How story of singing horse is applicable to lawyers profession?

As a very young lawyer, I suffered from the delusion that I knew the law and thought it should operate on the basis of what was written in the textbooks. I once watched my senior argue an obviously bad case in court, knowing well that the judge would laugh him out of court. Somehow my senior wangled an adjournment from the judge, and outside the court, he cackled at his great escape. I turned to a slightly older junior in the chamber and asked why my senior was so happy because the matter would so obviously be lost on the next occasion. My chamber mate looked at me pityingly and said: “Oh, you don’t know the singing horse story?”

In response to my puzzled look, he told me the story of a man who was being executed in response to a king’s orders. On the chopping block, he looked at the king and said, “O, king you may kill me, but you must know that I can make horses sing.” The king asked how he could do that. To this the man replied that he needed a year to train a horse. The king had him freed, and set him up in a house next to the royal stables and provided him a horse to train. The man’s friend asked him, “You know that there are no singing horses, why did you promise it to the king? What will you do now?” The condemned man replied, “A lot can happen in a year, I may die a natural death and so may the king; the king may not remain the king, a general amnesty for all may be announced, the king may change his mind about executing me anyway, and for all you know, the horse may actually sing. Let me enjoy this year that I have.”

Since that day, I have always been aware of the episodic nature of a lawyer’s work, which makes lawyers delay the inevitable in the hope that the morrow may yet bring about a change of circumstances that render the insoluble merely intractable.

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