Solos need someone to ask for advice

 Michael Kemp, The Daily Record Newswire

Small-firm practice is especially prone to wide fluctuations in workload. Some weeks you’re in the office until 2 a.m. every night, other weeks you’re watching the fall colors change on WA Frost’s patio at 4 in the afternoon. It’s those slow weeks that allow you to sit back, relax, and spend time with what’s really important in life: fantasy football. With pride, bragging rights, and the name of your firstborn child on the line, it’s critical to get this one right, so when you have the time you get to dig deep into the expert analysis of who to sit or start every week. But with dozens of websites and hundreds of experts out their offering varied and usually contradictory information, who should you trust for advice?

As a side note, my super-scientific, random sample of people in my fantasy leagues has concluded that 100 percent of people play fantasy football, but if this doesn’t apply to you, imagine I’m talking about the weatherman instead. Same result.

So you look at the analysts and decide who to sit and who to start, only to watch the opposite occur. Or you trust the weatherman and leave your umbrella at home only to find yourself having to walk six blocks in a downpour back to your car. And when it’s just the weather or fantasy football, the worst that happens is your suit gets soaked, or you have to name your firstborn son after a superhero. But when your client’s business or their freedom is on the line, the stakes go up quite a bit.

When you’re in small-firm practice — especially if you started your own practice, and are starting from scratch — there’s quite a lot that’s new to you. If you’re smart, you have someone (preferably several someones) to whom you turn for advice. But just as in fantasy football or the weather, there are far more sources of information than there are good sources of information. The problem, of course, is that the reason you went to someone else for advice is that you don’t know the right answer yourself. So how do you know if a piece of advice you were given is any good?

We can take a couple of lessons from fantasy football.

Compare the analysts

There are lots of analysts out there, and like any other predictive field, sometimes they get the call right, and sometimes you end up … all wet. But there’s value in consensus. Any individual opinion might be off, but if six people all tell you similar things, they’re more likely to be right.

This is just another way of saying don’t put all your mentor eggs in one basket. Someone really in your corner isn’t going to care at all that you’re not satisfied with just one opinion on an issue, especially if it’s complex or important. Having a network of people you can go to for advice not only broadens the range of issues on which you can find an expert, but increases the likelihood that you will find a consensus (or at least a plurality) opinion among them.

Look at record, not reputation

Every year there are those players who are still skating by on their reputation. One or two Pro Bowl years, an MVP trophy, and they are elite for life. But while players can’t last long like this, analysts (and weathermen) can be wrong more often than they’re right and still maintain their reputation. Even for sports analysts, though, it’s a (relatively) small community. Better, the Internet is forever, meaning if you are really serious, you can dig through quite a bit of data to see if a particular analyst is more often right or wrong.

For the legal community, however, there are simply way too many lawyers to know everyone. Hearing a name in the news may have more to do with media savvy than perfect legal analysis. They’re both desirable traits, to be sure, but only one is helpful when you are deciding how to value your case, or whether to request or waive a jury trial. The best lawyer on a particular issue may be someone you’ve never heard of. But take a look around — or better yet, ask around (see No. 1) — to find out who is the person other lawyers trust on a particular topic. Google is great for finding a lawyer who has published the top blog on a topic, and honestly, the Twin Cities legal community is great for the support you will find and the number of people who will take the time to talk to you if you call the number on their blog. But splashy headlines don’t make experts.

Does this mean that the answer is always going to be right? Of course not. If you want a guarantee, shop at Men’s Warehouse. Occasionally you’re going to put up a goose egg. It’s inevitable, even with the best advice; sometimes you just don’t catch the bounces. We can’t predict the behavior of judges or juries or even always clients any more than we can predict the bounce of an oblong ball on a grass field. But by seeking not just the first but the best advice we can find, we do the best we can.