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Kevin Clauson has been on the job as an associate at a law firm for less than a week, and he has not yet needed to get a single stitch.

That might not seem like something to be celebrated –- Why on earth would a lawyer need to get stitches?

But Mr. Clauson is a man who, in his last job, received the Stitch Award “because I had gotten the record number of stitches,” he said.

Eight-seven to be exact: six on his index finger, one on an elbow and 80 on various parts of his face.

While some would like to inflict these types of wounds on a lawyer, Mr. Clauson, 31, incurred these in another life –- as a professional hockey player. The stitches were the fruits of just one season.

Before Mr. Clauson graduated this year from St. John’s University Law School, he spent about four years as a professional hockey player in the minor league system of the Calgary Flames. After enough of the bruising and battering, Mr. Clauson decided in 2007 to pursue a lifelong desire to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a lawyer.

Mr. Clauson started his job as a litigator this week at the firm Herrick Feinstein.

His story got Courthouse Confidential thinking about others who have found lives in law after careers -– however brief -– as professional athletes. And it got us wondering what lessons from their athletic lives could come to bear at the bar.

Not too many professional athletes have transitioned from locker room to law firms. But Mr. Clauson certainly does have some examples to follow.

Len Elmore graduated from Harvard Law School in 1987 after an illustrious collegiate basketball career and a decade in the N.B.A. and A.B.A. Byron R. “Whizzer” White was a star N.F.L. halfback in the 1930s and 40s before ascending to the United States Supreme Court. Alan C. Page had a 14-year N.F.L. career that landed him in the Hall of Fame, and he is now a justice on the Minnesota Supreme Court.

But Mr. Clauson need not look past his own firm for an example. David Feuerstein, a commercial litigator with Herrick, spent just over five seasons as on outfielder in the Colorado Rockies’ farm system.

Mr. Feuerstein, 37, said he was drafted in 1995 and made it as far as AA – two steps from the majors. He eventually found that he had maximized his potential, he said.

“When the director of the minor league development asked me what I thought about coaching, I think the writing was on the wall for me,” said Mr. Feuerstein, who played football and baseball as an undergraduate at Yale.

Mr. Feuerstein said an internship with a law firm in Washington during the baseball off-season stirred his interest in law. He began taking classes at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law during his second-to-last season as a baseball player. He spent four years at Boies, Schiller & Flexner before going to Herrick in 2005.

His athletic career has been an asset to his legal career, Mr. Feuerstein said.

“The process, I think, is very much the same,” he said. “In order to perfect things you have to do it over and over and over again and practice and practice and practice. That’s the same thing, on some levels, as law. That’s why they call it the practice of law.”

Mr. Feuerstein said he also found a similarity in the constant scrutiny he encountered at the firms where he worked.

“It’s the same thing as in a law firm when people are evaluating you as an associate,” he said.

Curt R. Clausen devoted nearly a decade of his life to racewalking before going to Duke Law School in 2004. Mr. Clausen, 43, made the United States Olympic teams in 1996, 2000 and 2004. When he realized his career was coming to an end, Mr. Clausen said he turned to law because it blended well with his previous career working for the government in North Carolina.

Mr. Clausen is now in his third year as an associate at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, where he is a part of the firm’s antitrust practice.

Douglas K.W. Landau was never a professional athlete, but he has managed to carve for himself a successful amateur career as a triathlete. Mr. Landau, a Virginia-based litigator who often represents athletes in injury claims and advises race directors, goes by the nickname “the Triathlon Trial Lawyer.”

He said he started running in the late 1970s, while an undergraduate student at Boston University, after the track coach got him a job as a tester for Nike. He kept up running through law school at the University of Miami. Now, Mr. Landau, 50, has excelled in his age group. He won four triathlons outright last year, he said, and qualified for next year’s sprint triathlon world championships in his age group.

His athleticism has given him a leg up on the competition in the courtroom, he said.

“I think I have better endurance in long trials, long depositions, tough cases,” he said. “I’m not tired. I’m not some fat, overweight slob who smokes and drinks too much.”

Athletes have a natural attraction to legal careers, said Timothy L. Epstein, head of the sports law practice at SmithAmundsen in Chicago.

“Especially with litigation, you have the opportunity to continue in a competition just as you had when you were participating in whatever your particular sport was,” he said.

Mr. Clauson said he believed his years of body checking and trading blows -– and, in one instance, getting hit over the head with a bag by a grandmother –- on the ice would be good preparation for what is to come.

“Not being intimidated is certainly something that helps out in life,” he said, “and, especially, in law.”

John Eligon and other court reporters for The New York Times take you inside the city’s halls of law every Friday. Have a tip? Send an e-mail message to CourthouseConfidential@nytimes.com.