Half an hour into a meeting with a new Smart Separation client today, he groaned, “I wish I’d known this at the beginning……..”
It was painful to watch; the anguish of hindsight, when foresight and targeted legal advice had gone missing, exacerbating the cost, the arguments, the ruination of trust. All of it!
I’m the first to say that my role as a fresh set of eyes is a privileged place to be. But still, it puzzles me how often clients appear to hear brand new ideas, advice, or ways of thinking when they see me for triage, referral, or a second opinion. I find myself wondering if, in the past, it was the communication that was broken, the listening skills, the system, or something else.
I see how it happens. As lawyers, we can get caught up in interim and urgent issues, managing our reactions to our client, and lose sight of strategy and even the basics. Maybe we don’t have a community of trusted advisors to refer to? Maybe we lack the support of a firm, or experienced colleagues, or we don’t engage with high quality CPD? We can become ‘allergic’ to some files too, a feeling every lawyer knows.
Today was another good reminder about our responsibility as advisors. Our ‘file’ is someone else’s life, and maybe our profession should normalise mentoring or supervision-style discussions about ‘lives/files’ so hindsight doesn’t bite our clients too hard, too often.
