Making it Obvious Doesn't Mean You are Dumb

So, one of my big teaching points with students is the use of checklists. Family law is staggeringly complicated. Someone comes in the door, and within the course of an hour, you need to figure out their family composition, income, assets, property, liabilities, psychological dynamics and then take all that data and funnel into a predictive model.

THEN you use that model to create about forty pages of technical documents.

With that many moving pieces, a checklist goes from "good idea" to vital. The data backs up that the usage of such lists reduces strain on attorney and staff, reduces errors, and drastically improves work quality.

As I'm going through this, I get a lot of nodding heads.

When I come back to the same lawyers a year or two later, we do the survey of what the problems are. After I have listened long enough to get the gist of things, I almost always ask:

"Did you use the lists?"

"Um, no."

"Why?"

At first, I had a lot of frustration that people would not use the method. Once I realized that frustration wasn't helpful, I started getting curious about what the real barrier was.

Time and time again, I eventually got to the same answers.

"The checklists made me feel goofy."

"I was worried my staff would think I was an amateur."

"I didn't want my clients to think I didn't know what I was doing."

I frequently ask if they've ever seen pilots and aircraft mechanics use checklists on planes. Because I working in a Boeing down, the answer is almost always "yes."

"Did you ever once think those people were stupid?"

"No."

"Was it encouraging to see them work through the checklist?"

"Sure."

"Why?"

"... because flying an airplane is high stakes and complicated. I don't want the airplane I'm about to get in to crash."

Now, the trap:

"So, why is the practice of law different?"

The problem lives not in the legal professional's intelligence, but how they frame the tool.

Checklists are not for remedial beginners. They are for tightly organized units who know how to solve problems together well. Taking the thinking out of the "no brainer" stuff allows for curiosity, creativity, and the ability to rapidly adapt.

In many instances, I ask lawyers to literally bring the checklist into their meeting and stick it on the inside of their file. I always have to stress the same thing - you're learning an entirely new way of practicing and a new set of patterns. It's OK to put a big neon sign around it.

Making it obvious means you'll do it and start internalizing it. It does not mean you are dumb. To the contrary, making it obvious means you're smart enough to "hack" your own brain and change your wiring.

Amazingly, once I can get people to re-frame and commit to the method, I get very, very good results.

I bring this up on a site that's largely for litigants because we're all learning and working on difficult stuff. Don't do yourself the disservice of thinking that exaggerating a new behavior makes you any less.

You're on the path.