Super Lawyers - Washington 2012

WHAT IS THE BEST PIECE OF ADVICE YOU HAVE
FOR YOUNG LAWYERS? AS TOLD TO AMY KATES AND ADRIENNE SCHOFHAUSER

You can never get in
Do not allow the law of
Find your passion, and
trouble by taking the
your specialty—however
don’t be afraid to make
high road. And if you
a change to do what you interesting—to crowd out
know you’re going to
lose, put a smile on your
face and look good.

Sometimes it makes you stop and think what that high road is. You know: not sending the nasty email; just doing the right thing—you can’t get in trouble for that. Particularly, young lawyers have so much energy; they want to get the bad guy so badly that sometimes their enthusiasm might lead them to do things that they might regret later on. The classic example is dictating a letter that you want to send, thinking about it overnight and deciding the next day that it really isn’t worth it. [Or] not saying something when you could have. It’s often the art of not doing something. It’s the Jiminy Cricket sound bite.

NANCY ISSERLIS / NEW CITY ATTORNEY
FOR SPOKANE; FORMERLY BANKRUPTCY &
CREDITOR/DEBTOR RIGHTS WITH WINSTON
& CASHATT
what you learned in the
first year of law school.

You may be surprised how often those
fundamental principles prove pivotal in
even the most complex matters.
Second, do not think any matter is
“unimportant.” While some matters may
be more urgent or costly, and some clients
more demanding, everything you do is
an opportunity to learn, and how you
approach a matter reflects on you. You
cannot predict whose opinion will matter
down the road.
Finally, someone once reminded me that
almost any error can be fixed, but not every
mistake needs to be corrected. So do not
make a problem worse than it is by panic
or delay.
TIMOTHY BLANCHARD / BLANCHARD
MANNING, ORCAS, HEALTH CARE
love. What we do is too
important to take on if
you’re only half-hearted.

As lawyers, we’re fortunate to have countless and vastly differing jobs from which to choose—chances are that you can have a job in law that you love. There are obvious personal advantages to having a job about which you’re passionate, but I offer this advice for a different reason: Doing what you love will make you a better lawyer. You will care deeply about your work, and you will happily spend more time at it. Both of these things are essential to being an excellent lawyer.

Few lawyers find their dream jobs right out of law school. It takes courage to admit that you don’t love banking and commercial finance law, for example, when your big-firm salary is needed to pay your student loans. On the other hand, if you don’t truly care about banking and commercial finance law, you are not likely to become very good at it. Our profession has learned to be forgiving of career changes. I reinvented myself as a divorce lawyer after becoming a partner in commercial litigation. The best lawyers I know love what they do.