New UK Website – Legal Lookbacks – Highlighting Mistakes In The Legal Sector

We know being a lawyer demands excellence and hard work. While this attitude can deliver great results, it can also turn us into hyper-perfectionists – unwilling to embrace mistakes and less resilient in the face of stress.

No matter how ‘right’ we want to be all the time, we’re going to be wrong at least some of the time. And when mistakes inevitably happen, research indicates that constructively engaging with your mistakes is a tremendously powerful way to learn. Error avoidance? Not as much. 

Let’s cultivate a productive interest in our mistakes, so we can be better to ourselves and be better lawyers too.

Perfectionists tend to interpret mistakes as failures, and that these failures describe something intrinsic about them.
It’s time we stopped seeing mistakes personal failings to be denied or justified but as everyday aspects of our lives that will help us make better decisions, improve ourselves, and grow.

Many of our mistakes in law are administrative or relate to personal pressures, such as slipped deadlines or sending incorrect documents under tight timeframes. These risks can be reduced by reflecting on the way you and your team work, as well as putting processes in place. For example, in the medical and aviation industries, the use of checklists is an established method of avoiding preventable mistakes.

If you have a “fixed mindset”, you assume that your intelligence and ability are fixed aspects of yourself that can’t be changed in any way. A “growth mindset”, on the other hand, views mistakes as opportunities for learning, and that aspects like intelligence and ability can be cultivated. A mistake isn’t a reflection of a person’s innate ability, but instead is a chance to create a better outcome next time or learn something new.
If you believe your mistakes always reflect incompetence, and that being incompetent is an unchangeable trait in a person, any mistake can seem unbearable as it goes to the core of your self-worth. We try to embrace a growth mindset and prioritise growth over (impossible) perfection.

Legal Lookbacks is about being curious and objective about mistakes: What can I learn from this? What was within my control? What were my expectations? Were they reasonable? Were there any other successes from this? How can this become a success? Is there someone I should talk to, or seek advice from? And where do I go from here?
Reading about other people’s mistakes is also an opportunity to see how others have dealt with similar issues. Standing on the shoulders of other people and openly learning about mistakes will make us more adaptable and, ultimately, better lawyers.

As Tim Harford writes in Adapt: Why Success Always Starts with Failure, “In a complex, changeable world, the process of trial and error is essential. That is true whether we harness it consciously or simply allow ourselves to be tossed around by the results.”

We welcome your stories on Legal Lookbacks, and we hope you find this to be a useful, open space to learn from each other’s dreaded “oops!” moments. Take a moment to share.