Parenting Your Baby Lawyers

Allison Williams: [00:00:11] Hi, everybody, it’s Allison Williams here, your Law Firm Mentor. Law Firm Mentor is a business coaching service for solo and small law firm attorneys, we help you grow your revenues, crush chaos in business, and make more money.

 

Allison Williams: [00:00:25] Hi, everyone, it’s Allison Williams here, your Law Firm Mentor. On this week’s episode of The Crushing Chaos with Law Firm Mentor podcast, we’re going to be talking about parenting your baby lawyers. Now, I know that that is a controversial term, “Baby Lawyers”, I know a lot of people are offended by that, by that term. And if you are offended by that term, please know that I use the term, not with any level of pejoratives at all. In fact, I remember when I was referred to as a baby lawyer and I actually thought it was a little bit endearing, I thought it was kind of a, a kind term because it implied that I was being protected, that I was being taken care of, that I was being nurtured, and that was very much how it was used. But I do know that there are people that use the term baby lawyer very much from a place of negativity, almost like you’re just a baby, you don’t know anything, you’re a baby and so I don’t mean it that way. In fact, there is a developmental stage for everything that we do in life. We will all encounter entrepreneurship for the first time as a baby entrepreneur, we will encounter new towns and new countries, and new places we travel as a baby in that new area, right? So we all are going to have experiences in life where we just don’t know what we don’t know. Right? That is really what is implied by the term baby lawyer.

 

Allison Williams: [00:01:52] So I want to talk about the, the other, the other aspect of having a baby lawyer, which is the quote-unquote parenting of a baby lawyer. And this topic actually derives from one of our coaching calls here at Law Firm Mentor every month in each of our programs. All of our clients have access to monthly coaching in addition to the one-on-one access that they have. And in our group call someone to raised the issue of the challenges that they were experiencing with their newest associate and they had a relatively high opinion of the associate, except very recently the associate was being an associate and more importantly, being a baby lawyer. And so this person did not have the knowledge, the skill, the, the context of being a practitioner, the way that one naturally acquires over years of practicing law and I think it is so common a mistake that lawyers make that we talk about this a lot at Law Firm Mentor that when it’s time to hire a lawyer and this is your first lawyer hire and you’re growing a business, you do not have time for someone who doesn’t understand the basics of what it means to be an attorney, how to address the court, how to address the adversaries, how to draft documents, how to research. There’s a lot that goes into lawyering, right? And part of the reason why I think the term baby lawyer is so accurate is that if you think about the life span of an infant, when you give birth or when you when your spouse gives birth to a child, a new infant comes into your household and that child is being developed, cultivated, it’s soaking up everything that you have to give him or her so that they can become a member of society.

 

Allison Williams: [00:03:39] We don’t just turn them loose at four or five or six, right? It takes decades for a child to become a young adult in our culture. But I want you to think about the reason why, of course, when I say our culture, I’m talking about the United States. So if you’re outside the United States and specifically referring to America, but I want you to think about how, as a general rule, we bring lawyers into the practice of law and we say, all right, kid, your licensed, here’s your file, you know, have fun with that, as if they are somehow going to soak up not just the task that they are doing, but to integrate all of the learning that happens. Right? Like another, another good example, another good analogy for this. When I first started driving and I’m sure a lot of you can remember this as well, right? When you first start driving, you’ve got your hands at 10 and 2. You’re gripping the steering wheel. You are paying attention. You’re looking every single way, right? You’re looking left, you’re looking right, you’re looking straight, you’re looking behind you, you’re doing that several times, you’re getting the feel of where your foot should be on the pedals, you’re moving your feet back and forth to make sure the pedals actually work. You’re turning on the car, you’re feeling the engine rev up underneath you and there’s kind of a little high that comes with that. And you’re integrating so much information, it’s not just where do I put my hands, where do I put the steering wheel? How do I put my car into drive? But there’s so much that you have to consider the feel of the, of the, the seatbelt across you when you put on brakes for the first time, looking behind you now. Now we have backup cameras, which adds another layer of complexity because now you have to add on integrating when to look behind you, when to use the backup camera and how to use both. But when I was growing up and learning how to drive, we did not have cameras in cars, we just had that rearview mirror. But sometimes the rearview mirror wasn’t enough, you turned your whole body to the right looking over your shoulder so you could look out of the back of the car and you’re taking in so much information that your body is overwhelmed. In fact, I remember when I would go on like even a 15 minute drive around the neighborhood with my parents, by the time I got home, I was exhausted.

 

Allison Williams: [00:05:56] Like I was like, oh, my God, right? Because it took so much tension and energy for me to stay focused on all those things, right? Just like a child, when you first take your child to school, they go to school at a young age, midday, they’re taking a nap, right? Because all that learning is exhausting, right? When you are using your brain on overdrive, you are wearing it out. Your body and more importantly, your brain needs to be rejuvenated. And we talk about this a lot when we talk about the nature of learning and the fact that I’m a very big proponent of visual, auditory, and kinesthetic learning in the trifecta of learning because it helps to integrate information more fluidly, but it does take a lot of energy out of you. So when you think about that, I want you to think about the, the role of the baby lawyer, and then I want you to think about the fact that a lot of lawyers have a mindset that they are bringing on a young attorney to help usher them into the profession in a way that they did not have for themselves, right? A lot of lawyers think I want to be a better mentor to my employees than I ever had for myself, I want to be a better mentor to my employees than I can even conceptualize, right? I want to give them a better experience, I want to teach them more, I want to train them more, I want to pour into them more.

 

Allison Williams: [00:07:21]  Now I still want them to make money for me, but I also want them to be developed. And then there are other lawyers that don’t have that issue at all. They’re like, yeah, day one, you come in, take your file to court, have fun. Right? Don’t commit malpractice. I don’t know how you’re expected to know how not to commit malpractice, but I’m telling you to do that now so I put the fear of God into you so you’ll be perfect and I won’t have to worry and then you’ll figure things out relatively quickly, right? And I have long been a proponent of the fact that you need to integrate both of those strategies in order to truly develop a young lawyer appropriately because if you just stick them in the corner and have them drafting documents for the first five years, you’re never going to get them through that initial surge of anxiety and imposter syndrome and feeling inadequate with things that really are not that big of a deal, but will be a big deal for them because they haven’t experienced them before, because you have sheltered them so much that they never get their sea legs. On the flip side, if you have someone on file on day one and then they go into court and they have a mean judge and a mean adversary and a difficult client and they don’t know what they’re doing, they’re going to have a traumatic episode. They’re not likely to be successful in that episode and if they do, it’s by happenstance.

 

Allison Williams: [00:08:36] And then what they learn is that there really is no right process, right, right pathway, right knowledge base, I’m really just able to wing it and be OK, and that is often a detriment to the public, a detriment to their license, and can cause great calamity both for your economic interests if you get sued and for them as they are protecting their license as a practicing attorney. So I’m not a big proponent of kind of drowning the baby on the first day or letting the baby sit in the corner sheltered in a bubble for years before you start giving them things to do. There needs to be a balance there. But what tends to happen is that the lawyer who owns the law firm, and has hired on the baby lawyer, starts to get triggered by the baby lawyer being, frankly, a baby. So what do I mean by that? What I mean is that when we hire people for our businesses, there is often a significant fear that the person we hired is not going to be good enough, not going to do justice for our clients, not going to get good results, not going to make us look good. And ultimately, our ass is on the line, right? We are going to get sued if they screw something up, we’re going to get the bar complaint if the client is not happy.

 

Allison Williams: [00:10:00] And then ultimately we feel hamstrung, now we have hired this person and our goal is to have them learn as quickly as possible but we don’t necessarily know how to do that. We know that we want them to learn, so we tell them here your job is to learn. But we want to prevent oftentimes because of our own imposter syndrome and feelings of inadequacy, we want to prevent anyone from harming our reputation. So what we do is we hold onto our baby lawyer and we very much shield them from the experiences that we either feel ourselves we would not like to have at their age and stage of practice, or we, we protect them from harming us. What we perceive will be harming us. We protect them from doing the wrong thing with the case, from saying the wrong thing to an adversary, from interacting appropriately with the judge and then ultimately what happens there is that we don’t trust them. They know we don’t trust them and thus it makes it harder for them who already… the associate attorney already does not trust him or herself and now they’re breathing in your lack of trust in them and that is only going to make the situation worse. So, by the way, that is typically what you’ll see happens wrong when the associate starts running and then crashes and burns because ultimately they’re not doing things the way you want, you’re not able to redirect them appropriately.

 

Allison Williams: [00:11:27] You’re not able to develop them as they go and grow and so they at some point in time just learn, the way that this works is I stay out of your way and I hunker down on the things I can do. So sometimes they’ll do the same thing over and over again, very small, very, very low economic value activity in order to not piss off the boss. And you might be thinking, OK, great, well, how do I shift that? Well, there’s a whole series of activities I could give you on how to develop an associate, I spent many years training and developing associates in law firms before I opened my own law firm. But I really want you to be thinking about when we talk about the phrase parenting a baby lawyer. I want you to be thinking about how you are experiencing the perceived shortcomings of your young attorney. OK, so we’ve already talked about the fact that you don’t have time, right? You hire them and typically you’re hiring an associate attorney because you have too much work to do and then as soon as they come in, you realize, holy crap, they can’t do this work that I have them that I have for them to do, so I have to do more or they can do assistant work. And by assistant work, I mean work that yes, they can do the first draft, they can’t do a final product, but they can do the first draft or they can review the document and pull out the pieces of information that I need.

 

Allison Williams: [00:12:53] They can’t actually create from those pieces of information the next document I need created, but they can at least pull the information that I need. It helps me to get a leg up on drafting for myself. But because you don’t have the time, you’re not giving them the structured guidance that they require.

 

Allison Williams: [00:13:13] The other thing is that it is very challenging to teach nuance to a younger attorney, right? Nuance comes when a person sees something over and over and over again and becomes discerning. So if in case, number one, we have a certain fact pattern and we see case number two, we know that no two cases are exactly alike, but you can have some prototypical type cases, some activity that shows up. We have prototypes for adversaries right? This is the, this is the actual adversary, the one who serves us with short-term emergent applications at four fifty-nine on a Friday, right? This is the, this is the super passive laid back adversary. They never get around to getting to things. They never send you things when you want. They’ll be the nicest person in the world to deal with but they’re kind of lazy. They’re just kind of lollygagging through, right? We have all of these different prototypes of people and we also have prototypes of factual scenarios that will come up in our cases.

 

Allison Williams: [00:14:14] And it’s very challenging from scenario one to scenario two, for you to explain all the nuances as to why you’re taking a different approach in scenario two than scenario one, oftentimes because that nuance is baked into the seventy-five details of a case where in case, number one, you had all seventy-five, in case number two, maybe you had seventy-three and maybe you had different numbers. Seventy-four and seventy-five, right? So those little nuances are picked up over the course of time by listening and seeing and observing and asking questions and a baby lawyer typically is not going to have enough time to do that before you start having them locked and loaded and handling cases, which is the reason why they’re going to need a lot more instruction upfront and a lot more oversight and guidance as they go through the process of lawyering, before you unleash them on the public and say, here, go have fun with this file.

 

Allison Williams: [00:15:16] Now, there’s other risk associated with the baby lawyer. We’ve talked about how they often crash and burn in their first job, especially if they have a boss that is a busy entrepreneur who’s growing a law firm and does not have time to develop them. But there’s a risk of them leaving even if you put all your time in. And I think that a lot of lawyers recognize this, we recognize that on average, lawyers leave law firms once every four years.

 

Allison Williams: [00:15:42] OK, that’s an ABA statistic and that is across all lawyers, so we know that there are some lawyers that started the job and they’re here through the duration. Right? My, my partner, Victoria, she’s been with me as a baby lawyer, she started with me in her first year of practicing and we’re now together for seven years. So she has grown and developed and trained and evolved into who she is now but most lawyers that I’ve hired that are younger, they come, they leave. And not because they’re bad people and not because you’re a bad boss. Even if you were an exceptional boss and you provided ample resources, a young lawyer does not know what they don’t know. They don’t know what they want, they don’t know if they want to be in a small firm or large firm. They don’t know if they want to be in a midsize firm or a boutique. They don’t know if they want to practice one practice area or have a hodgepodge. They have to have the opportunity to see and experience and feel and then get centered for themselves on what they really want. And because of that, you are often making an investment in someone that has a low likelihood of a high rate of return on your investment. And for that reason, I think a lot of lawyers either don’t put the investment into the lawyer because they say, I don’t want to waste my time only to have them leave, or they do put the time and investment in the lawyer with the hope that they stay and then they feel burned and bitter when the lawyer leaves and say, I just wasted all this time on the person.

 

Allison Williams: [00:17:13] So however you feel about it, right, there is a certain level of guidance, structure, responsibility that you will have to have toward a younger attorney. And when you adopt a mindset of training and developing them, one thing that happens that is unhealthy that I want to talk about in this episode, I know you’re going to say, wow, this episode has been going for a while and you’re just now getting to the point. But I hope all of that, lead way kind of explains to you why when you hear this next point, it was so necessary. So the thing that we need to avoid when we talk about our baby lawyers, is parenting our baby lawyers. Right? So there is something to be said for protecting, right? You definitely want to protect your young lawyers from themselves. They don’t know what they don’t know and what they don’t know could harm your business. However, you don’t want to get into a pattern of parenting them, in other words, you don’t want to take the young, bright, starry-eyed baby lawyer and try to grow them up in your image. You are not giving birth to your baby lawyer. Your baby lawyer may become your protege, but even if he or she is your protege, they have to have space. They have to have the ability to create their best version of themselves for themselves. They have to grow into an independent autonomous agent, even if they are working collectively and collaboratively in a business because there’s going to be a time where they are evaluating facts on their own, where they are in court, on their feet, on their own, when they are working with the client and legal advice on their own. And if they don’t have the space to be themselves, if they think of themselves as nothing other than a version of you, then what tends to happen is that they are trying to copy and paste you without your personality, without your years of experience and there’s a disconnect.

 

Allison Williams: [00:19:18] And I want you to think about it from, from the perspective of a parent. So a lot of our audience consists of parents, I would say far more lawyers than not that listening to this podcast have children, right? So if it’s not your experience, if you don’t have children, I’m sure you can understand this because I don’t have children and I understand this. OK, so I want you to think about what happens when you first give birth, there’s a developmental trajectory of an infant into, into adulthood. So baby is born. And for the first 17 to 18 months or so, that baby is before bonding, right? I guess I could call that baby but ultimately, bonding starts at about eighteen to twenty-four months.

 

Allison Williams: [00:20:03] In the first six months after baby gets to about six months, that’s when he or she is at a place where they strongly recognize primary attachment figures and where attachments start to form, where they recognize the voice and they recognize sound and smell and all of those things about you that make you the unique connection to them. Right? And once they have that attachment, that attachment forms and it strengthens from six months to about 18 months, eighteen to twenty-four months is when you start to see that attachment form into, evolve into a bond. And that’s when the strong relationship forms where that child knows they can depend on you, they know that they can rely on you, they know that you’re going to be a secure, safe place for them. Now, of course, we can talk about all sorts of disordered parenting where attachments don’t form or bonds don’t form because of childhood trauma. That’s a whole separate conversation for a different day. But right now, we’re just talking about the kind of the start off in life. Now, I want you to liken that to the start off of a baby lawyer, baby lawyer comes in for the first period of time for the first at least a year I would say that baby, that baby lawyer is very much in the state of being precognitive if you think about it. Right. When we’re in the precognitive state before age seven, we are taking in information and we don’t have the ability to reject what comes in.

 

Allison Williams: [00:21:30] We just soak it all in. Right? That’s part of the reason why where a baby lawyer starts his or her career is so not determinative but highly correlated with the quality of the lawyering, that they will do for the rest of their career because if they start with a mediocre law firm or having a mediocre experience or not being able to ask questions or not getting guidance and structure, and then they go years later into someone else’s law firm, there’s a lot of well-baked in habits that have to be rewired, broken, that are much more challenging to break than if they had been learned appropriately in the first place. So I want you to think about when baby lawyer is in that state of just soaking it all in and you don’t give them an experience where they can learn but learn with a level of risk because the practice of law is inherently risky, especially if you’re in litigation, but really in all areas of law. Right? So if you don’t teach them how to take calculated risks, if you don’t teach them how to assess people, how to integrate emotional intelligence into advising a client so that you are both connecting with your client as a person as well as giving them what they need as a client, as well as shoring up your case for victory so that you can secure your competitive win.

 

Allison Williams: [00:22:51] Then what’s ultimately happening is while the client, while the baby lawyer is just learning how to lawyer, they’re learning in peace meal. They’re not getting the full integrated experience that they need to have in order to truly get the nuance of why things are done a certain way, why it is safer to do it a certain way, why it is more likely to lead to a positive outcome in your case type when it is done a certain way versus another way. And when a lawyer is deprived of that, it is really challenging to try to instill it later, right? So if you think about for those of you that have adopted children, if your child came through the child welfare system or even was simply relinquished to an agency and ultimately did not have the ability to form that secure attachment before he or she found their way into your home, the longer period of time, the older the child is before he or she gets to the point of having that stable, consistent primary attachment figure or figures where there is proper bonding, the harder it is for that child to trust you, for that child to see you as a safe figure, for that child to believe that if he or she makes a mistake, that the result is not going to be abandonment. Because he or she has not learned that, at the state where they were soaking in all of the details of life.

 

Allison Williams: [00:24:17] And the same thing really applies with a baby lawyer, right? So when you think about that with a baby lawyer, you have to also draw the parallelism that a baby lawyer needs to soak in the state of attachment, right? They have to first get to all right, I’m not going to get fired as soon as I do something wrong, I’m going to have the ability to make a mistake but I’m going to have to learn from my mistake. I’m going to be held accountable because I am an adult. Right? We are talking about them as baby lawyers, but we’re not going to remove from them all adult responsibility. They still must take responsibility for the actions or inactions that they engage in in order that they can learn and demonstrate their desire and willingness to learn in your business. But when you are putting a baby lawyer into a new ecosystem, ecosystem, the ecosystem of your business, it’s really challenging not to either hold back too much or give too much,  meaning, you dump and run on a file so that you’re really not giving them what they need to grow through that experience of learning. Nor is it appropriate that you are so involved that they don’t get the opportunity to think for themselves to grow into what they have to learn or to do that at a rate that’s appropriate for their developmental stage.

 

Allison Williams: [00:25:37] So like parenting, developing a baby lawyer is a challenge. It is. There’s no other word for it, it is a major undertaking. Now, it is not so major an undertaking that you can’t do it. I know a lot of lawyers that successfully became happy, thriving, capable lawyers under the tutelage of a well-meaning, bright-minded, caring individual who was also their mentor and supervisor, if not boss. But in scenarios where there is so much going on in the business. When you are trying to market or trying to optimize your intake. When you’re trying to improve your sales technique so that you can convert more people and then you add to it the pressure of now I must add more people because I got a baby lawyer over here and he or she is not immediately profitable. When you have all of that going on it’s very challenging. I’d say nearly impossible to give the level of thought, attention, detail, orchestration necessary for appropriately managing and leading a baby lawyer.

 

Allison Williams: [00:26:50] The other thing that comes up with  baby lawyers, and I mentioned this a little bit earlier. We were talking about the idea of a protege, right? If you bring in a baby lawyer and you ultimately have a design of pouring into that person so that they become your protege, that they are another version of you just younger and spunkier. Or maybe not spunkier. Some of you are pretty spunky. But they are their own wonderful entity. But they, they have a lot of your thought processes. They have a lot of your passion. They’re lit up by the same things that you get lit up by, right? You get excited about things. They get excited about those same things. You get angry about a certain travesties of justice. So do they. And that relationship can form and often oftentimes does form when you are creating a relationship with a young lawyer that stays with you for a long time. But sometimes when we are so fixated on creating that, we have, whether in our conscious mind or even at the slightly subconscious level, right? 

 

Allison Williams: [00:27:53] When we are just it’s just a little below the surface, we can’t quite tap into what it is but we know that there’s something there that has us want to create a protege. When you have that, there is often an unhealthy enmeshment that happens between supervising attorney and baby lawyer. So that you start to personalize baby lawyer’s mistakes as something done to you when he or she makes very common, very normal, customary mistakes. And when that enmeshment happens. When there is not a detachment of the owner from the young attorney and you see the young attorney as an extension of you or a reflection of you, then what will typically happen in those scenarios is you will either stymie their growth because you are so afraid of them doing something wrong. Or if you do let them grow, what will tend to happen is every victory becomes your victory. And there can be, not saying that this is intentional, but there can be kind of a taking away from, the, from the young attorney.

 

Allison Williams: [00:29:02] There are different schools of thought about this, but I have always found it somewhat offensive when a lawyer does all of the work on the file. right. Takes in the file. They may or may not have been the ones to do the consultation, but let’s say they took the consultation from soup to nuts, beginning to end. And then works up the file. Does everything from the drafting to the client advice, to the discovery, to the research and presents that file and gets a successful result. And then the supervising attorney puts their name on it and takes the glory and they take the glory under the premise of, well, it’s my law firm, but for me hiring you, but for me training you, you wouldn’t even know this argument existed. And there’s always a problem when that happens because there’s, there’s a sense of betrayal that happens with taking that out. Right? There’s a, there’s a sense of betrayal that comes from the older, more experienced lawyer, the owner taking that away from their baby lawyer and whether or not you personally agree with that perspective or not. Some people say, I think that’s kind of like paying your dues or what have you, I disagree. Ultimately, if you get to a place where you see your baby lawyer as truly your baby, is truly your creation, something that you made into what he or she is, there oftentimes is a greater sense of betrayal from what happens normally in the course of business, especially when younger attorneys grow up.

 

Allison Williams: [00:30:37] If your business does not grow and evolve beyond where that person’s career trajectory is, then typically that person will leave you because they’re seeking a level of growth and development and autonomy and influence that cannot be held, cannot be had at your law firm. And that’s where you get into really sticky disputes. That’s where you get into a lot of bitterness, where a lot of lawyers will say, I’ve been burned by training lawyers in the past. I’m not doing that again and they refuse to grow.

 

Allison Williams: [00:31:10] So I want to just give you that to think about as we go through our, our journey of growing law firms, because I know a lot of people want to grow law firms by hiring younger attorneys. And there is an art, a skill, and a process to developing a young attorney. Really into developing any attorney, but especially a baby lawyer. All right, everyone, I’m Allison Williams. Today, we have been talking about parenting your baby lawyer and if this is something that you need help with, I want to invite you to reach out to us here at Law Firm Mentor. Hop on a growth strategy call where we can talk about your issues with your team and how we can help you optimize them. I’m Allison Williams, your Law Firm Mentor and I’ll see you on our next episode.

 

Allison Williams: [00:32:10] Thank you for tuning in to The Crushing Chaos with Law Firm Mentor podcast to learn more about today’s guests and take advantage of the resources mentioned. Check out our show notes and if you own a solo or small law and are looking for guidance, advice or simply support on your journey to create a law firm that runs without you, join us in the Law Firm Mentor Movement Free Facebook group. There you can access our free trainings on improving collections in law firms, meeting billable hours and join the movement of thousands of law firm owners across the country who want to crush chaos in their law firms and make more money. I’m Allison Williams, your Law Firm Mentor. Have a great day!