Excellence in Law Takes Time: Deciding What Is Worth the Investment

Dr Mark Bellamy PhD, CPsychol, AFBPsS
Chartered Psychologist | Founder, LegalPsych

One of the things that has struck me in my conversations with lawyers is just how long it takes to become genuinely good at some of the things that matter most in the profession. Legal knowledge can be taught and technical competence developed, but much of what distinguishes an experienced lawyer seems to emerge more gradually. Judgement, understanding clients, reading a room, recognising what really matters in a mass of information, knowing when to challenge and when to say very little are capabilities built through years of experience.

This is one reason I think excellence in law needs to be understood over the course of a career rather than simply through progression from one professional milestone to another. Qualification matters, as do promotion, partnership, taking silk or assuming leadership responsibility, depending upon the particular route somebody follows. Yet none of these necessarily tells us everything about the quality of someone's professional judgement or the depth of expertise they are continuing to develop.

Law also presents an interesting difficulty because the people entering it are often accustomed to doing well. Academic achievement has usually been important, competition for training and positions can be considerable, and there are relatively visible markers of progression during the early stages of a career. It is therefore understandable that ambitious lawyers may sometimes feel they should be developing faster than they are, particularly when surrounded by other highly capable people.

The difficulty is that some forms of professional excellence cannot easily be accelerated. A lawyer may understand intellectually how to manage a difficult client conversation, for example, but there is something different about having conducted many of those conversations and gradually learning to recognise what is happening beneath the words. The same applies to judgement under uncertainty. Experience provides a library of situations against which the present one can be considered, although that experience becomes useful only if we continue to think about and learn from it.

This is where I think honesty about ambition becomes important. There are many different ways of being excellent within the legal profession, and it is probably unrealistic to expect to pursue all of them with equal intensity. Somebody may want to become an outstanding technical lawyer, develop a significant practice, become an exceptional advocate, build enduring client relationships, lead a firm or chambers, develop the next generation of lawyers and contribute more widely to the profession. Each is a legitimate ambition, but each asks something of the person pursuing it.

Time, attention and psychological capacity are finite. Choosing to develop expertise in one area means investing resources that cannot simultaneously be invested everywhere else. This becomes particularly important as careers progress and the demands placed upon successful lawyers tend to expand rather than contract. The excellent practitioner may become responsible for a team, important client relationships, business development, supervision, leadership and increasingly consequential decisions while still expecting themselves to maintain the same standards in their own legal work.

I have seen something similar during many years working with high performers in other fields, particularly sport. People are understandably attracted to the outcome associated with excellence, but the more revealing question is often whether they are prepared to engage with the process required to produce it. For lawyers, that process may involve years of difficult cases, preparation that nobody else sees, learning from mistakes, seeking out work that stretches existing capability and remaining open to feedback even after considerable professional success has been achieved.

There is a further complication in law because effort itself can be highly valued. Long hours, responsiveness and an exceptional willingness to take responsibility may all contribute to professional success, particularly at certain stages of a career. There may be periods when deliberately investing more time and energy is entirely appropriate because something matters enough to justify it. The psychological question is whether that investment remains deliberate or whether increasing amounts of capacity are gradually being committed without any continuing examination of what they are being committed to.

I think this becomes especially relevant when lawyers reach points in their careers where the next version of excellence may require something different from the last. The habits that helped somebody become an exceptional associate may not be exactly the capabilities required of a partner. The behaviours that established a barrister's practice may need to change as their caseload, reputation and responsibilities develop. Sustainable performance may therefore depend partly upon periodically reconsidering not only how hard we are working, but what we are now trying to become good at.

There is also something psychologically useful about allowing expertise to take time. Experience alone does not guarantee development, but experience accompanied by reflection gives us an opportunity to notice patterns, test our assumptions and refine our judgement. A career containing a great deal of work is not necessarily the same as a career containing a great deal of learning, particularly if the volume of work leaves little capacity to think about what that experience is teaching us.

Perhaps one of the more useful questions for lawyers, therefore, is not simply how successful they want to become. It is what they want to become exceptionally good at, why that matters to them and what they are genuinely prepared to invest in getting there. The answer may change considerably over a 30- or 40-year career, and I suspect that periodically revisiting it is part of sustaining both performance and a sense of purpose.

Excellence in law takes time because some of the profession's most valuable capabilities are accumulated slowly. They are shaped through difficult work, responsibility, relationships, mistakes, reflection and repeated encounters with situations in which there is no perfectly clear answer. Being honest about which forms of excellence matter to us, and what we are prepared to give to their development, may help ensure that the career we build reflects something more deliberate than simply continuing to achieve the next thing placed in front of us.