Fear Factor

Ray’s Blog – March 20 2010
The Fear Factor
Let’s start with the positive. I have had a great career as a lawyer. In truth, I have enjoyed several chapters, all of which were doing legal work, but totally different – from poverty law to fighting the government, to helping the environmental movement, to business law. Each has its own reward. I have made a living.
But I have to acknowledge there are darker sides to becoming a lawyer and practising law. No – not the usual Hollywood stuff of selling your soul to the devil or compromising your values.
The darker aspect which comes to mind today is anxiety and fear
– fear of making a mistake and fear of failure. I suspect this intrudes on people working in many professions and other jobs, but in my experience it is legend amongst lawyers and articling students.
My own experience is validated by an article with appeared in The American Bar Association's *ABA Journal* entitled "Law Practice Can Trigger Stress Disorder, Says Attorney Who Now Works as Therapist" by Martha Neil. From that article:
A sense of impending doom is a common feeling for many attorneys in practice:
From the mistake made when drafting a document or taking a deposition to a transgression that you may not even be aware of yet, there's always something lurking in your consciousness to produce a feeling of being "in trouble."
For him personally, writes Will Meyerhofer, a former BigLaw associate who now works as a psychotherapist, "it got to the point for me, at Sullivan & Cromwell, that I felt my entire body clench in preparation for attack just walking through the doors of 125 Broad Street and stepping into that elevator." His post, however, indicates that law practice, in general, rather than any particular law firm, is the cause of such stress.
Most people must contend with the stresses, competition and demands of our current work environment culture those problems. But lawyers may be in a league of their own when it comes to taking fear into the workplace and incorporating it into their daily activity (and nightmares).
The anxiety and fear of making an error may begin in law school. An old movie “The Paper Chase” illustrates how an illustrious but intimidating professor at Harvard destroyed the confidence of some of his students. We hear from some mentoring lawyers “Put their feet to the fire”. “Put the fear of God in them”. It seems nothing is good enough. No mistake can be too small. Every word counts. Every question in court is critical and if you miss one, you can never go back. Once the contract is signed, the litigation begins. And on and on.
Does law attract individuals who are susceptible to this catastrophic type of thinking or does it develop and grow over time? Do the more mature lawyers, the mentors, suffer from this type of thinking so normalize it and pass it on?
Lawyers are trained to analyze every situation to the benefit of their client and often this means taking advantage of every possible interpretation of the written word, and knowing that any set of facts or circumstances can be spun to achieve the best result for the client despite the intent of the participants or, in fact, “reality”. Knowing this, lawyers live in fear of other lawyers doing just that with their work. And of course, lawyers well appreciate the intolerable experience of being sued for making a mistake, having seen their clients suffer through it. Lawyers are well aware of the current philosophy and culture in US and also Canada that if on person has suffered, someone else is responsible and must pay.
We have insurance and that should help, but I am not sure that it does. Some lawyers may believe that if they worry, they will not make mistakes as though excessive worry is a worthy preventative measure. Their inner voice says: “I have always worried a lot, never been sued, so worrying must be effective.”
I am not sure if architects, accountants, dentists, doctors, business people, teachers, etc. suffer from this syndrome. What I do believe is that this type of extreme anxiety and fear detracts a lot from enjoyment of life and cannot be very productive. Recognizing and dealing with it is important. And this means more than just putting it in a compartment and coping. It is noteworthy how many lawyers use alcohol as a coping mechanism for the stress of practice.
I think that these issues are worthy of serious, open and honest discussion in a safe environment. Law firms have mentors for articling students (called Principals). Mentors are not born great and don’t become great without training and a deep understanding of what they must do to encourage the development of their mentees. There should be a program for mentors and feedback from mentees. There are many other ways to help lawyers deal with the fear factor, but we have to start with consciously confronting the problem.

Core Values

Danny Miller is the author Managing for the Long Run: Lessons in Competitive Advantage from Great Family Businesses.




Danny and I met some years ago and he and I email on occasion. His book is replete with examples describing why Family Businesses are successful. These reasons include;

- inspiring ideals
- a passion for the substantive over the pecuniary
- patience and perfectionism
- religious unorthodoxy
- Spartan parsimony
- permanent tenures
- systemic role ambiguity
- a host of other qualities almost totally ignored in traditional texts on management

The qualities he identifies as measures for success are the 4 C’s – command, continuity, community and connection.

You will recognize the names of these great family companies – Michelin, Estee Lauder, Hallmark, LL Bean, Levi Strauss, Coors, New York Times, Timken (of ballbearing fame), Microsoft, Apple, HP, Toyota, etc.

Take the New York Times, for example. It seems relatively easy to create a mission statement and core values for a great newspaper, though far more difficult to consistently apply them. Once a great company has created the mission statement and developed leadership, attracting and motivating the employees and managers is going to be a lot easier. In fact, unless a business can motivate its work force, it is not going to be “successful”. Note that “successful” means more than simply profitable.

Law firms are often created as “family companies” but usually after a generation and the original people retire and as they grow in size, they are no longer family companies. Where are the Blakes in Blakes or the Davis’s in Davis.

Nonetheless, a law firm can try to emulate the characteristics that have distinguished family companies and made them great places to work.

Law firms are curious creatures. There are some law firms that specialize in products which can inspire their workforce. For example, they may do aboriginal work, specialize in labour (either management or union), class action tort against law corporations (tobacco, breast implant, etc.), merger and acquisitions, environmental work. But in fact, most law firms don’t specialize so narrowly and many that do still look to the bottom line almost solely as a measure of success. They are also very difficult to manage for other reasons, including the independent and risk-averse nature of lawyers.

In a law firm there is little personal inheritance to pass on to the next generation – your name may remain on the door (though that too is unusual) but once you leave, you are no longer associated with the product, This is unlike great family companies which are passed on to the next generation.

Some law firms do have mission statements and personal codes of ethics and do believe in personal growth. Some have sabbatical programs, take on pro-bono work, participate in legal clinics and legal education, encourage partners and associates to do community work, etc.

For an interesting example, see Talent Without Borders

This is a story in the Globe about a law firm which has given its associates paid time off if they use their own vacation to participate in an aid program by participating in CIDA sponsored projects in non-industrialized countries. The associates mentioned went to Botswana and Vietnam.

The firm allocated $40,000 for participation in Leave for Change, …. In the end, seven employees participated, including Ms. Ghislanzoni, who volunteered in Botswana late last year, and her Edmonton colleague and marketing specialist Jenn Muir, who returned from a three-week post in Vietnam in January. (The eighth staff member became ill and could not travel.)

The result (apart from the actual work done abroad) was:

Like Ms. Muir, Ms. Ghislanzoni's experience left a positive impression of her
employer on her. “It reinforced the fact that the firm recognizes that different experiences all have different values and they all have a place in the firm,” she says. “It shows quite a bit of forward thinking and it makes me feel loyal to the firm because they supported me in something important to me.”

This is a hot topic for those who are looking for a work environment in which they can help others, enhance their own professional and communication skills, and enrich their personal lives.

I am convinced that every law firm should be looking at these issues through a different lens and discussing what can be added or changed to make working for it a truly unique and rewarding shared experience.

Crossing the Line

The subject of crossing the line is fascinating. Take for example Woody Allen’s “Crimes and Misdemeanors”.


A middle class dentist of about 55 has an affair with a woman who has a borderline personality disorder. She threatens his comfortable, established life and his marriage and he “must” takes steps to put an end to the problem. In doing so, he crosses a line from which there is no return.

Mark Dreier, a lawyer who graduated from Yale (so did George Bush) and created a very prominent litigation firm in New York, was recently convicted for fraud and other crimes. He was interviewed by Bryan Burrough for an article for Vanity Fair Magazine (yes I do read it sometimes). His story which makes for great reading. He crossed the line when he ran out of money to build his own law firm, then sold a fraudulent $20M note to a hedge fund. The note was issued purportedly by a client who is a major developer in New York. The issuer of the note was fictitious; the financial statements of the issuer were pasted onto letterhead of his client’s accountant. The hedge fund did no due diligence. Dreier was going to pay it back as soon as his law firm started making money.

Within a few years, Dreier had 3 estates, an $18M yacht, millions of dollars of art and various other toys. And he had by that time increased his Ponzi scheme to over $400M.

We didn’t hear much about Dreier because the Madoff story broke just a few weeks later.

Why do some people cross the line and not others? What motivates or allows a person to cross the line. Madoff, Dreier, Liknaitsky, Q.C.- (Alberta), Melnitzer, Q.C. – Ontario Aaron Mortgage (BC)(a lawyer was involved), etc. are in a sense mundane. Their motivation, however disguised or rationalized, was to achieve status and wealth not available through legitimate means.

The story of the dentist in “Crimes and Misdemeanors” is more complicated and one which resonates because a person who is so well-intentioned and upstanding crosses the line to eliminate the threat to his family, a threat of his own creation. There are other movies which deal with spurned mistresses, most notably “Fatal Attraction”.
But Fatal Attraction is far less subtle and leaves the audience with less to think about. The male protagonist, played by Michael Douglas, is stalked by a one-night stand played by Glenn Close.

Novels and movies portray situations in which people feel compelled, despite the consequences, to do something which will destroy their lives by betraying their values, ethics or morals. The result is often devastating. It is the essence of modern tragedy.

When our lives are under any form of siege or threat, it becomes tempting to cross the line. That threat can come from as simple and innocent an event as making a mistake in handling a file and not facing the consequences squarely and immediately.

It is always most difficult to do the right thing when the consequences seem most dire to the person facing the dilemma, but to an objective observer the problem may have a relatively straightforward solution.


Life is not really a slippery slope. It is best to think about things before you cross the line than have an epiphany after you cross the line, looking back only too late with the benefit of hindsight .