A Lack of Mentoring, or Lack of Awareness?
Although it’s been nearly 20 years since I started my legal career, I can still vividly recall two recurrent thoughts from the first year or two I practiced:
• How was I going to learn all of this stuff? The actual practice of law required mastery of all sorts of technical rules, industry practices, professional understandings and strategic considerations. The senior attorneys in the firm just seemed to get it all; for me, as a newly–minted lawyer, it was a daily reminder of how little I knew.
• People will take advantage of your mistakes. You screw up, and opposing counsel is going to make you pay. This was one of the most unique – and terrifying – aspects of learning how to practice law.
What kept me out of trouble was being aware of these limitations. I learned as much as I could, everywhere I could. I asked questions. I looked things up. I worked hard, and absorbed everything. And if I had to give a partner or a client a legal answer that I knew they wouldn’t like, I took the time to make absolutely, positively certain that I was right.
After all, these were people with vastly more experience than me. I couldn’t presume to take a legal position based on something I remembered from law school, or came up with based on a cursory bit of research.
When I first read about Joseph Rakofsky getting over his head in taking a murder trial so early in his career, I immediately thought of how I felt when I was a year out of law school. Unprepared. Often overwhelmed. And I’ve thought about it more since the filing of “Rakofsky v. the Internet”, and being named as a defendant for writing a blog post about his ill-advised decision to file the suit. How could the lightning of ineptitude twice strike someone who should know better?
But I had two things as a young lawyer that Rakofsky apparently lacks: Awareness and good mentors. The effortless competence of the attorneys I worked with at that small litigation firm in San Mateo was a constant reminder of how much I needed to learn. And those attorneys were always offering guidance, advice and support.
Perhaps Rakofsky didn’t have mentors to help guide his decision-making in these formative early years of his legal career. It’s got to be harder to get advice from experienced attorneys when you’re trying to fly solo right out of school. But perhaps it wouldn’t have made a difference. Rakofsky had co-counsel for his murder case. He has a more experienced lawyer representing him in his Quixotic quest to silence those who wrote about his missteps. Surely someone has tried to offer some adult guidance. But if you haven’t the awareness, the understanding that you don’t know very much when you’ve just gotten your law license, mentoring hasn’t a chance.
There’s a concept in psychology known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. It’s a cognitive bias encountered by some incompetent people, in which they lack the ability to appreciate their own limitations. Perversely, this makes them MORE confident.
While those suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect may lead happy and contented lives in other occupations, the adversarial nature of practicing law is inevitably going to lay incompetence bare. That seems to be the case with the unfortunate Mr. Rakofsky. His murder trial ended badly, and his civil lawsuit will only compound the damage.
What’s the lesson of Rakofsky’s ineptitude? I believe that the vast majority of young attorneys are aware that they don’t know much, that law is a difficult profession where proficiency is earned only by time and practice. But if you’re a young lawyer, and what you’re thinking of doing flies in the face of conventional wisdom or the advice of more experienced attorneys, you need to look extra-hard in the mirror. You may be right. But you’ll be doing yourself a favor if you interrogate your ideas and conclusions from every angle before taking action. Or at least entertain the possibility that you’re wrong.
Because probably, you are.
June 4th, 2011 at 6:39 am
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