Being “bright” and “special” is nice. But winning takes hard work. And the harder worker usually wins.
When my best friend from high school, who graduated from West Point, finished his time in the service, he got a job on Wall Street. Not long after he began he told me, “This is a lot like the Army. Ninety percent of it is showing up.”
As lawyers, we like to think that it’s about more than just being there in our office, or in court, or in the conference room, or wherever. We believe we somehow are the professional elite (unless, or perhaps especially, if a doctor is in the room). We pride ourselves on our acumen, our creativity, our deep knowledge of a given area of law or practice, our well-trained minds — and so on.
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Certainly, our work is interesting and intellectually challenging. One of the great things about being a trial lawyer is that there are ways we can bring special skills to the service of our clients to help them achieve their goals: that acumen, creativity, knowledge, and actual training (that is, what you learn by working and not in law school classes) can, in fact, really help our clients win, and help us have a lot of fun in the fighting.
None of that, though, is a substitute for simple hard work, and lots of it. We like to call ourselves clever and bright (I am amazed at how clever lawyers are indeed by not outright calling themselves bright, instead praising their intelligence, while pretending to praise others, by saying, “I work with really bright people.”). We think we are special because of this or that creative idea we had. Again, that is nice. But it is not enough. All of those skills and training and elite stuff does not relieve us of the obligation of lots of hard work.
We may be so bright with great degrees, but we still need actually to review hundreds of pages of a witness’s statements, generally multiple times, before we interview, or depose, or cross examine that witness at trial. Smartness is cute and everything, but it’s not like actually reading all those appellate cases before the argument in front of a demanding judge who may have written some of those cases or at least is prepared for the argument by having read the relevant authority, just like you should assume your adversary is. We may have done that year “in England” or have graduated from this or that elite school, but we still need to review all the exhibits, decide what order they go in, make sure they are numbered, and that we have enough copies or the right file format for court.
Most lawyers are not idiots, but it is not our self-proclaimed genius which will help us win. It’s working hard, every single day, in every single case — and, almost always, harder than our adversary — that will help us win.
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John 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 [email protected].