What does ‘Failure’ mean to you?
Disappointment?
Heartache?
The end of the road?
No one likes to fail. But if there is one group of professionals who are especially averse to failure, it’s lawyers. This is because in the practise of law, outcomes of cases are measured as either wins or losses. Lost cases can mean lost clients and even a lost reputation. For a lawyer, a failure can have much more severe repercussions than for everyone else.
Nevertheless, failure is part and parcel of the human experience. Lawyers are not excluded from this universal truth. Therefore, notwithstanding disappointment or fear; if we can adjust our response to and beliefs about failure, it can offer valuable insights that can determine how we proceed on the journey of growth and excellence. This is as true for lawyers as it is for everyone else.
Failure and Growth
Failures can be preventable, complex or intelligent. While preventable failures can (and likely should) be avoided, the other two types of failure can teach us valuable lessons; but only if we examine them and make the necessary corrections.
Many new businesses find that the fastest and most efficient way to get a new product off the ground is not to wait to develop a perfect product, but to launch a minimum viable product early on and then improve it over time. This approach provides information on where the ‘edges’ for success and failure are. So by failing quickly and even visibly – or as the cliché goes “fail fast and fail forward” – we can learn what works and what doesn’t. This is the only way to learn and improve.
Dealing with failure: A quick guide for legal practitioners
In the practise of law, planning to fail X number of times in order to learn how to succeed for the X+1st client is neither fair, practical nor ethical. So no legal professional will ever take a deliberate decision to fail.
Nonetheless, the fact is that he will fail, at least occasionally. And he will experience this failure in both the practice and business of law. Anyone who claims not to fail is usually not reporting their outcomes accurately. Since failures are inevitable, the first thing we need to do is accept that they are inevitable. Next, we need to adjust our attitude to them because that is what will determine how well we learn and how much we grow from them. An aversion to failure can directly hamper business development, one of the most critical business components for growing a legal practice. Those who successfully expand their clientele embrace failure and rejection, and realise that it is a necessary step to success.
So if you have ever made a mistake – or worse, failed at something – learn from the experience. Only then can you find new ways to grow your business and make it successful.
Many rainmakers have turned their failures into victory. So can you.
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