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It was my worst nightmare as a young lawyer.
I had spent hours and hours cite checking a brief, only to have a more senior colleague say, “Shari, these citations are all wrong. What could you have been thinking? This is not the quality of work we expect from lawyers at the [redacted] firm.”
My colleague’s words reflect an attitude that runs through the legal profession as a whole: Denial. Good lawyers always deliver perfectly for their clients, and they do not make mistakes, the thinking goes. But lawyers (and paralegals and assistants) are human, and mistakes will inevitably happen. By changing our attitude toward mistakes, research tells us we can improve our work, enhance our relationships with clients and even reduce exposure to ethics violations or malpractice claims. How?
Ready to admit that you have been mistaken about mistakes? Here are the 10 things you can do to embrace them.
My story has a bit of a dramatic ending. A few years after citation-gate, I was diagnosed with dyslexia. This forced me to change the way I thought about my mistakes. I had no choice but to accept my limitations and put systems in place to reduce the inevitable numerical errors I make. Now, when something goes wrong, it doesn’t derail me. I address it, put the mistake on my list, forgive myself and get back to work.
Shari Shapiro is an attorney with Cozen O’Connor’s Energy, Environment & Public Utilities Practice Group, where she focuses on renewable energy, energy efficiency and green building. A former business strategy consultant for PriceWaterhouseCoopers, she has a keen interest in and has studied psychology and the nexus between business and behavior.
Illustration ©iStockPhoto.com
The "duty to Google" is a shorthand way of saying that when information is easily available, it simply cannot be ignored.
February 21, 2019 0 0 0