Litigators

Trust Your Barber: Knowing When To Defer To Experts

Try to make an effort to be a little better at knowing your limitations, and be a little more willing to swallow your pride and ask for help.

By Matthew W. Schmidt  
on

Know your limitations, and don’t be afraid to ask for advice.

I surprised a friend recently with my approach to haircuts. He, like many people, has a particular way he wants his hair and has certain likes and dislikes. My approach is always to just tell the barber — or stylist or whatever trusted hair profession you choose; you should use Elaine Mitchell when you’re in New York, she’s great — to do whatever they think best. I figure that they have far more training and experience than I do, including both general techniques and what styles may work best with my hair type and face shape. I really don’t have much to contribute, and I accept that. Their expertise is what I’m paying for.

I’ve always carried this approach to restaurants as well, and never quite understood people who ask for substitutions or make specific requests. A trained chef knows far more about the intermixing of flavors than I ever will, plus has spent considerable time balancing the tastes of each specific dish. Even if I have some specific aversion to some ingredient, I recognize that it’s simply me being closed-minded, and I really should trust the chef and spend my mental effort on other things where I can actually add value. Increasingly I find myself just asking the waiters what they like, since they also have more experience than me with the specific dishes.

My friend was surprised, I suspect, because I can be opinionated and demanding about specific things. And true, I am fanatical that, for instance, papers are stapled in the proper 45 degree angle that I had drilled into me by an old boss of mine. But I’ve spent a lot of time reading stapled documents, and I know from experience that a proper stapling angle makes it easier to read and looks cleaner. I can’t speak with anything close that level of authority when it comes to what makes a haircut or a meal work. I may be able to identify a successful result, but I’m at loss as to exactly why it’s a success.

I could of course learn more about hair styling and cooking, but I’m very unlikely to ever surpass the expertise of someone who dedicates their lives to those fields. And even if I could — I’m admittedly a quick study — I’ll never have a comparative advantage there. I’d simply spend a huge amount of time recreating a level of expertise that I could access far more cheaply by just asking someone else.

So instead of wasting my time to achieve a worse result, I expand my effective expertise by simply asking an expert. This is true in litigation as well.

REMEMBER WHAT YOU DON’T KNOW

Sponsored

Litigators should be far better at deferring to experts than we are, because most of us have dealt with clients who hurt themselves by refusing to take our advice. Litigation is usually a foreign environment to non-litigators, even other lawyers, and clients are often forced to rely heavily on the judgment of their litigators. Some clients have trouble with this — for instance, insisting on a hyper-literalist view of a provision that, in practice, almost no judge will share — and don’t follow our advice. That rarely works to the client’s advantage.

In our own lives, however, it’s easy to forget that lesson and think that we know more than we actually do. Most commercial litigators, including my colleagues and I, are generalists. We may develop expertise in certain areas of law or have many clients in a certain industry, but few rely on a specific niche their entire careers. It’s a well-worn cliché, which I remember well from my on-campus interview days of trying to make intelligent conversation as a law student about different practice areas, that litigators often have to learn a new industry for each case.

That means that litigators are usually dealing with a situation where they don’t know everything and need to rely on others to teach them. Indeed, the ability to learn quickly is a core litigation skill. But in order to learn, you need someone to learn from. You’re unlikely to learn everything about a client’s industry from reading documents, just as you’re unlikely to learn how to cook from Eric Ripert by reading his cookbook.

An expert in this context isn’t necessarily a potential expert witness, although it often can be. Sometimes it’s just a client contact. But the principle is the same, and the right expert can save you huge amounts of time, get you a better answer, and allow you to focus more on areas where you have more personal expertise.

DON’T BE ASHAMED OF ASKING FOR HELP

Sponsored

One of the best pieces of advice I ever received was that if you’re a phone call away from an expert on a certain issue, then you’re an expert yourself. The advice was in the context of speaking with a client who asks a technical question in a field you’re not familiar with. Many lawyers fall into the trap of feeling like they should personally know everything; they’re tempted to either bluster through the answer or they confess they simply don’t know. But if you can call someone, either a colleague at your firm or another trusted source, and find the answer, then to the client, it’s as helpful as if you knew the answer yourself. You’re expanding your effective expertise by leveraging your social connections.

This is true in many contexts, but it’s easy to forget. We’ve all been in situations where we spend hours working out some clever hypothetical, then we finally speak to someone who tells us that one of our base assumptions was wrong. Often we find ourselves there through some combination of arrogance, underestimating the complexity of a situation, or feeling some sense of guilt that we don’t know everything. But that’s okay. As Matthew McConaughey’s Rusty Cole taught us in True Detective, life’s barely long enough to get good at one thing. It’s okay to call in outside help, just as it’s okay to rely on Google instead of cluttering your memory with useless facts.

So starting today, try to make an effort to be a little better at knowing your limitations, and be a little more willing to swallow your pride and ask for help. With luck, it’ll both save you time and make you a better lawyer. You might get a better haircut as well.

Matthew W Schmidt Balestriere FarielloMatthew W. Schmidt has represented and counseled clients at all stages of litigation and in numerous matters including insider trading, fiduciary duty, antitrust law, and civil RICO. He is of counsel at the trial and investigations law firm Balestriere Fariello in New York, where he and his colleagues represent domestic and international clients in litigation, arbitration, appeals, and investigations. You can reach him by email at matthew.w.schmidt@balestrierefariello.com.

Topics

, , ,