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By Murray Gottheil | March 22, 2025
Paul is a junior lawyer. His supervising lawyer expects every document that Paul creates to be perfect. To ensure this, the supervisor reviews and often revises all of Paul’s draft documents, no matter how routine they may be. Paul resents the extra time required to achieve perfection, especially since he is working many, many hours.
Paul also has a practical streak. Since he bills on an hourly basis, it does not make sense to him to spend the extra time required to ensure that every document, regardless of its importance, is grammatically and esthetically perfect. He questions why the client would want to pay for that. In fairness to his firm, Paul tells me that they routinely write off time so that the client does not always pay the full cost of producing those wonderful documents. On the other hand, Paul does not see the point of working into the evening to achieve the required standard, knowing that his time will be written off.
Paul’s whining got me thinking about my own relationship with perfectionism. It’s complicated.
In my early years, I also thought that everything that I did had to be perfect. By the end of my career, I had learned to balance perfectionism with practicality. I thought about whether, if I were the client, I would want to pay to root out every last typo or awkward phrase in a particular document. I put in the time where the client would see the value in my doing so, and I skipped one more review of a document where perfectionism was not financially merited.
Although Paul readily agreed with me about tempering perfectionism with practicality, he was not so sure about my view that I had no problem with his boss demanding perfectionism in Paul’s first few years of practice. It seems to me that lawyers need to learn how to be perfect before they set about deciding where and when it is acceptable to be less than perfect.
I told Paul that I expected that, after a few years of teaching him to be perfect, his supervising lawyer would let him use his own judgment about when it was appropriate to cut corners. Paul was adamant that would never happen. The imperative of being “perfect” was so deeply engrained at his firm that the partners would never abandon the weight of perfectionism, regardless of the extent to which it degraded their internal morale, client relationships and profitability.
There are very few absolutes in this world, but I am willing to go out on a limb and suggest two:
- Except for training purposes in the short run, perfectionism is not a worthy or healthy goal in the legal profession; afterwards, it must be tempered with a healthy dose of practicality; and
- Paul will eventually leave his firm. Like Taylor Swift, his parting words may be something along the lines of: “We are never ever getting back together.”
Murray Gottheil is a retired lawyer living in the country, happy and driving a pickup truck. Reach him at murray@murraygottheil.com and see what he is up to at www.lawanddisorderinc.com.
This article was originally published by Law360 Canada, part of LexisNexis Canada Inc.