“Perfect is the enemy of good” seems like great advice for not over analyzing, but counter intuitive for a litigation job where you have to be precise and accountable all the time. What do you think?

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Depends on the task. There is margin for error in many things we do and less margin in others. Likewise some tasks just need to be fine. Others need to be as close to perfect as you can make them. The key is learning which task is which and then making the best use of whatever amount of time you allocate to a particular task.

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I’ve seen the pursuit of perfection result in missing filing deadlines. A good lawyer learns to balance precision and utility. Anecdotally, the best one-liner I ever heard from a judge was “Pursue excellence, not perfection.”

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Litigation job = enemy of good 🧐

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Sometimes you’re building chevys and sometimes you’re building cadillacs. It’s a function of knowing the goal of the project and understanding the stakes at issue and how they’re affected by what you’re doing. I think it’s a familiarity that gets developed through time in practice.

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Hahaha I just want to crap out now. If I could retire during the pandemic I would. Several people in my firm are retiring. And I’ve heard the same for other firms nearby. I’m jealous of those people heading to the beach to sip cocktails the rest of their lives. I guess maybe that’s good for me, though. More room to move up/around.

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I've always used this phrase as "perfection is the enemy of good enough." It's slightly different but the overall gist is the same. In litigation, things like an appellate brief? Perfection is ABSOLUTELY required. For things like drafting routine written discovery? Ehh, good enough will do. Since it's the lawyer who drafts the answers, it's not like written discovery is going to reveal any fact that suddenly breaks the case wide open. This is the same reason I RARELY send Requests for Admissions anymore.

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Requests for admissions are so nice when you’re writing your final written argument tho, and you can just refer to those instead of eliciting basic information through cross

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