By Brooke Pauley

In Law360’s Expert Analysis Series focused on “Law School’s Missed Lessons,” Brooke Pauley shares her experiences and advice on learning from failure.

In law school, you learn about the importance of precision, correctness and perfection. Between the grading curve and learning the art of legal writing, it’s natural to believe that meticulous perfection is the only way to succeed. This pressure can be brutal and can lead to self-doubt over the slightest human error.

If you’re anything like me, and like many other law students, you’re probably already your own harshest critic — constantly pushing yourself toward some higher, shinier version of “achievement.”

Then you graduate, you start practicing, and suddenly you’re thrown into a fast-paced world of uncertainty, ambiguity, and what feels like an endless stream of feedback and advice on how to improve. It can be daunting to be surrounded by partners you want to impress, judges before whom you want to perform well and colleagues who have been doing this a lot longer than you have.

Law is one of the few professions where you prepare your arguments, present them in front of a judge, and then hear a clear decision on who wins and who loses. It reminds me of cheer competitions growing up, where weeks of practice could be undone with one foot out of bounds, and the anxiety that brings as you’re on deck about to be called.

I still relive the time I was too excited at regionals and over-rotated on my tumbling pass, securing our team second place by tenths of a point. It’s been years since I had any business even thinking about a spring floor, but I still feel those “If only I had …” thoughts sweeping past my mind every now and then.

Law is filled with those moments that we classify as personal failure. In a job where every detail is important, even small mistakes feel grave. Forgetting a talking point at an oral argument, missing a copy of a document for a judge, or even just saying something awkward in front of your coworkers might feel like a moral and intellectual flaw. But the truth is that “failure” in those moments is not the opposite of progress. It is the progress.

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