Young And In Law: How Being A Young Attorney Has Its Advantages And Disadvantages
Experience is a double-edged sword: great when utilized correctly, but destructive when taken for granted.
Law, like many other fields, respects experience over exuberance, for better or for worse. In just about every profession, except for professional sports, an experienced professional is more valuable than someone in their first or second year. In consulting, for example, how can a first- or second-year analyst be more valuable than an executive, or in finance how can you expect someone new to come in and immediately understand the markets? The answer is you can’t, but that’s not what you are doing when you hire young associates.
Before I have people emailing me that of course experience is coveted in the legal industry and every other industry, let me say on the record, I agree. Experience cannot be taught and comes only with working in any industry for an extended period of time, making it one of the most valuable traits in any profession, but especially law. That being said, experience is a double-edged sword: great when utilized correctly, but destructive when taken for granted. Inexperience and youth can be looked at in the same way.
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I do not think anyone, including my colleagues and I, would argue, cost aside, that you would rather have an experienced attorney working for you than a novice attorney. That is because an experienced attorney has seen more, knows the ins–and–outs of the industry, and has points of references for anything new that may get thrown their way. A first-, second-, or even third-year attorney may be brilliant but incapable of fully utilizing such talents without experience.
There’s a reason every attorney and every law firm, including our firm, has a list of representative cases, either on the firm website, under each individual attorney, or both. Prospective clients want to know not only the types of cases an attorney has worked on and the results, but that the attorney (or firm) has been doing it for a long time and has experience. Having an experienced attorney not only gives the client a sense of comfort but also gives them confidence they will win.
Does an experienced attorney make fewer mistakes than a new attorney? Almost certainly. Has an experienced attorney tried different approaches for the same issues? Hopefully. Is an attorney with more experience automatically a better attorney than someone only a year or two out of law school? No.
That last answer may surprise some people, but it shouldn’t. Putting aside that there are bad lawyers out there and that somewhere out there right now there is a future managing partner working as a first year, I think everyone would agree that experience alone does not make an attorney great. If that were the case, the industry would be dominated by geriatrics, and every client would have to meet their attorney for dinner before 4:30 p.m. That was a little mean, but I think everyone gets the point; experience should be coveted, but it is not the be all end all of being a good attorney.
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Exuberance Can (Sometimes) Be More Beneficial Than Experience
Ideally an attorney will be both experienced and exuberant, but this is not always the case. An experienced attorney with a case that he or she has seen a number of times before may just go through the motions (no pun intended). (Consider the movie Ender’s Game, where a young new recruit comes to training only to climb the ranks against others who had been in the program substantially longer by doing things differently than the accepted practices).
I saw this in one of my recent cases regarding a non–decisive issue: an extremely experienced attorney (someone who has likely been practicing law longer than I have been alive) was filing a brief in a court that they had likely litigated in for decades. The attorney filed a brief that was well over the specified word limit without realizing it, or so I thought.
This is the perfect example of experience verses youthful exuberance. The Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure (“FRAP”) had recently been amended to lower the word limit of all briefs. How did I know this? Because I had no idea how many words I would be permitted on opposition, so I did what any young lawyer (or really any lawyer) with no idea would do: I looked it up and learned that the word limit had recently been reduced. This was why I believed that my adversary had gone over the limit.
It turns out, however, that in this particular circuit there was a local rule that permitted the old word count for briefs. In my opinion, this makes for an interesting case study of the issue of experience verses exuberance, partially because we can all only infer who was more in the wrong or the right. I’m not afraid to say that I did not check the local rules upon seeing the word limit. I never knew or thought that the local rules could overrule the FRAP. I incorrectly assumed that if something was in FRAP, that was it; that was the rule. That is something that I know now, I am better for it, and I learned through experience.
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But what I will never know for sure is whether that experienced attorney failed to check because he thought he knew what the word limit was or he checked both FRAP and the local rules to discover the local rules permitted for something that FRAP did not. (Update: I think I figured it out and I think he screwed up, as the word count certification was based on FRAP and not the local rules.)
Who won this round, experience or exuberance? I would like to think it was a draw, but a dangerous one. There is little harm on my side by being well below the word limit aside from losing room for arguments; however, there is potential for tremendous harm where an entire argument on an issue may have been over the word limit on the other side. Of course there could have been the issue of the local rules requiring fewer words than FRAP and therefore I would have been in trouble had I complied only with FRAP and not local rules.
The lesson to me is this: never take experience for granted, treat every case as though you are a first-year associate, and use your experience not as a way to expedite matters but as a way to add value to services. Clients are willing to pay for experience, and there is no reason to cut corners that may undermine that experience.
Brian Grossman was an attorney at Balestriere Fariello, a trial and investigations law firm which represents clients in all aspects of complex commercial litigation and arbitration from pre-filing investigations to trial and appeals. You can reach firm partner John Balestriere at john.g.balestriere@balestrierefariello.com.
