Boutique Law Firms, Litigators, Small Law Firms

Stop Wondering If You Did Something Wrong: You Can Always Get The Acai Bowl Tomorrow

Dwelling on your mistakes won’t change anything.

By Matthew W. Schmidt  
on

Don’t spend all your time second guessing if you did something wrong. You probably did, but dwelling on it won’t change anything.

Each day, every one of us makes thousands of individual decisions. You decide whether to hit snooze, what to have for breakfast, how to commute into the office, what font to use for something, and many, many other things. There’s a very good chance that, as a simple matter of math, you got some of those wrong and you don’t even know it. Maybe you got the avocado toast this morning instead of the acai bowl, and now it haunts you all day long because you’re not sure if you should have gone for the acai bowl. The uncertainty’s worse than knowing for sure that you made the wrong choice. It gnaws at you.

But (at least at our current level of scientific development) nothing you can possibly do will allow you to have not eaten the avocado toast, and instead have gotten the acai bowl. You can spend the entire day beating yourself up over that, but it won’t change a thing. Instead, you really should just get over it, and get the acai bowl tomorrow.

Stop Second Guessing Yourself

At the risk of being a clichéd self-help book, one of the least productive things you can do in life is second guessing yourself, and litigators spend far more time doing it.

There’s a fine, but key, distinction here: Reflecting on how you could have done better is valuable. But looking back to assign blame is destructive. It’s destructive individually, but it’s exponentially destructive in an organization because it encourages CYA behavior and a lack of risk taking. It encourages people to be chickens, not pigs.

This distinction sounds pedantic, but intuitively we all know the difference. Tom Brady watching videos of his last game to see how he could improve is productive. A Woody Allen character sitting at home obsessing about how he may have said the wrong thing at a cocktail party is self-destructive. It’s largely in the intent: looking back to see how you can do better in the future is good. Looking back to flagellate yourself for past mistakes is the archetype of a toxic waste of time.

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Why Litigators Are So Susceptible To Toxic Second Guessing

One of the most serious institutional problems with litigators today is that it’s the default career path for those who can’t make up their mind. You take smart people in college who don’t know what they want to do with their lives, they go to law school by default, and then they go into litigation in a large New York firm by default. Most law schools don’t even pretend to screen by anything except LSAT and GPA, so any reasonably diligent student takes their 170 and 3.8, gets into a good school, then slides into a summer program, and litigation’s the default choice.

The problem is that complex commercial litigation is a strong contender for worst possible default career choice for risk-averse, highly cautious people who have never held a job before. I make an effort to be available to undergraduates who need advice, and I’ve lost count of the number of times I heard that law school’s a great choice if you don’t know what you want to do. It’s not the students’ fault; the issue is an institutional failure of everyone from guidance counsellors to parents pushing their children into legal careers. I always try to convince them that law school’s a terrible idea if they don’t want to be lawyers. They almost always seem too set in their ways to even consider it.

I did my undergrad work in finance, and most business students don’t have this problem. The majority end up in banking or consulting, sure, but they’re ready for it and excited for it. Most of them are in business school because they want to work in one of the fields it feeds into. Many of the interviews are even designed to screen out, at a minimum, the pikers who can’t even fake interest in the subject for a few hours. Legal interviews tend to not bother with this at all.

Even in practice, I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard practicing commercial litigators (although never my colleagues) complain that they’re simply moving money around for wealthy companies.

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First, this is wrong. Commercial litigation is, without exaggeration, the main thing standing between us and total societal collapse. If businesses and individuals lacked a reliable and trustworthy way to resolve disputes, they would be forced to resolve them through open violence, which is exactly what happens throughout the world in black markets where people don’t have recourse to the law. Even if we didn’t get to that point, any inefficiency in dispute mechanisms causes substantial costs. Reasonable people may disagree about the resources that the U.S. puts into its lawyers, but our federal court system is the greatest dispute resolution system humanity has yet created. There are worse things as a culture we could spend money on.

Second, if someone doesn’t agree with the importance of commercial litigation, that’s their business, but they really should find another job. Deciding to spend your life in a constantly demanding job that you hate and think is useless is just a bad idea.

In any event, selecting for people who couldn’t decide on a career path and hate being commercial litigators isn’t a formula that selects for a willingness to make quick decisions and ability to avoid becoming overcome by loss aversion (or as my favorite economist put it recently, being more motivated by love of winning rather than hatred of losing).

Start Being Part Of The Solution

Unfortunately, you probably won’t be able to solve any of these structural problems in litigation in your lifetime. But you can at least become aware of the problem and start becoming part of the solution.

Don’t worry about unknowns in the past. You probably won’t achieve a Zen-like state right away, and you shouldn’t. A certain level of self-criticism and paranoia is necessary for anyone to maintain an edge in any field. But don’t fool yourself into thinking it’s immediately productive. It’s a leisure activity that makes you indirectly better, just like you’ll be a better lawyer if you eat right, get some sleep occasionally, and stay in shape. But when you’re up against a deadline, going to the gym for a few hours followed by a nap isn’t going to get the brief done.

So don’t burn valuable work time obsessing over whether you should have gotten the acai bowl this morning. Get over it and just get one tomorrow.

Matthew W Schmidt Balestriere FarielloMatthew W. Schmidt has represented and counseled clients at all stages of litigation and in numerous matters including insider trading, fiduciary duty, antitrust law, and civil RICO. He is of counsel at the trial and investigations law firm Balestriere Fariello in New York, where he and his colleagues represent domestic and international clients in litigation, arbitration, appeals, and investigations. You can reach him by email at matthew.w.schmidt@balestrierefariello.com.

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