In-House Counsel

The Road Not Taken: A Series of Fortunate Events

In-house counsel columnist writes about a useful tool to get you through the bad days.

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It was not a fun week at work for me. It is a busy time of year. I’m working long hours, but the additional time at the office didn’t translate into sufficient time to focus on my work, it just turned into more work. I was stressed and overwhelmed, as were my colleagues. I knew I was making mistakes. Fortunately, I prevented disaster by using one of my favorite non-required tools: a checklist.

I’m a big fan of checklists to help me with my job. Checklists aren’t a tool most lawyers use; we aren’t introduced to them in law school, and they are not a requirement for any court filing or the validity of a legal document. When I’m in a confident mental space with plenty of time, I can almost talk myself out of using checklists: “Why do I need to put myself through an extra step? I know what I’m doing. I’ve got this.”

And that is precisely why I use checklists. Because I do know what I’m doing, but I get distracted. I get tired. I get anxious. Deadlines are real. Perpetual fatigue over an extended period of time is a recipe for mistakes. Nobody can be perfect all the time and adding the stress of insufficient time and attention only increases the chances a mistake will happen. When I can’t trust myself for whatever reason, I can trust my checklists.

Ultimately, a checklist is a bespoke tool to help you identify what needs to be included in your final product. Because I work for a company, I have specific company-required elements to my checklists. An attorney who works with individuals as clients would have different, client-specific elements to include.

My checklists are for my personal use only, sort of like hand-written notes, so I can craft them in a way that works best for me. I put my checklists in outline form: the broad, big issues I know have to be included, then separate out the discrete issues within the bigger issue. When I feel like I’ve completed my work on a document, I pull out the checklist and confirm I caught everything.

It is easy to find ways to use a checklist when you work with the same general document or the same issues regularly, but I think checklists are more valuable when I am doing something I’ve never done before. In the case of something new, I gather all the requirements I will need to complete my action and transcribe them into a checklist. That way, I don’t have to re-find the references, my final review is streamlined and, if I end up getting distracted, I have an easy way to find where I was in my review when I return to it.

The power of checklists is not new, but it isn’t a tool attorneys use much. If you want to learn more about using checklists in your work, there is plenty of literature out there (affiliate link) about how checklists are used in medicine, aviation, and engineering disciplines. Ultimately though, you don’t need a book to tell you that you aren’t perfect every day and a checklist can help you through your non-perfect days. Create a checklist that is short enough that you will use it, but comprehensive enough to catch the things your brain might miss, which is a most fortunate event.

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Celeste Harrison Forst has practiced in small and mid-sized firms and is now in-house at a large manufacturing and technology company where she receives daily hugs from her colleagues. You can reach Celeste directly at[email protected].

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