Litigators

Always Be A Work In Progress

We need to keep expanding and pushing: handle new work. Work with new people. Try to get new kinds of clients. Read new articles.

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You’re not supposed to stop getting better, so make sure you are always getting better (though be careful what that means). And if you actually think you’re done, it’s time to get a new job.

I don’t think we ever used the term to described ourselves when I was growing up, but after I was somehow let in to what my third son would call a “fancy” college, I realized that where I came from would be considered a ghetto. Yes, it had its fair share of crime (I grew up in New York City in the ’70s and ’80s), but, more, it was a restricted and, in many ways, small place — restricted by ethnicity, by experience, and by worldview. As an example, when I left it to go to that “fancy” college I met, for the first time, a white Protestant (where I came from just about everybody was Catholic or Jewish). And that’s when I was exposed to the notion of being born again.

In my naive (and, I suppose, ghetto) way, I interpreted being born again to just being done with your religion: accept this, and you’re over the finish line, and all set. I know it’s not that simple. But, more than that, I rebelled at my limited understanding of the notion even then. How can you be all done?

Well, we can’t be, or, at least, I think we shouldn’t be, and that applies not just to faith but to profession. If you’re blessed enough like me and my colleagues to be a lawyer in America and believe it’s the right thing for you, you can never be done. This isn’t a sprint where we try to get over that finish line as I imagined it in college. The marathon metaphor comes to mind, but a career in the law is the New York City marathon: through different neighborhoods, up and down, over different terrain, crossing bridges along the way, and at times more than a bit odd.

What exactly does that mean for how we work and live and grow as lawyers? Certainly it means not embracing this extreme niche notion of being a professional, being the person who can handle some arcane legal problem and, perhaps, only that arcane problem (which, as a practical matter, worked out, for example, extremely poorly for those hundreds of well-paid lawyers a decade ago who handled only mortgage-backed securities work).

We need to keep expanding and pushing: handle new work. Work with new people. Try to get new kinds of clients. Read new articles. If you’re a trial lawyer like me: try cases in new courts or arbitral bodies. Keep getting better, but the real way of getting better — not just, or not even, more money, or more “prestigious” work, or more awards (I still think the term “Super Lawyer” sounds like it’s from a comic book). Keep developing as a work in progress as a lawyer.

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But if that stresses you out — that you’re never going to quite know everything; you’re never going to be, or, at least, never should be comfortable; you’re always going to find yourself in a situation where, at first, you don’t have a solution — this simply may not be the job for you. I’m not being negative, but I am being serious. Gaggles of people go to law school for all kinds of bad reasons and then manage to become admitted lawyers. It doesn’t mean they all should be lawyers. And if the idea of constant growth stresses you out, then get out of this profession as soon as you can.

However, for those of us that don’t have much choice but to be lawyers, we have to be a bit impatient with ourselves. We should never be satisfied. We have to always push ourselves. We have to keep getting better at what we do and keeping helping our clients to win in the process.

john-balestriereJohn Balestriere is an entrepreneurial trial lawyer who founded his firm after working as a prosecutor and litigator at a small firm. He is a partner at trial and investigations law firm Balestriere Fariello in New York, where he and his colleagues represent domestic and international clients in litigation, arbitration, appeals, and investigations. You can reach him by email at john.g.balestriere@balestrierefariello.com.

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