Biglaw

The Reverse Golden Rule

To err in Biglaw is human. To forgive is divine, and potentially profitable.

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There aren’t many universal rules to the human experience, but a precious few have earned a spot in the rule book. We all know the Golden Rule: treat others as you want to be treated. I’m also a fan of the Platinum Rule: treat others as they want to be treated. I’d like to humbly submit a new rule for your consideration. The Reverse Golden Rule: treat yourself how you would treat someone else in your position.

The inspiration for this piece came from a recent article from the Harvard Business Review on a skill set called self-compassion that remains vastly underutilized in the legal world. Self-compassion is the ability to handle our own failures in a mature and productive way, by honestly recognizing the faults that led us to failure, but forgiving ourselves for those faults combined with taking action to do better in the future. People who demonstrate high levels of self-compassion tend to be happier, healthier, more professionally fulfilled, and tend to feel more authentically in touch with their true selves.

Self-compassion is defined better by action more than words. It is being kind to yourself, rather than judgmental. It’s recognizing your failures with the knowledge that all humans make errors. We demonstrate it when we properly harness the negative emotions associated with failure to teach and inspire us, while balancing them with positive emotions that keep us from being overwhelmed or giving up all hope of improvement. In short, it’s approaching failure with a healthy and honest attitude. Maybe most importantly, it’s about being open about the fact that we make mistakes and seeing them as opportunities for growth, rather than evidence of defects in our fundamental being.

Why We Suck

Given that self-compassion is the sign of a functional, mentally and emotionally mature person, it’s perhaps unsurprising that lawyers are typically terrible at it. We are not by our nature happy, emotionally balanced people. We have some of the highest depression, substance abuse, and self-harm statistics of any profession. We’re a self-selecting group of professionals who tend to be highly organized, highly disciplined, and to have incredibly low tolerances for failure and risk. We choose to engage in a job where any error we make could cost massive amounts of money, or permanently impact the rights of the people who’ve entrusted us with their families, freedom, or lives. The demands of our profession mean failure is typically not an option, and so we’re a profession made up of people who can’t stand to fail.

It’s more than just who we’re composed of, though. It’s also who we choose to be our peers. Consider the qualities that a Biglaw firm typically looks for in its partnership. Firms look for perfectionism, total dedication, and exacting standards. Succeeding within a firm means projecting at all times an aura of hard-driving success, and of demanding — and obtaining — top-notch work out of the people below you. There’s no room for error in a Biglaw partnership, and the people who tend to succeed are the people who don’t allow for error in themselves or others. Self-compassion isn’t a skillset that Biglaw inherently cultivates or rewards.

Our clients push us toward perfectionism, as well. Most clients pay handsomely for their attorneys, and they expect to receive the value that they’re putting in. Clients justifiably don’t like paying for work that gets messed up. Attorneys that make errors don’t keep their clients for long.

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Everywhere an attorney turns, they find more and more reinforcement for the notion that errors are unforgiveable. Lawyers need self-compassion as much as any human being, but they’re in a job that teaches them at every turn that self-compassion isn’t to be tolerated.

Acting The Part

Surviving in Biglaw, like in many industries, requires a degree of public relations acumen. I talked last month in this column about the George Costanza effect, how we pressure ourselves and our associates into always being busy, or at least seeming busy. In the same way our industry pressures attorneys to perform the part of the crazy-busy workhorse, we ask each other to perform the part of perfect, error-free automaton. We minimize our failures as much as possible and amplify our successes because the image of success cultivates actual success — or at least that’s what we tell ourselves.

Law is the art of selling advice. To sell our expertise we have to inspire confidence in our clients, and in our partners and colleagues. We have to play the part of all-knowing sage and crafty gambler, keeper of secret wisdoms, exploiter of errors made by the other side, minimizer of the errors made by our clients. We spend so much time projecting this aura of absolute competence that we end up without the tools we need to handle failure when it happens. And sooner or later, it always happens. If we don’t have the tools to reconcile our inner knowledge of failure with our public personas of competence, we court disaster.

Without self-compassion, our options for addressing failure are few. We can gloss over and ignore our failures, which saves us the mental grief of acknowledging them, but also deprives us of opportunities to learn from them. Alternately, we can wallow in our errors, flagellating ourselves for falling below the impossible bar we’ve set, which leads to unhealthy outcomes and toxic working environments. Those coping strategies contribute hugely to the crises our industry is facing in attorneys’ stress, burnout, and mental and physical health failures.

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Fixing The Problem

Self-compassion offers the tools we need to reconcile these conflicts, but it requires us to reconfigure some of our basic assumptions about ourselves. We have to start with the knowledge that we’re all human, and each and every one of us is bound to screw up eventually. When we do, we need to address our errors honestly, account for why they happened, make amends where we can, and ultimately forgive ourselves and move on. Acknowledging our faults, taking lessons from them, and letting them go are at the heart of the concept.

So how do we start cultivating self-compassion in a profession that’s notoriously bad at it? I can think of two solid starting points. First, to treat ourselves better, we need to start treating each other better. We need to cultivate environments where people feel free and safe to talk about their errors. When we identify or learn of mistakes our colleagues make, we need to address them swiftly in ways that help avoid the errors going forward, but not in merciless ways where we gun for their jobs or refuse to work with them ever again because of isolated errors. Addressing mistakes in an honest, direct and fair way helps create the kind of safe working environments that cause teams to excel.

And once we’ve done that, that’s when it’s time for the Reverse Golden Rule. We need to treat ourselves the same way we’ve treated those around us. When we screw up, we need to ask ourselves how we would treat a colleague who came and told us they’d made the same error. Most of us wouldn’t give up on our colleagues after a single mistake, or two, or three, and we shouldn’t give up on ourselves either. When we offer ourselves the same understanding and fair-minded approach we offer others, we take one more step toward making our firms, and Biglaw itself, a healthier and more productive place.

James Goodnow

James Goodnow is an attorney, commentator, and Above the Law columnist. He is a graduate of Harvard Law School and is the managing partner of an NLJ 250 law firm. He is the co-author of Motivating Millennials, which hit number one on Amazon in the business management category. You can connect with James on Twitter (@JamesGoodnow) or by emailing him at James@JamesGoodnow.com.

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