Perfection, Deadlines, and Cost-Effectiveness: A Delicate Balance

Published January 13, 2015

Internal tugs between conflicting desires and responsibilities mark life on a daily basis for most lawyers. This is particularly evident in the perfectionism/deadline/cost-effectiveness tug-of-war.

One of the defining features of lawyers is that they tend to be perfectionists. It’s never good enough. They always look back in finishing a task, trying to think better, think further, research more, write a better sentence, and so forth. If you’re in a larger firm, perfection is important to your success and evaluation in terms of being a good lawyer.

However, perfection is not the only consideration for a lawyer. Other factors in this equation include deadlines and cost-effectiveness.

Perfection is nice, but it takes time. In any given matter, you’ve got to ask your supervising lawyer when that supervisor wants the work completed, and you’ve got to meet the deadline. Although a supervising lawyer is not a court, the deadlines are just as important. Even if you learn that the supervising lawyer provides fallacious deadlines just to put the pressure on you, you’ve got to deal with that because your ability to meet deadlines will be part of your internal evaluation.

However, even if the deadline is so loose that it allows you to perfect your perfectionism, the end result of perfectionism is a buildup of hours. And if you’re on the hourly billing system as opposed to the value billing system, you get more money for doing that, which means that the client has to pay more. The truth of the matter is that not every matter requires perfection. Some matters are sufficient with “good enough.” You need to know when that is, meaning that you’ve got to understand your client and what the matter is, as well as what your client values and what your client wants.

Categorized in: Coaching

Audience type: Associates, Small Law Firms, Sole Practitioners