Easy things are harder than hard things

This is a post mainly for law students volunteering for FRU, and others very early in their careers.

Let’s assume you’re a brilliant lawyer. You understand and can reconcile all the appellate decisions on indirect discrimination. Equal pay holds no terrors for you. TUPE is an open book. You even understand the assumptions underlying the ‘simplified approach’ to calculating a pension loss.

Then you conduct your first case in the employment tribunal (or wherever, in fact – but this blog is about employment tribunals). It’s the most bog-standard unfair dismissal with no tricky law in it at all; but you come away crushed, feeling you’ve made a total idiot of yourself.

Why? Does this mean you’re not cut out to be an advocate after all? Should you pack it in?

No. It’s because easy things are harder than hard things.

There’s a whole host of minor conventions to do with conducting hearings. Things like where you sit, the degree of formality with which you address the tribunal, what you say to witnesses, how you refer to documents in the bundle, how you deal with a witness who asks you questions instead of answering yours, what you do if client tries to speak to you while you are cross-examining or making submissions, etc etc. Some of them you may have picked up in law school simulations. This blog and the book it supports aim to demystify a lot of them. But until you’ve got some real-life experience behind you, you’re bound to stumble from time to time. And when you do – however little it matters in itself – you are quite likely to feel disproportionately humiliated.

Blame the species. We’re highly hierarchical animals, with a strong commitment to ‘belonging’; and we typically express belonging by conforming to minor rules that don’t much matter in themselves. That’s why small errors of etiquette are so toe-curling. Not because they really matter or have caused any real damage to your client’s prospects of success: but because you have displayed your ignorance of the rules of a group you are trying to belong to. It doesn’t help that all this happens in public.

Reading this post won’t make these feelings go away. But you don’t have to panic or draw extravagant conclusions. It doesn’t make you stupid that you don’t know how something is usually done when you’ve never done it before; it just makes you a beginner. The difficult stuff you find easier – understanding the law, spotting the inconsistencies between the documents and what the witnesses say, that sort of thing – does actually matter more in the end.

And meanwhile: every mistake you wince to think of is a mistake you’ll never make again. Viewed that way, every one is an asset.