Question as to Talent and Imagination

I read not long ago that Albert Einstein once said that extraordinary intelligence was characterized by having a really intuitive mind with reason as its critical servant. 

I hypothesize that really intuitive minds all have substantial imaginations of one sort or another.  I also conjecture that the intuitive mind can start with something like guess-work followed by rejection followed by more guess-work, followed by more rejection followed by more disciplined guess-work, and so forth. The term “guess-work” can be a synonym for “hypothesis” “invention” or “intuition.”  

Very much like Karl Popper’s idea of scientific inquiry: start with a question, try a hypothesis, try to reject and replace or revise it (where revising is a form of replacing), embrace the hypothesis only if it survived repeated attempts to refute it. 

I’ve asked friends of mine whether they think the Einstein Theory might apply to lawyers. Should a great lawyer have a deep imagination, the gifts of a detective, those of a rhetorician, and some of those of a  type of logician? 

Or is the practice of law too conservative and mechanical for all that?  After all, the law is many things, but it significantly seeks to conserve pieces of the past. But isn’t some work of the imagination done on very subtle distinctions or arguments? 

Are imaginings and the intuitings more likely to be found in transactional work, e.g., negotiations, or in “creational law,” like probate work or contract creation, than it is to be found in litigation. 

Michael Sean Quinn, Austin Texas, mquinn@msqlaw.com