The majority of day-to-day lawyering as practiced on behalf of average private individuals involves thorough knowledge of a set of rules, attention to detail, and the ability to follow through. When picking a lawyer for almost all the things I need done I’m not primarily interested in intellectual brilliance or creative thinking, I’m a lot more concerned about whether the paperwork will be accurately prepared, carefully reviewed, and filed on time. It’s a job for a highly-organized, bright-average individual temperamentally attracted to highly repetitive work, and more intelligent and more creative individuals are likely to be frustrated by it, and often in their frustration start to perform at a level well below their “ability”.
For this reason it’s often seemed to me that there really ought to be several legal career paths: one for this kind of practice, one for criminal litigation, one for more complicated commercial law, and so on.
And I’ve little doubt that you could create standards to evaluate aspirants to each that would do a better job of predicting success than the LSAT.
There really are. These and more.