I’ve been thinking lately about the cult of personality, when one person is able to exert tremendous influence over a large group by sheer virtue of his or her charisma. Flattery and praise are unquestioned, and naysayers are summarily disposed of.
I’ve witnessed the cult of personality in otherwise intelligent and well-reasoned attorneys.
As a general matter, lawyers are inquisitive and intelligent. They read, study, learn and adopt practices and procedures over time, adjusting as the need to do so arises.
At least, that’s the way it is supposed to work.
But lately I’ve spoken with a number of very smart lawyers who find a form or sign up for an expensive intensive conference and adopt everything wholesale. They use the form for the motion because someone says it works, but without bothering to read it carefully and investigate the case law and statutory interpretation behind it.
Huge mistake.
Case in point: a colleague called me the other day with a problem. Seems that he filed a case in bankruptcy court against a creditor and alleged a string of discharge violations. Big case, big time investment. He was working with forms supplied by someone else, just following the documents and waiting for his adversary to send him a big check so he could move onto the next case.
After all, the form helped this other attorney reap a windfall in a similar case. It’s all good, right?
Not even close.
My colleague got his head handed to him in open court, came to me begging for a solution. So I spent an hour on the phone with him, asking him WHY he was doing what he was doing. He had no idea, just kept parroting back to me that the form and the attorney who had drafted the form told him to file the case this way.
Poor guy. Got sucked down the rabbit hole. Now he’s gonna spend months getting himself out of the case and making it all go away. Client’s gonna be real upset, he’s not getting paid for any of this, and other cases will sit in a pile on his desk as he tries to work out the problems in this one.
What have we learned here? When someone tells you about this great new tactic that makes a ton of money and tells you all you need to do is use a couple of simple forms, take a minute and ponder it. Read the documents, understand them and deconstruct them. If you can pull them apart and put them back together then you get the privilege of using them.
I’m not telling you that your mentors and colleagues who seek to help are full of hot air. Quite the contrary – we all have a lot to learn from others who have been around the block a few times. Just make sure you can “own” the processes and procedures before adopting them. Because if you’re just gonna take someone’s word for it then you better be ready to be slapped around by the court and your adversaries.
Jay, I am in total agreement with your assessment. I got drilled on the concept of never citing anything unless you read it – fair enough – that's a lawyer thing. Lazy lawyers get slain. But – the marketing rabbit hole is a touch different. Some of us are on different pages simply because of our birth dates – and because we were weened on PC's. I finally broke down and bought a Mac. Guess what – my video loaded without a crash and I am able to understand things that were once a distant Microsoft cloud of dust.
Can you please recommend a Headway consultant whose fees are in line with their delivery? Thank you. Mike
Mike:I agree that legal marketing and law office management issues are not readily within every lawyer's sphere of knowledge. The bottom line is that nobody should do something just because they are told to do so; they need to understand the WHY as well as the HOW. Mechanics are great, but never jump without full knowledge.
Mike:I agree that legal marketing and law office management issues are not readily within every lawyer's sphere of knowledge. The bottom line is that nobody should do something just because they are told to do so; they need to understand the WHY as well as the HOW. Mechanics are great, but never jump without full knowledge.