Andrew York, Esq. – Butler, Vines, & Babb
Knoxville, Tennessee

In my Leading as Lawyers blog posts to date, I have generally written about ongoing events in my life. But today, I write about an experience in the past.  Lately, I have reminisced on a prior law school experience that has been an ever-present reminder to me of an important part of leadership: sometimes, things just need to get done.  I describe that experience and offer insights here.

When I was in law school, I was an editor of Transactions: The Tennessee Journal of Business Law, I distinctly remember our first rounds of edits. I had a MacBook Air, so I used Google Docs to make my designated edits. I sent them back timely and was quickly issued a time for an appointment with the Supervising Editor, Jamie Thompson.

Jamie sat down with me via Zoom and politely informed me that my edits were totally wrong. I could not believe it because I spent extensive time with the edits, hoping they would be perfect. Upon reviewing the edits with him, we noticed that the footnotes would change when it was opened with Google Docs and when it was opened with Microsoft Word, so the edits were correct in Google Docs, but the numbering was incorrect and not easily correctible when the document was opened in Microsoft Word.

This presented an unfortunate situation: (i) the footnotes were currently in a mess, (ii) the edits needed to get done immediately, and (iii) no singular person was responsible for the circumstances.

Instead of casting blame, Jamie told me that he would handle the edits and not to worry about it. He recognized a leadership principle that I had not understood up to that point, which is that sometimes things go wrong without it being a singular person’s fault, but that does not change the fact that the thing still needs to be done.

It is easy to skirt responsibility and to assign fault when someone obviously creates a problem, but often, a leader will rally to fix a problem that the leader never created. That is servant leadership. The great thing about learning this aspect of leadership is that there are always ample opportunities to practice; the hard thing is that the opportunities are rarely appealing.

The trash is full in the office? Likely not your job to remove it. No one will congratulate you. It probably just needs to be removed.

The copier is jammed? Likely not your job to fix it. It probably just needs to be fixed.

A deadline is approaching, and someone needs to take the filing to the court? Might not be billable hours, but it probably needs to be done.

While these jobs are usually assigned to other people so that attorneys can bill more hours, sometimes it can be refreshing to show that you care about serving the people at your work.

In the legal practice, there are ample opportunities to push these incidents onto other staff instead of embracing them. Sometime these can be “learning opportunities,” which can benefit the staff members; but sometimes they are just an inconvenience, which ultimately can be embraced to help a leader continue to grow in their position.

One of the legendary stories of Michael Jordan is that he never asked his teammates to do something he was not willing to do himself. As leaders in the legal field, we can act just like Michael and embrace those opportunities, without pushing them onto another person. It is easy to make excuses, and it is not always appropriate to be the one embracing those responsibilities when there are other things going on, but a leader can recognize when to oblige and when to abstain.

At the end of the day, things will be wrong. Often times, those wrong things are the exact kind that everyone wants to avoid addressing. Regardless, things just need to be done, and YOU have the power to do them.

Special thanks to Jamie Thompson, University of Tennessee Winston College of Law Class of 2021, for helping me to learn this valuable leadership principle and skill. My meeting with him had a profound impact on the way that I approach different situations in my life. I am grateful that he handled that meeting in a manner that enabled me to understand and pay forward the power of servant leadership.