Small Law Firms, Solo Practitioners

Why Lawyers Should Not Feel So Sure Of Themselves

An openness to facing adversity and a willingness to having knowledge challenged are required if you want to develop real expertise and experience, according to columnist Keith Lee.

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People seek out lawyers for “expert” advice.

Clients look for lawyers to solve their legal problems by way of lawyers’ specialized knowledge acquired through education and experience. To a non-lawyer, almost any lawyer is an expert. Even a brand-new lawyer fresh out of law school likely has a better grasp on the law than someone whose legal expertise is watching Law & Order (although given lower admission standards and declining bar passage rates, we’ll see how long that lasts).

But just because you’ve gone through law school and passed the bar exam does not make you an expert. Far from it. 

Expertise is something that is earned over a long period of time with diligent effort and work. Only through facing increasingly difficult obstacles and situations do people people acquire new skills that allow them to solve more complex problems. Law school, and passing the bar, are merely the first steps along a path to developing a deep understanding of what it is to practice law.

Yet, given the speed at which today’s world consumes information, short attention spans, and flagrant self-promotion, it’s easy for people to appear to be “experts” – lawyers included. It can be difficult for the general public to parse which lawyers are truly experts and which are not. People are confused as to where they should turn for legal advice.

Which is why, as I’ve mentioned before, the majority of people still rely upon advice and suggestions from friends and family when looking for a lawyer. That’s not to say there is not a shift towards online research via blogs, social media, and legal platforms such as Avvo. But when people are looking for some to hand a serious problem to, they want to make informed decisions. As such, they tend to go to those they already rely and trust.

So lawyers often like to make themselves appear as experts. They accrete awards, scholarships, and publications like barnacles on a dock. Anything to make themselves appear as an authority on a topic or subject, even if they’re not. Of course, in the process of doing so they also likely begin to convince themselves that they are experts. After they’ve been “faking it til they make it” for awhile, they may selectively self-decide they have made it!

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“I’ve decided I’m a winner! Because gosh darnit, people like me!” But they’re merely delusional and falling victim to the now-infamous Dunning–Kruger effect in which relatively unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than is accurate.

An Expert, You Are Not

While the towering confidence of the unskilled is usually the focus of any story mentioning the Dunning-Kruger effect, it also suggests that the inverse is true: highly skilled individuals may underestimate their relative competence. But recent research indicates this may not be the case. A new paper in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology explores how feelings of expertise can make you more closed-minded:

The study shows us the effect of the social role of expertise, manipulated independently from the true possession of expertise. In other words, the path of acquiring knowledge, and being wrong a lot along the way, may produce countervailing positive influences upon open-mindedness, something not examined in this study. This means we can conclude from this research a narrow but important point: that thinking of yourself as “being the expert” can be an obstacle to open-mindedness.

This suggests that even when people do begin to approach levels of real expertise, they’re still prone to self-delusion. We’re just naturally quick to react with bias. It doesn’t matter where you are on the continuum of experience, you need to be sure to guard against prejudice and close-mindedness when presented with new problems. This is why it’s incredibly important for lawyers to constantly cultivate a beginner’s mindset – even when you do achieve levels of real expertise, you retain openness and a lack of preconceptions just as a beginner in that subject would.

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By embracing a beginner’s mind, lawyers can allow for new experiences and account for challenging ideas. To do so otherwise is burying your hand in the sand and hoping for the best. Lawyers have to be able to confront challenges to their arguments, preconceptions, and propositions. Not just in the courtroom or over a document, but in all aspects of life.

An openness to facing adversity and a willingness to having knowledge challenged are required if you want to develop real expertise and experience. That doesn’t change whether you’re in or out of the courtroom. It’s a full-time job called life.

And if someone can’t manage the above, they’re not likely to make a very good lawyer. Think about that next time someone asks you for a referral.

Keith Lee practices law at Hamer Law Group, LLC in Birmingham, Alabama. He writes about professional development, the law, the universe, and everything at Associate’s Mind. He is also the author of The Marble and The Sculptor: From Law School To Law Practice (affiliate link), published by the ABA. You can reach him at keith.lee@hamerlawgroup.com or on Twitter at @associatesmind.

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