Mistakes I Made In My First Months As A Trainee Solicitor
On a handful of mistakes, many insecurities and the value of feedback
I spoke to a trainee today who is having a tough week. I could really relate to how this person felt, which is why I wanted to write this post. I wish I had written this post sooner because I have buried so much, but I will try to piece together what I remember.
Soon after I started in my department, I was working one-on-one with a senior lawyer because my supervisor was away on holiday for an extended period of time. I don’t think he was quite aware of how little I knew as a first-seat trainee, or perhaps he did, but he wanted to challenge me anyway. I remember being very embarrassed with the fact that I was struggling to run what seemed like a simple redline of two documents. He was kind about it at the time, if not a little alarmed at how long it was taking me. This was my first feeling of being inadequate in my seat.
Two weeks later, I worked directly with a partner in my department to organise the signing of documents before a closing. Before the partner left for the day, he asked me if I had received the signatures for all of the parties. I quickly said yes, knowing that I had received many emails from many people. The partner had been managing the correspondence at the time, and I remember feeling overwhelmed by the volume of emails I was copied into. I didn’t thoroughly check each signature to confirm.
I worked until the early hours of the morning, spending what felt like a disproportionate amount of time trying to work out how to organise all of the signatures onto one document. I was already in a state of panic when, at about 1am, I realised I was missing a signature. I was terrified about the consequences of my mistake, and I had no idea what the etiquette was here. Do I find a way to get the partner’s attention…in the early hours of the morning? Was my mistake going to lead to the collapse of this deal?
The next month, I was glad my supervisor was back. I felt I would have someone to slow things down. On the first day, things quickly became tense because I did not tell my supervisor when I had completed the task I was working on. Over the next few weeks, I often felt like I was an annoyance. I took this personally.
By the end of the month, I worked many late nights on a closing with a lawyer. On the last day, I was feeling pretty good about how things had been, until the lawyer noticed the incorrect way I had named the document, which I had circulated to all parties. This was a good example of a situation where I knew I hadn’t understood something, but I felt like I had passed the point of asking how to fix it, for fear of seeming incompetent. This ruined the day for me, despite the fact that we had finished a deal we had spent months working on.
For many of those months, it was a rollercoaster. There were good days, and there were days where I felt like I was getting everything wrong. I was very self-conscious about things like picking up the phone to call the associate on the other side of the deal. (I remember writing down what I was going to say and rehearsing before I made the call!) I also felt I wasn’t a very fun person to be around, and so I felt bad for the people around me.
I’m aware this is painting a negative portrayal of my experience, but there were many great moments. The reason I’m focusing on the negative here is because I think it helps to know that there will be times during your training contract where you will make a lot of mistakes. If you’re anything like me, you will also take this really hard because you want to do a good job, you want to make a good impression and performing well is closely tied to your feeling of happiness.
So many of my mistakes were down to me, my inexperience and insecurities. I look back now and I know that I contributed to the tense feeling with my supervisor because I was extremely sensitive to negative feedback. Recently, with the help of therapy, I’ve been working through how my own upbringing contributed to this sensitivity, where doing something wrong led to a disproportionate reaction. If I had a better understanding of this at the time, I feel like I would have been able to understand that feedback doesn’t mean I’m not good enough. Rather, it’s exactly what it says on the tin: there are specific things that I need to improve on. And the only way you will know what to improve on is by receiving this feedback.
I also want to stress the importance of taking care of yourself during those first few months. It’s very hard to move from a situation where you are doing well to a completely new environment where you can’t be perfect. I made the mistake of locking everything up, which then made me feel quite alone in the struggles I was facing. During the times I did share, it made me feel a lot better to know that other trainees were going through something similar.
Note, I originally wrote this post for our new Junior Lawyers’ Community.