By James Bowden
Fellow blogger and occupant of the lawyerly Nirvana that is in-house counselhood Mark Herrmann recently wrote a blog post carried by Above The Law noting, in essence: (i) young attorneys don’t have great attention to detail and fail to sweat the small stuff, and (ii) more experienced attorneys obsess over details and are bothered by younger attorneys’ failure to do so, because they have all been driven insane. It is probably a fair criticism, though one that I think begs a response, in bullet-points (because I’ve been told that in-house people love bullet points):
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The granular attention to detail that makes attorneys so valuable to companies and obnoxious to their non-lawyer friends is a learned behavior, gained from extensive training. It is not a behavior that people are born with (like washing one’s hands with five different bars of soap every time we pass a sink) even if the manifested result is similar. Risk aversion is likely the trait attorneys are born with, and attention to detail is a professional coping mechanism. In short, we’re learning.
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There is a big difference, at least from my perspective, between initial drafting and the editorial process. I am notorious for typos in documents I draft – I think it is because I know what it is supposed to say, and am a little bit blind to minor errors in my own work. Which is why my poor assistant has to review everything for me. On the other hand, I am very good at picking up typos and inconsistencies in other people’s work. This may explain in part why one of my earlier posts misspelled “hearsay” in the title. Also, per a colleague of mine, I have the spelling skills of a baby walrus.
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An engineer once told me that his rule for producing work was, “fast, good, and cheap: pick any two.” In law firm life, young attorneys are asked to provide things good and fast; cheap is simply a function of how much time you have to work. So, while law firms rightly obsess themselves with producing flawless work product (with the possible exception of initial complaints in class-action securities cases), sometimes the timeframe required results in work product that is “as fast as possible, and as good as it can be in the time provided.” Which is good, because it gives the other side things to comment on.
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The Young Lawyers Blog has no comment as to the sanity or lack there of demonstrated by more experienced attorneys, except to say that if insanity is a characteristic of the attorneys we work under, insanity must be a part of what we aspire to.
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I’ve noticed that attorneys tend to eat a large amount of sushi, which leads me to believe that the observed behavior noted by Mr. Herrmann may in fact be the result of mercury poisoning.
Once I saw a sticker (maybe a t-shirt) that said “insanity is hereditary; you get it from your children.” Based on Mr. Herrmann’s post, in the practice of law insanity is a sign of life’s lessons learned.