James Bryce once wrote, "Selfishness, injustice, cruelty, tricks, and jobs of all sorts shun the light; to expose them is to defeat them." During my first year as a lawyer, when I was working at a law firm in Dallas, my paralegal came into my office and placed a pile of mail on my desk. After I dug through some spam and lawyer magazines, I found an MRI report of one of my clients that showed a herniated disc in her low back.

Since I was the newest lawyer at the firm, most of my clients had just sprains and strains and no injuries that would show up on an MRI. So I jumped up from my desk with the MRI report in hand and quickly walked down the hallway to another lawyer's office who'd been practicing much longer than me. Waiving the report around, I said, "Hey, one of my clients has a herniated disc! How much is that worth?"