Moreover, the general counsel, with overall legal responsibility for actions throughout the corporation, may perhaps be legitimately saddled with at least constructive knowledge of virtually everything occurring within the company. It is too vague, too moralistic, and fails to convey the potential for danger to anyone's immediate plans or well-being. To the sophisticated lawyer, however, even the abstract is part of the legal analysis. At a minimum, these indefinitive, often intellectual propositions form part of the picture of risk that must be considered by the corporate officer. More potently, however, deeper legal principles establish the context within which all of the other details of the law ought to be understood and assessed.
Abstract values are often, therefore, an integral part of the law itself.
Indeed, from a distance, where most nonlawyers view the law, all one can detect are the structure's bricks. Up close, however, where the lawyer operates, we realize that the material that holds the structure together and ultimately gives it its shape and strength, is the less obvious mortar that runs between all the bricks. This difference in cognition now creates the lawyer's special analytical context. The lawyer's job, from the point of view of the corporate client, is to guide the client safely around and through the maze of annoying regulatory bricks to true business freedom. The lawyer's special problem, then, is to determine how to live with this insight in a world of substantial texture while serving in a world of clients seeing and demanding gaps.