It pains me to confess this publicly: my work is not perfect. Part of the pain is pride, part of the pain is shame, and part of the pain is frustration. I would love for my work to be perfect with each word precisely selected. If only each carefully crafted sentence could be poetry in its own right, with every syllable infused with meaning. Unfortunately, if I waited until my work was perfect before sending it down the assembly line, I’d be crucified for being a bottleneck and my colleagues would be unable to do their jobs.
And so, I look for major defects, but if the work passes the basic inspection, it gets to travel through the machinery to get where it needs to be to serve its purpose. Much like an economy vehicle, my work is not prized for the clean lines, perfect hand stitching, or the bespoke artistry that makes a thing luxury. Rather, my work is valued for its utility and efficiency in getting to it. If it serves its purpose and I can prepare it quickly, then it is valuable to someone. If I can’t prepare it on the timeline that is demanded (which can often be hours, or even minutes), then it does not matter how perfect the product is. It will be useless for its purpose.
Releasing imperfect work is something we all have to do and, for most of us, it is something we learn on the job. Law school teaches us how to properly cite cases, the more we put into our exam essays, the better our grades. Then, comes real life: the partner who explains that he doesn’t need “all of this” in an early career legal memo; the client who refuses to pay for the hours of exhausting research to get to the “perfect” answer; the judge who ignores typos in your opponent’s brief to grant an order in your opponent’s favor. As we mature as legal professionals, we learn that “perfect” is not what gets the job done. Unfortunately, there isn’t a class in law school that teaches soon-to-be lawyers how to identify the priorities that can change work product from “perfect” to “what is needed to serve its purpose.” Add to this the subjective nature of much legal work, and many young lawyers (older ones too) are overwhelmed by the manpower necessary to make their work “perfect” for the immediate audience (like a supervising attorney) versus the need for efficiency and identifying the elements of work that will actually make the work useful to the client.
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To be clear, I am not advocating that lawyers give up on perfection. To the contrary, perfection is often exactly what is needed for specific projects. However, sometimes it isn’t what is needed. That’s part of the hard part of being a lawyer: knowing when to go for something other than “perfection,” or even worse, releasing work product into the world when you know it isn’t your best work.
It happens to all of us eventually. Even the most fastidious among us will eventually have to choose which sections of a document to proofread that one last time, which portions of the brief get additional research, and which part of the boilerplate you ignore because you’ve used it a million times. In time, this type of triage becomes a useful tool in the lawyer’s toolkit, but it is a tool that one earns only through the anguish of watching something you know could be improved go to someone else’s hands.
I sacrifice poetry, but I prevent a bottleneck. In my universe, efficiency is more valuable than poetry, so I have learned how to avoid being the bottleneck. As new lawyers join my team, I’ll invite them into the sanctum of tribal knowledge that lets us to do our jobs imperfectly enough to allow our colleagues to do their jobs well.
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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].