You’ve heard the saying about “assumption” right?
Hate to start with vulgarity, but it’s important to this post.
If you haven’t heard of it before, please take your earmuffs off.
It goes something like to “assume” is to make an ass out of you and me, and although I hate to admit it, there’s some truth to it — and I learned it the hard way.
I don’t know that this is great for my brand – to share so many lessons from my failures, but then again, if this is helpful to one baby lawyer out there, then let my loss be your gain.
It’s difficult to put into words how important it is to have the skill of confirmation — so let me just share two instances with you — and then explain.
The Un-Confidential Mediation Memo
After completing a confidential mediation memo, I gave it to my secretary to fax, and started working on the next billable project. She let me know she handled it, and I didn’t give it another thought.
The next morning, the shareholder asked me to come to his office. I figured he just wanted to touch base on the case, and I would smugly let him know his superstar associate had that mediation memo HANDLED.
Instead, the rude awakening.
I felt like I slammed into a brick wall of questions….
- Did you have the right fax number for the mediator? Yes! Double-Triple Checked!
- Did your give your secretary the correct fax number? Yes! I created the cover sheet myself – I didn’t even delegate it!
- After she faxed it, did you confirm that it went to the correct number?
What the what? That’s on me, too?
-aSTONISHED ASSOCIATE, MEYBE
The shareholder brought it to my attention that he received a call from a government agency in another state that they received a confidential mediation memo. Apparently, my secretary didn’t fax the confidential memo to the mediator — rather, she faxed it to this government agency, who was kind enough to call us and let us know. They also advised that they didn’t read it and would shred it.
I was mortified.
I had assumed that my secretary would fax it to the right number.
I took it and immediately personally faxed it to the mediator and thanked my lucky stars that I didn’t blow a court deadline.
I shared it with my secretary – and asked her to double/triple-check her fax numbers – and also to send me the confirmations.
And the shareholder was gracious enough not to mention this in my review.
The Missing Court Reporter
Firms are run differently and may have different rules for ascension (for becoming a partner or shareholder). At my last firm, it was important to not only work for different shareholders in your office, but it was also important to work for shareholders outside of your office — to show that you could work for a number of shareholders but mostly so that when it was time for the firm to vote you in or out, you had some peeps on your side.
I was really excited and quite honored to get the opportunity to work for this particular shareholder from the Houston office, who was known to be a phenomenal trial lawyer. I took special care to make sure everything I did for him was excellent, knowing how influential he was in the firm. He was coming to Dallas to take the plaintiff’s deposition, and I practically pulled an all-nighter to make sure he was prepped.
The morning of the deposition, I felt good. Everything was falling into place, and I felt really strong about our case and the prep. But our court reporter was apparently late.
“Mey, can you check on the court reporter?”
“Sure thing!” I exclaimed cheerily.
I called my secretary (a different secretary than the scenario above) to check.
“Mey, I’m sorry. I didn’t schedule a court reporter. I thought it was the paralegal’s job.”
Insert the wide-eyed emoji here.
In her defense, she was new, but I assumed that she received some orientation or training that when I gave her the deposition notice to serve, she would handle the arrangements. That’s all I had to do before – hand it to our previous secretary and a court reporter magically appeared for the deposition. It didn’t dawn on me that I had to specifically ask for it to happen.
I calmly asked her to book one asap and text me ETA, and then had to go explain to this very powerful shareholder why we didn’t have a court reporter.
Luckily, the plaintiff was also late so when we started an hour later than we intended, it didn’t look like it was all my fault.
Also, lucky for me, the shareholder wasn’t a yeller. (Trust me baby lawyers, they exist).
In fact, he was very calm and even complimentary of how I took responsibility and fixed it, even though I botched it. And in kindness and grace, he told me ahead of time that he wouldn’t ding me on my review, and that this was an important lesson that I would probably remember for the rest of my career.
He was right.
You see, in each of the two scenarios, I assumed that something would take place, but I didn’t double-check it, didn’t confirm.
Now, you may be thinking to yourself that my assumptions were reasonable and that the practice of law must allow for these mistakes.
And you’re right – it can and does, but in true form, it depends on the circumstances.
Under any perfect storm, my mistakes / failure to confirm or double-check could lead to damage to my brand, to the firm brand, a malpractice claim or worse, loss of a license. I was just fortunate that these mistakes were easily fixable.
So some takeaways?
- Get in the habit of double-checking our work.
- Get in the habit of confirming your staff’s work (at least at first) to confirm the process for how things are handled – until you build some trust and get into a groove. No one likes to micro-managed so tread carefully, but it’s important for you to know how things get done (in case you get questioned).
