Small Law Firms, Solo Practitioners

Can You Say 'No'?

In the legal realm, the repercussions for saying "yes" when you should have said "no" can be great.

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Gary J. Ross

Gary J. Ross

After being snowed in most of the day, last Saturday night around midnight I popped out for a walk. (I was going a little stir crazy.) A bakery was open late, so I stopped in for a bite. There were a few other customers, including a group of drunk kids who had evidently spent the day exhausting their beer supply, and just one guy behind the counter taking orders, preparing food, and ringing people up. While he was ringing up my order, he was on the phone saying to someone he was trying to close up but people kept coming in and “the people are hungry.” He told everyone who came in he was about to close up but would go ahead and get them something. After a while he started telling people the kitchen was closed, but they could have a pastry or anything else that was already prepared and out front. One person said, “Well, I need a few minutes to make up my mind,” and then after those few minutes he said he really wanted some French fries. The counter person said, well, okay.

French fries!? French fries aren’t a pastry! The guy just couldn’t say “no.” I was there about a half hour, and he was still there when I left, and still trying to tell himself — as well as the person on the phone — he was about to leave, right after he took care of the customers. (As long as they got a pastry, unless they wanted something else.)

In Biglaw, I had trouble saying “no.” Do you have time for this? Sure. Can you get this to me by the end of the day? Um, okay. Most of the time there wasn’t even a question involved, so I would feel like I didn’t have the opportunity to say “no.” “Help me with this project.” “I’m going to put you on this deal.” “I have something else you can help me with.” “You are my bitch.” (Actually, I think the last one was just implied.)

That’s probably my biggest regret, that I didn’t tell more people flat-out that I just didn’t have time for their deal, contract, community service project, whatever.  It’s okay to be there at 1am working on a document you’ve been working on all day. (I’m not saying it’s ideal. Just okay.) It’s another thing entirely to have to start a new project at 1 a.m., even if normally the project would only take an hour or two. At some point the brain is too tired to focus on starting something new. Many times I should have just said “no.”

In SmallLaw, you can get into even more trouble if you can’t say “no.” Of course there are the same time pressures, often more so. But I’ve also found that if you’re halfway decent, you’ll be the first stop for most of your clients, so you’ll get a lot of requests to do things you’ve never heard of, much less have experience in. You can lose your practice if you start agreeing to do things outside your bailiwick. Time is precious and it takes a long time to learn enough about a brand-new area of law to be able to do something competently — and you can’t really bill for that time — and nine times out of ten you wind up screwing it up anyway. No task is ever as simple as it sounds if you don’t know what you’re doing. Instead of spending a day billing six hours or so on your core competency, you can blow a day barely billing an hour, plus put yourself in danger of losing the client if you botch it. So it’s best to focus on what you do best, unless you just happen to have a lot of free time and are genuinely interested in that practice area.

The bakery customer got his French fries, and since they were cooked to order, I’m sure they were great. But in the legal realm, the repercussions for saying “yes” when you should have said “no” can be great. Deadlines can be missed. Everyone at the firm will have to scramble to comply with whatever it is you said “yes” to that you should have said “no” to. Clients can get fed up with delays or work product that doesn’t look quite right.

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Saying “no” in a way that is not off-putting is somewhat of an acquired skill, especially if you’re having to tell a client you’re too busy. “Can’t do it. I’m busy with my more important clients.” vs. “Oh gosh, the timing for this is terrible! We are completely tied up for the next few days on something with a firm deadline of Friday, but tell you what. Check with my friend Everett and see if he has the bandwidth. We do the same type of work and he has similar rates. Tell him you’re my favorite client.”

We — or at least most of us — are conditioned to want to please. But sometimes it’s best for everyone involved to just say “no.”

Gary J. Ross opened his own practice, Jackson Ross PLLC, in 2013 after several years in Biglaw and the federal government. Gary handles corporate and securities matters for startups, large and small businesses, private equity funds, and investors in each, and also has a number of non-profit clients. You can reach Gary by email at Gary.Ross@JacksonRossLaw.com.

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