Recently, I attended a symposium for attorneys who practice in small firms or as sole practitioners. A “symposium,” it turns out, is a lot like a “conference,” except that the PowerPoint presentations don’t have any text.
(I’m kidding, but I wish I weren’t. With only a couple exceptions, everyone who did a PowerPoint presentation embraced a Dickensian philosophy of over-populating their points with prose, producing slides that were gorged with text — big steaming paragraphs within bullets within sub-bullets — yielding a tragic inverse between the number of points the speakers wished to make and the number of points they afforded their fonts. Some other day I will rant at greater length about the proper use of PowerPoint, but for now here’s a handy tip: If your slides can double as an eye test for the audience, you’re doing it wrong.)
One of the last speakers of the day addressed the topic of stress and how to manage it. (Not surprisingly, perhaps, his PowerPoint included an almost Zen-like paucity of words, limited to a few simple bullets per slide. Sadly, the venue was suffering from a power outage at that point, so we had to follow along with his slides on handouts that had been printed as “notes” pages with three slides to a page plus some lines for taking notes, instead of the vastly superior two-to-a-page slides-only format, but I appear to be lapsing into a PowerPoint rant again and so I will manage my own stress by changing the topic back to his.)
His talk was framed as a self-help lecture — stress is unhealthy, and lawyers are especially susceptible to it, so we should know how to recognize and reduce stress. But the topic got me thinking about the importance of this advice not only as a mechanism for improved happiness, but also as an essential component of being a good lawyer. Our job is to be not stressed, because our clients usually are. Indeed, that is one of the most important reasons to have someone represent you in a dispute.
A Stressed Lawyer is a Bad Lawyer
Many symposiums (symposia? symposii? symposiae?) …
Many conferences devoted to law practice management include presentations about stress reduction because lawyers tend to be pretty stressed-out individuals, which can lead to a variety of health and happiness problems. Lawyers — and litigators in particular — tend to embrace conflict, intensity, and long hours. Stress clings to all of those concepts to such a degree that they feel inseparable. As a result, many litigators feel as if they must not be doing the job correctly unless they are feeling the pressure from time to time.
Litigators are stress junkies.
And while litigators often wear their stress tolerance as a badge of honor, and think of it as part of the job, in reality it can interfere with doing the job well. (Not to mention that it does harm to our bodies and relationships, but I’m leaving the “self-help” aspects aside for the moment.) Our role as representatives of clients who are in the middle of disputes is to provide those clients with objective advice, and serve as their voice in dealing with other parties. Stress detracts from our ability to do either of those things effectively. The symposium speaker succinctly stated several symptoms of stress, summarized shortly to support that statement. (Anyone want to have an alliteration contest? Yeah, I thought not.)
Stress is a physiological reaction — a triggering of the “fight or flight” reflex that kept early humans from being eaten by lions and the like. As the speaker put it, when confronted by a wild animal, your body can either react without thinking (either by running away or fighting the critter), or it can allow you to calmly consider your options while you get eaten. Evolution has selected for those people who wisely (and automatically) gravitate toward the first option. So in a stressful situation, your brain immediately shuts down higher brain function and reacts on instinct.
Think about that for a second.
No higher brain function.
No careful consideration of options.
No reasoning through the possible ramifications of any decision.
I’m pretty sure that, as a “counselor” at law (or an “advocate,” or even just a “hired gun”) that is not a scenario in which I’m going to provide my clients with the advice they deserve, and need, and are paying for.
So good attorneys need to manage (or eliminate) their stress. We become calmer under pressure, rather than letting a frenetic situation carry us along with it. This isn’t just a matter of self-preservation (although that’s the “self-help” aspect — the chemicals that the body releases during a “fight or flight” episode are literally toxic); it’s what we’re being paid for. Really, this is one of the most important reasons that you hire a lawyer in the first place.
“In an argument, the first one to get angry loses.”
I ran across this bit of home-spun, internet-spread wisdom last week, in one of those lists of advice that all fathers should give their sons. (Note: I was never given this advice. But I was taught not to ask a question on cross-examination to which I did not know the answer, so I guess it balances out.) In the middle of the “fight or flight” portion of the stress lecture, the quote re-surfaced in my brain in a new light. The truth of this pithy remark isn’t just that you lose some dignity when you get angry, or that we value composure and congeniality more than being right. Those things may be true, but they are value judgments. I’m now looking at the quote as a valuable piece of tactical advice: anger puts you at a competitive disadvantage in an argument, so you should avoid it if you want to win. Or, if that is impossible, hire a lawyer.
If you are in a dispute of sufficient magnitude that there may be a lawsuit on the horizon, chances are someone has done something to make you mad. Really mad. I’m-plotting-my-revenge kinda mad, to the point where you are having visions of hurling bricks through someone’s window, possibly with a summons and complaint attached, depending on whether your revenge fantasies typically run to litigation. (Hey, some people’s do, and believe me, I’m not judging them.)
If you’re that angry, you are almost certainly under stress. And that stress makes you a bad decision-maker; indeed, your higher brain function is impaired. Of course you are going to lose an argument in that state — you are literally not thinking clearly. And not only will you lose the argument, you will probably also lose track of whether you should be having the argument at all, or whether you’d be much better off trying to make peace. This is why you need a lawyer. You need someone to do your talking for you when your brain isn’t working well, and you need someone to give you calm counsel and help you evaluate your options. In the modern era, taking time to reflect on your options probably will not result in you being eaten by a lion, but try explaining that to a brain formed by many thousands of years of evolution.
(I tried writing that last sentence without the word “probably” but my legal training just wouldn’t let me.)
“A man who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client.”
There’s no better illustration of your inability to do this on your own than situations in which the disputant is a lawyer himself. A couple years ago, I got a call from a colleague who had a small collections matter with a former client. The suit in small claims court led to a counter-claim asserting malpractice, and the colleague wanted to move the case to superior court and further escalate the matter. “Settle,” I advised. “Immediately.” And had he not been furious at the former client, he probably would have said the same thing. Even people who are trained to assess the merits of pursuing claims, and to consider ramifications and alternatives, become obsessed with bringing suit when it’s their own claim. Because they’re angry. Because they’re stressed. My job is to help them think about the problem using a brain that isn’t deprived of its higher functions.
So when you hire a lawyer to go sue someone in order to carry out your revenge fantasy and inflict as much harm as possible, only the bad ones will do exactly as you ask without thinking. The good ones will separate stress from strategy, and give you the advice you need.
(They may even use PowerPoint when delivering the advice, but if the slides are covered with small-font text, run away immediately or a lion will eat you.)