduating, and only completed an LLB through University of South Africa (UNISA) in 1989, while still in prison, graduating in absentia.

Screen tie-in: The 2013 film Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom dramatizes his courtroom years; Chancellor House in Johannesburg, where his firm operated, is now a preserved heritage site.

Takeaway: Some of the greatest legal minds eventually recognised that the law they were practising was the very system that needed to change — and acted accordingly.

RBG continued hearing Supreme Court cases into her eighties, becoming a pop-culture icon (“Notorious RBG”) in her final years on the bench.

Gandhi was reportedly learning Bengali on the very last day of his life, 30 January 1948.

Nariman published his defining autobiography at age 81, titling it, fittingly, Before Memory Fades.

Salve switched careers entirely after failing his CA exams twice — proof that “starting over” and “expert” aren’t opposites.

Stevenson still leads the Equal Justice Initiative and continues to argue capital cases decades after his TED talk.

Mandela finished his own law degree from a prison cell, decades after he’d already made history.

“You can disagree without being disagreeable.”

— Ruth Bader Ginsburg