Confidence and the New Attorney

Bar results come out today in some jurisdictions!!  Congratulations to all those that passed!! What an amazing feat!!

While we hope you’re busy celebrating, we also want to take a moment to talk about the importance of confidence as you begin practicing law.  For the most part, confidence is a self-given gift.  You bestow it on yourself and say to hell with other people’s opinions and own your skills and abilities.

It’s not easy getting there.  Especially during your first few months in the legal profession.  I never took as hard of a hit to my self-esteem and self-worth as the three years I spent in law school.  My writing was never good enough; my arguments weren’t ever as strong; I never felt fully prepared.  When I did prepare it always seemed to fall flat.  I didn’t make advocacy teams, and didn’t even bother to try to make any journals.  Every time I applied for a position I never expected anything to come of it.  There were a lot of tears and a lot of questioning about whether I was good enough, and often, the world seemed to give me a resounding NO! By the time I graduated, I had lost a lot of the strong resolve I had pre-law school.  Passing the bar restored some of my self-esteem, but it wasn’t until I started my first job that I slowly gained back my self-assurance and belief in my capacity as an advocate.

Straight out of law school, I started as a pro bono coordinator, which meant I “guided” private attorneys in immigration cases.  I say guided because I would never have dreamt to say I was supervising them.  But in all true definitions I was supervising the volunteer attorneys.  These were lawyers with decades of experience, and I felt intimidated when I emailed them to ask them to edit things or pressed them about deadlines.

Then one day I read an email sent by a senior attorney to a superior.  It was direct and to the point.  Declaratory statements only.  I was shocked that she wasn’t even worried about her tone.  Meanwhile, my emails were more like, “do you mind,” and “if you could,” and “sorry to bother you,” with extra exclamation points.  And I’m sure there were probably smiley faces at the beginning.  I just didn’t want to seem like I was being bossy, right?  Like, who was I to tell them what to do?

But after seeing that email it clicked and I thought–oh.  We’re all professional, so they won’t mind that I’m guiding them and giving them edits.  And then I went further, it doesn’t matter if they think I’m not friendly or incredibly deferential because the point of this is to serve the client.  If that means that I press someone about a deadline and it perhaps annoys them, so be it.

The ability to advocate for others really set me free.  And that’s very true of women–we can fight for other people, but find it hard to be our own cheerleaders.   But the more I came off as competent and self-assured to the volunteers, the more they reached out to me, the more capable I felt.  This confidence seeped into other area of my practice–from the way I interacted with students, to how I participated in meetings, and other organizations.

I would encourage all new attorneys to assess their strengths and skills and give yourself permission to acknowledge those strength and skills.  Don’t feel like you need to wait to hear from others that you’re a strong advocate.  Know that you are and show it.  Don’t be worried about coming off as a presumida or whatever bad adjectives used against you to attack your self-esteem.  Because when you present yourself as a capable and intelligent individual most people will then have no choice but to treat you as such.