So I fucked up at work today. Well, more accurately, the mistake happened over a month ago and is just now bearing its sour fruit, as it were, completely blindsiding me. Hindsite is 20/20 and all that. But it did lead me to a useful insight to law. In my opinion, law is a stressful career because it requires you to do things both quickly and absolutely perfectly.

This is somewhat a "well duh" statement, I know. And yet when you think about it, at least in the academic world, speed and perfection are usually trade-offs. If the report has to be done tomorrow you sacrifice a little bit of quality to just get it done. If it needs to be absolutely perfect, the (good) student knows she'd better plan ahead and give herself plenty of time to check and double check. In the legal world, you don't always have the luxury of double checking.

That wasn't exactly the case in this instance - after all the mistake happened a month ago, I had plenty of time to go back and look it over. But it was a long term project, so once I finished the "rough draft" if you will I set it aside and moved onto other things. It wasn't even my case to be honest - that's why I set it aside. It was something I was doing to help out one of the other paras, and then a large project came up in my own case, so I immersed myself in that project, and never got back to tidying up the original project. Then this morning they want to see what we've accomplished so far, and well, this afternoon, problems ensued.

That's the thing about this job - almost every time I've screwed up in any significant way, it hasn't been because of stupidity or carelessness / thoughtlessness. Well, actually, I guess it depends on what you call carelessness. The point is, each screw up has come down to problems in the details, and each time it wasn't that I didn't think about those details, it was just that I made a decision to do something the faster way, or the "good enough" way, and it came back and bit me on the ass.

In a way this is comforting, because if I was simply totally oblivious, then that would be a bigger problem. This is just a matter of learning not to opt for the "good enough" way. The reason why this thing blindsided me today was a matter of changing circumstances. I had done the project in a way which meant that the small errors which are inevitable in any "rough draft" of mine shouldn't have been a big issue, given the way I thought the attorneys would be using the data I was assembling. At least not in the initial phases - when we got down to using them as evidence that would be a different story, but that is probably over a year away. But they apparently decided at some point to do things differently than originally planned, without passing along that information to the paras. Had my data been 100% accurate it wouldn't have been a problem at all. But the change in method magnified the errors to a much greater importance.

Anyway, this job has been a good learning experience precisely because I can get screw ups like that out of the way now when it's relatively unimportant, rather than when I'm in my first internship after law school. I am slowly coming to terms with the high expectations that one encounters in this field, and learning how to adjust my thinking to meeting them.

Every other job I've had has involved a certain amount of fudging, now that I think about it. We taught our refs that if you're officiating an intramural game and you're uncertain about a call, go with your best judgement but be decisive about it even if you're not sure. In retail like at Bath and Body Works - if somebody asks you a question about a product that you aren't sure about, don't lie to them, but you're supposed to know your products, so you can't always say "let me look that up for you." So you fudge it.

Political science: weak points in your argument? Fudge them a bit and try to steer the emphasis elsewhere.

But when you're a paralegal? Fudging is a dangerous dangerous thing!