There’s a Reason for the Lawyer Generational Divide: Getting Burned Spurs Nitpicking
One criticism of younger lawyers is that they aren’t as devoted to perfectionism as their elder counterparts. Is this evidence of a generation lacking in commitment?
More likely, older lawyers like to nitpick because they have been burned in the past, according to an Above the Law column by Aon vice president and chief counsel Mark Herrmann. He gives some examples of how mistakes lead to obsession.
You see a colleague get burned by waiting until 5 p.m. to call for vital information. The person has left for the day. “For the rest of your life, you make your phone calls for vital information before noon, just in case,” Hermann writes.
You send an email urgently requesting information and later learn the recipient is on vacation. “For the rest of your life, when you send an urgent email, you then call the person to whom you’ve sent the email to confirm that the person is not on vacation,” Herrmann says.
You ask your secretary to correct a couple typos in a brief, but don’t proof the changes. The secretary accidentally deletes a sentence and files the brief. “For the rest of your life, you read, from start to finish, the final form of every brief that’s going out the door, even though the last set of changes that you made involved only fixing two typos,” he says.
