Biglaw

Getting It Right When We Get It Wrong

Lawyers hate admitting mistakes, and the profession is worse for it.

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Anybody that’s built a billion-dollar company from the ground up has probably had a couple of good ideas about the business world over the course of their career. Jeff Bezos has had more than that. Bezos is the founder and CEO of Amazon, arguably the billion-dollar company in the world today. From the smart speaker in your home to the omnipresent delivery drivers on the streets to the drones that may soon be patrolling the skies, Amazon is as successful as companies come.

So it intrigued me reading a profile of Bezos the other day promising to reveal the quality that he values most in his potential employees and colleagues. Most hiring committees will tell you they look for candidates with a proven track record of success. Bezos, on the other hand, is on the hunt for people who will admit to how often they’ve screwed up.

Before you start freshening up your résumé to send off to Bellevue, understand that Bezos isn’t looking for people who simply make errors. Rather, he’s looking for people who are capable of recognizing quickly and accurately, even at cost to themselves, when they’ve gotten something wrong, and who are willing to course-correct based on new, better ideas or data.

Striking A Balance

In the psychology and business studies fields, this sort of capacity is usually referred to as “intellectual humility.” Intellectual humility is the ability to commit to making informed, tough decisions, but to then remain open to changing course based on new information, new ideas, better reasoning, or unexpected feedback. It’s the ability to choose to go a hundred miles per hour, and then stop on a dime and head a different direction when emerging circumstances demand it. It’s the ability to make a reasoned change of opinion, even when that means recognizing failures on one’s own part.

It’s important to distinguish intellectual humility from self-deprecation or a lack of confidence. Intellectual humility actually requires a hell of a lot self-confidence. It requires someone to know that they’re smart and capable, to trust their own decision-making skills and ability to lead, and to get others to buy into the decisions they’ve made. It’s tough to do all of that without falling into straight-out arrogance, but the intellectually humble person has to be comfortable reexamining their prior decisions, and be open to the possibility they’ve made mistakes, or made a choice that is no longer the best one. It’s a hard balance to strike, which is why those who pull it off have Jeff Bezos’ attention.

You Are What You Do

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Answer me honestly: is Biglaw any good at cultivating or rewarding intellectual humility? I hate to say it, but I think the answer is no. I’m sure any reader of this blog has a wealth of anecdotal evidence at their disposal of intractable, arrogant lawyers committing to an idea and refusing to move off of it until far, far too late. I’m sure most lawyers’ spouses would also agree. “Humble” is not a word that gets bandied about much in the corridors of Am Law firms, unless we’re talking about how we humbled the other side of a case or a deal. Something about the private practice of law seems to discourage the development of intellectual humility.

The reasons for this disconnect are likely many, but the one that jumps out at me initially is that law is not structurally conducive to an intellectually humble mindset. Intellectual humility is based on the fundamental principle that the decisions in one’s past may have been good, or may have been sub-optimal or poor, and only by continually analyzing those decisions in light of new data will we understand how we ultimately did. An intellectually humble person is willing to jettison all the arguments that they thought were right if they’re presented new, better evidence or arguments.

Finding The Means To Justify The Ends

This is just about the opposite of a private practice lawyer’s work flow. Being a practicing lawyer means steeping oneself in the techniques of motivated reasoning — identifying the conclusion one wants to reach and then searching for arguments to justify reaching that conclusion. Preparing for a legal fight? A lawyer will start with the premise that their client’s position is the valid one, then go back to try to fill in the gaps to explain why.

Lawyers spend every day racking their brains searching for arguments to justify their clients’ desired endpoints. Those are the mental muscles we choose to exercise, and so we can’t be surprised when those techniques seep into our everyday thought patterns. When we spend all day trying to retroactively justify others’ business decisions, we train our minds to instinctively justify our own business decisions, even when those decisions were bad. We spend so much time convincing others that our analysis is correct in certain circumstances that we end up convincing ourselves that we’re never, ever wrong.

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At its worst, the lawyerly brain fools its owner into deploying seemingly reasonable arguments in defense of our knee-jerk, emotional decisions. Running a law practice is hard, especially in large firms. Any decision that gets made likely had opposition, and people who got entrenched in their opposing arguments and that want to see themselves vindicated in the end.

An intellectually humble attorney might look back on the decisions they had a hand in developing and ask questions about whether goals were met, whether unexpected outcomes cropped up, and whether the other approaches that weren’t taken might have been better at solving the problems the firm sought to address. An intellectually humble attorney must be willing to admit if they were wrong and accept that they may have to reverse course. An intellectually humble attorney will eat crow in front of an entire firm and ask that the project they’ve worked on for months be scrapped or entirely reconfigured beyond recognition.

How many attorneys do you know that would do that? How comfortable would you feel doing that, if you had to? How would a senior associate feel about their prospects of partnership a year removed from standing up in front of the firm and admitting they advocated for what turned out to be a bad idea? How many partners in your firm would feel safe in their jobs admitting “my bad” to their coworkers?

Biglaw would do itself a favor if it came to grips with the existence and inevitability of failure. Like the poet said, be humble. We’re going to screw up, and we’ll be better business people, and frankly just better people, if we can learn to admit it.

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 [email protected].

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