Anyone who has written, proofread, filed and served a pleading has experienced the dreadful moment of opening the document on the court’s docket and immediately recognizing the typo jumping off the page. Set your expectations-and your schedule-appropriately. Accordingly, that brief will always take longer than you think. Despite your best intentions, you can’t help but bounce back and forth between tasks.
Inputs and distractions fly at you like fastballs from a pitching machine. But, of course, the working environment in a law firm is far from ideal. In an ideal world, writing a brief might take a day. It’s called “Hofstadter’s Law,” which stands for the proposition that: “It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take into account Hofstadter’s Law.” There’s a name for this tendency, coined by author and professor of cognitive science Douglas Hofstadter. Over and over, the amount of time required to complete projects gets underestimated. Yet, despite there being certainty about the deadlines, legal projects seem to perpetually end in mad scrambles that lead to stress, at best, and consequential mistakes, at worst.
There’s a constant stream of tasks that need to get completed by certain dates.
It will always take longer than you think.Ī typical lawyer’s day is punctuated by deadlines. But there are some universal principles-”laws” of the universe, if you will-that impact each of us, and, when not taken into account, lead to unmet expectations. If you have more realistic expectations of how your days will go, then you’ll have better outcomes.Ī big part of setting better expectations is knowing yourself. The best path forward is to embrace the chaos and learn to dance with it. For those who crave control, the uncertainty of being at the beck and call of a partner or subject to the whims of an adversary is distinctly unsettling.Īs with most problems, the first step in dealing with this one is accepting it. The legal profession tends to attract high-achieving “Type A” personalities who like to control situations and win. But the disposition of most lawyers is different. They’re able to lithely roll with the punches and get through their days unscathed. Chaos is always lurking, a mere phone call or email away.įor some, the chaos is not an issue. I’m not a mental health professional, nor do I pretend to play one on the internet, but in my experiences of both coaching young lawyers and having been one myself in a fast-paced law firm environment, it seems obvious that one of the primary sources of day-to-day stress is the fact that one’s expectations of how the day will go (the “plan”) almost always get derailed through someone else’s intervention (the “punch”). The data is clear and compelling but the root causes of the mental health conditions that seem to inordinately affect lawyers-including many young lawyers-are uncertain. We’ve all read about the rising rates of stress, anxiety, and depression among lawyers. As Mike Tyson said to a reporter in the run-up to his fight against Evander Holyfield, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” Because of the adversarial nature of the law, however, a lawyer’s day is uniquely capable of turning into a train wreck. With coffee and a fresh to-do list in hand, most days for most lawyers begin optimistically enough.
0 kommentar(er)
