Lawyers’ Poker: 52 Lessons that Lawyers Can Learn from Card PlayersSteven Lubet’s book will be very valuable to mediators and negotiators. Even though poker is a zero sum game, every mediator or negotiator faces a zero sum game: can we find the zone of agreement?

Where Steven’s book is valuable, and this is what I concentrated on in my longer review on bizop.ca, is that every negotiator has to figure out how strong the other party believes his own case is, how strong I believe that the other party’s case is, and various permutations of the “recursive reasoning”.

No less an authority than the Nobel Prize Winner Professor Thomas Schelling has also endorsed Lubet’s characterization of a lawyer has someone who has to solve the “recursive” reasoning problem.

Poker gives very clear examples of how to solve this strategic thinking.

Steven Lubet doesn’t claim that all lawyers need to know can be learned from poker players, but he does provide clear and compelling examples of how poker players think strategically and his legal examples are enlightening.

Generally, I would characterize Steven Lubet’s book as a contribution to that part of cognitive science which focuses on the interaction between heuristics and rational thought in decision theory. And as such it is both unique and valuable.

This is a rare book about an esoteric subject which the author has made clearly understandable for a wide audience of readers. Every one who faces the misfortune to become involved in the legal process should make this their first read. It helps one understand the games lawyers play with the fates and lives of their clients, opponents, judges and juries. Those not so unfortunate will appreciate the transfer of densely packed knowledge in an extremely lively and memorable package. Those who don’t understand the allure of poker will gain appreciation for the game as a model for life situations.

There’s far less that could be learned from this book than one could by watching a few law-related TV shows.

The poker related explanations are rather mediocre so that poker players would get bored, and one gets a feeling that the author is stretching to find an anecdote to fit every situation.

The text is peppered with anecdotes that are mildly interesting, both poker-related and from legal cases. If there’s the ideal book that brings the two topics together, this is not it. I found no eye-popping revelations, it felt like a routine drill, covering all the angles–never going too deep.

I actually picked up this book to see if I could learn anything in preparation for a tort case–as I am not a lawyer but a competent poker player. I learned one thing from this book–conceptually, it is not a bad idea to share enough information before trial (during or before discovery) to arrive at a situation where the opponent has enough to achieve an optimal settlement.

So many aspects of law are so complicated that by the time you get to be a lawyer, poker has little to teach you that haven’t already seen. The book proved this belief.