Perfectionism in IP
If I had to pin down the single most common trait of patent and trade mark attorneys, then I think it would have to be perfectionism.
The IP professions need and select for the people who strive for excellence, and it attracts and holds onto those that are hard-wired for perfection (at least in their work).
Striving for perfection in our patent and trade mark work is obviously a good thing. Continuously aiming for producing the absolute best work products and outcomes for clients makes IP work valuable and enjoyable (much of the time). Finding the best wording for a claim, or preparing the most comprehensive clearance search, is an intellectual challenge. Clients value the high standard of work, and aiming for perfection reduces the chances of problems at patent office and in front of the courts.
However, we all know that something as simple as the wrong word, a misplaced comma, or omitting a class of goods can put validity or the ability to cover an infringement at risk, and cost the proprietor hundreds, thousands, and potentially even millions of pounds in commercial value.
That our mistakes could be so costly is drummed into us right from our first days as a trainee. And so, we learn that we shouldn’t settle for less than perfect in our legal work, even when the time or budget doesn’t necessarily allow for it, creating pressure to work harder and longer and a constant feeling of not being good enough or letting the client down because the last piece of work wasn’t perfect.
Perfectionism also rears its head in new areas as IP attorneys progress in their careers and start to take on management and leadership responsibilities. The same thoroughness that helps prepare immaculate claim sets or opposition filings can play out in how we work with others. In much the same way as with the legal work itself, perfectionism can be both positive and negative when it shows up in management and leadership of others, including of whole firms.
In both the legal work and the people stuff, perfectionism can become a commercial liability for IP firms. It can reduce wellbeing and engagement and increase sickness absences. It can rack up unbillable costs, client complaints about delays and invoices, and at its worst it slows firm growth and hits the bottom line.
Inside the IP attorney mind
(Not as scary as you might imagine!)
It’s helpful to start by thinking about some of the psychological underpinnings of perfectionist tendencies. This really helps put the learned perfectionism we get from training in the IP sector in context.
The Cognitive Profile of IP Attorneys
A lot of what is known about the "lawyer personality" derives from research by Dr. Larry Richard (a psychologist and former trial lawyer who founded LawyerBrain (www.lawyerbrain.com)). I was first introduced to this work when speaking on a webinar on mental health alongside Dr Richard.
Dr. Richard analysed thousands of legal practitioners over 20+ years and was able to identify several distinct personality traits where lawyers score as statistical outliers compared to the general professional population.
In the context of IP law, some of these traits are actively selected for in recruitment and cultivated through training and the day-to-day work. These key traits for IP attorneys (with average percentile scores for lawyers as whole) are:
Scepticism (90th Percentile: exceptionally high): High sceptics are naturally cynical, questioning, self-protective, and argumentative. High scepticism is essential for arguing with patent office examiners and third parties in opposition and court proceedings, it is damaging when overly used in leadership scenarios, where it creates distrust and defensiveness.
Autonomy (89th Percentile: exceptionally high): Attorneys possess a strong instinctual desire for independence and control over their immediate environment. They actively resist being managed, especially by those that haven’t had the same experience as them, they get annoyed at and resist processes and systems, and they prize personal agency, which can result in micro-management when forced to work with others.
Psychological Resilience / Ego Strength (30th Percentile: very low): Despite their high intellect, attorneys score surprisingly low on psychological resilience. They tend to be thin-skinned regarding criticism, defensive when challenged, and deeply fearful of failure, with mistakes being felt as personal threats to their identity and professional status.
Sociability and Cognitive Empathy (12th Percentile: exceptionally low): While often talkative and outgoing, attorneys tend to prefer working independently and score lower on sociability (initiating close interpersonal connections) and cognitive empathy (intellectually taking another's perspective). Therefore, when someone else makes a mistake, the perfectionist attorney is much less tolerant and forgiving.
Mix these traits together with the demands of excellence from IP training, qualification and ongoing practice and you create a little cognitive incubator for chronic perfectionism.
Kahler’s "Be Perfect" driver
So now we’ve seen that the IP (and legal profession as whole) self-selects and incubates cognitive traits that exacerbate perfectionism. But there are also behavioural traits (which are psychologically different to the cognitive traits discussed above).
Within the field of transactional analysis (about human interactions), the psychologist Dr. Taibi Kahler identified five common “drivers”, unconscious behavioural patterns developed early in life to help us manage situations and to gain approval from others. One of these is the “Be perfect” driver, which is especially common in legal professionals, and at least anecdotally, IP attorneys.
This behavioural driver rests on a simple belief: “I am only safe if I am competent and make no mistakes.”
That belief can be useful. It is characterised by attention to detail, high standards and accuracy. As such, it produces careful work, examination success and professional credibility.
However, the belief that we are only safe in those circumstances also has drawbacks, we can be slow and pedantic, anxious when we are forced to finish a task earlier than we want (because its not perfect yet), miss deadlines and be inefficient. Sound like anyone you know in the IP profession?
What’s more, the belief can tip into dysfunction and impact on others because it is used as a defensive habit. When there is uncertainty or heavy workloads, the “be perfect” individual tightens control, focuses on unimportant details, and expects unattainable standards from themselves and others.
The perfectionist persona
A combination of cognitive traits and behavioural adaptations can therefore combine to create a true perfectionist persona. Of course, this combination brings excellence, and these individuals can be exceptional when able to contribute to client work and the firm itself through high standards and efficiency.
However, the combination has a darker side, where the perfectionist becomes driven by failure, paralyses themselves by being unable to complete tasks or see when they’ve reached a point of “good enough”, and links their own self-worth to error-free output. It is in this maladaptive perfectionism that impacts on the rest of the organisation.
The impact of maladaptive perfectionism in IP firms
You’ll have picked up from everything above that there are two key areas where perfectionism shows up within IP firms; in the day-to-day legal work and in the effect it has on others. The impact of maladaptive perfectionism in both of these areas broadly splits in two ways (and that are common to both the work and the interpersonal areas), profitability and people. Let’s take a look at some ways in which these manifest in IP firms, especially when we are talking about the perfectionism of senior attorneys.
1. Profitability
At its most simple level, perfectionism can reduce profitability through unrecoverable time, inefficient/non-existent delegation, and decision-making paralysis.
Delegation: Senior attorneys often spend hours rewriting junior attorney drafts and frequently without explaining the changes so the junior attorney can learn. And that’s if they are willing to delegate in the first place. It’s just as common for the senior attorney to simply hold on to the work and do it themselves on the basis that no-one else can do it well enough.
In practice, perfectionist approaches to delegation eat into the personal time of the senior attorney, prevents them from doing more complex or high-value work, pushes internal management and strategic projects down the priorities list and gets in the way of doing business development. All for work that is unlikely to be fully billable to the client.
Over-servicing: A perfectionist mindset means that every task is pushed as close to perfection as possible by taking as much time as the perfectionist believes is necessary. The consequences are straightforward, the work product may be almost perfect, but it can be unnecessarily long, taken too long to produce, missed the internal or external deadline and be no closer to getting the commercial outcome the client actually wants.
Profitability takes a hit because of the need to write-off significant amounts of high-value time, or through unwitting damage to client relationships by giving them work they didn’t ask for, late, and at higher cost than expected.
Strategic decision paralysis: The perfectionist mindset commonly impacts on taking strategic decisions. One perfectionist can be vetoed, but with a high proportion of cynical, autonomous, perfectionists with low social adaptability (back to the cognitive traits identified by Larry Richard) in a leadership group (such as a group of partners or board) then the ability to make decisions is not just hampered, it can be delayed, sometimes indefinitely.
The impacts on profitability can therefore be the cost of losing opportunities entirely, spiralling prices due to delays, or simply because other, less perfectionist-heavy firms put themselves in a position to move ahead.
2. People
The cultural cost of perfectionism is felt in the wellbeing and confidence of staff, retention rates, hidden mistakes, discretionary effort and long-term practice viability. In effect, when senior attorneys are perfectionists, they trigger all sorts of negative reactions in their staff.
Delegation: When talking about the profitability impacts, it’s clear that delegation by perfectionists is problematic. But delegation without feedback, or with micro-management and unachievably high standards, or indeed non-delegation, impacts on the person doing (or that could do) the work. Junior attorneys are “trained” through this treatment to behave in certain ways and to believe certain things about themselves.
They are taught that perfection is essential, and that if they can’t reach that then they aren’t good enough, through micro-management and not being delegated to they are taught that they aren’t trusted to do the work even remotely right, and without receiving the feedback that goes with the myriad of corrections the senior attorney has made, they aren’t able to learn from their mistakes, compounding the problem of them not being good enough. The junior attorneys also try to avoid working with the person who holds them to unnecessarily high standards, and where they can’t avoid working for that person, they can become sick and may even leave.
The “no-mistake” culture: When perfection is expected and mistakes are met with harsh criticism, junior staff do not feel able to raise when they have made or have seen a mistake. Hiding mistakes carries with it the very real risk of the small mistake spiralling into being a much bigger and costlier mistake, with the possibility of indemnity insurance not applying where an error was hidden. Hiding of mistakes are also a common factor in the removal of attorneys from the relevant practicing registers. All because the senior attorney didn’t tolerate errors.
Illness and a drop in discretionary effort: Where junior attorneys are consistently being held to unrealistically high standards, and especially when they don’t match their own, more realistic, standards, then there is an impact on the mental health and motivation of the junior. Wellbeing drops and sickness absence becomes more frequent. In addition, the willing ness to go the extra mile dissipates as the junior doesn’t believe that the effort is worth it (after all the senior thinks they aren’t good enough anyway) or that the senior doesn’t deserve it (they don’t treat me well, so why should I bother and put myself out?).
As these factors become more common, then there is a consequential likelihood of the junior attorney deciding to move on to another firm, to go in house, or to leave the profession entirely because they have become so jaded at having so many perfectionist senior attorneys make their life difficult and unhealthy.
Succession plans aren’t made and retirements postponed: When good, qualified attorneys leave because of perfectionist seniors, then there becomes a gap in the team structure, creating a position where there is no attorney to take over cases and clients when a senior partner is ready to retire.
The perfectionist senior attorney is also reluctant to bring others in on client relationships, even when there isn’t a gap, and so as retirement approaches, the firm realises that the cases and clients aren’t able to be handed over because nobody is up to speed, and either they take the risk of clients moving to another firm, or having the retiring partner stay on for another year or two, creating a disgruntled partner who’d rather be travelling the world (albeit this ultimately of their own making).
Techniques for senior IP attorneys to manage their perfectionism
With perfectionism being deep-seated and integral parts of the personality of many senior IP attorneys, it is impossible to change overnight. And, as perfectionism does bring advantages in terms of high standards of work, a complete change isn’t a desirable outcome anyway. Instead, the individual can manage perfectionism so that overall standards aren’t lowered too far but the behaviours become more reasonable and negative impacts are reduced.
In practice, having some frameworks and processes to follow make managing your own perfectionism a lot simpler. Here’s some examples that may help you.
1. Work tiering
Not every piece of legal work carries the same risk or justifies the same level of time/effort or senior attorney input. It can therefore be helpful to define this up front by creating a categorisation of the work that you do.
Just spending the time to categorise work in this way can help you make better decisions on how much time to invest in a task once you are faced with it in the real world. For some, it can also be helpful to have the categorisations to hand (on your desk or computer desktop) for easy reference each time you start a task.
Having this categorisation can reduce cognitive load by reducing the attention given to lower-risk and lower-importance tasks. Having pre-decided what level of effort and perfectionism is needed for a particular task, this gives you permission to not need to reach for 100%. This approach therefore reduces anxiety and stress around not reaching 100% perfection and reduces excessive time on tasks and even makes it easier for work to be delegated to junior attorneys.
2. The "Red-pen audit"
Senior attorneys often blur the line between correcting genuine technical errors and imposing their own writing preferences. While clearly, you need to be comfortable with the work product going out with your name at the bottom, it is important to remember that a piece of work that is technically error-free and grammatically correct is going to have the same outcome with a client, patent office or court as a version that is then revised into an entirely different way of saying the exact same thing. The internal outcome is different though, with more wasted and unbillable time, stress, anxiety and morale-loss for the junior.
Often, we don’t realise that the corrections we make to work are stylistic rather than substantial until it comes time to explain them to the person who did the draft, and we find ourselves saying, that’s just stylistic (trust me, I’ve been there!).
One approach to catching yourself correcting for style instead of substance is to apply the following two-step filter:
Is this a legal, technical, or strategic error? (If yes: correct it or have the junior correct it. Don’t forget to explain why it is an error.)
Is this merely a stylistic preference? (If yes: leave it unchanged unless the stylistic change is because of a stated preference of the recipient of the work (client, patent office etc.))
The approach of assessing the type of correction as you go, rather than at the time of giving feedback, allows you to question the necessity of making stylistic changes. This approach can help you let go of the need for each piece of work to be the perfect version of what you would produce, while growing the confidence and autonomy of the junior attorney working with you. It also decreases review time, with less corrections being made and less feedback needed.
3. The 70% strategic decision rule
To counter decision paralysis, you can agree and implement a rule (both individually, and within teams or firms) that strategic calls can be made when about 70% of the necessary information is available, rather than waiting for all of the information to be made available and perfect certainty.
For some decisions where the consequences of a wrong decision are less important, then you can drop that percentage to 50 or 60%, and for decisions where the impact is exceptionally significant, then it could be increased to no more than 80%. But it shouldn’t be increased just to avoid deciding.
The approach of agreeing up-front that you don’t need all of the information to decide, speeds up decision making and takes the stress and anxiety out of looking for the final, most-difficult to find pieces of information. Typically, any decision, even if you have all the information, is not going to turn out perfectly, and changes and updates will be needed over time. So why waste time and energy getting to the same point.
Knowing that the decision has been made without 100% information allows for less anxiety after a decision has been taken about it having to be correct and work out. This focus moves the mindset from needing to be perfect to avoid failing, to getting on with it and updating and iterating as you go.
Conclusion
Managing perfectionism driver is not about lowering standards. Instead, managing perfectionism is about getting the best outcome within that specific context. All while protecting the wellbeing of yourself and others; improving relationships with others; maximising fee realisation and giving yourself time back to do other, more profitable or more enjoyable things.
Knowing that perfectionism is rooted in both cognitive and behavioural patterns that have come about over an entire lifetime means that it isn’t easy to change. The tips above are simple tools that can help, but they aren’t going to fix perfectionism overnight.
Instead, that can be a lifetime of awareness and development work on yourself, and with support from skilled professionals, such as a coach or therapist (depending on the origins and deep-seatedness of your perfectionism).
If you want to know what professional support you need for your perfectionist tendencies, I’m happy to have a chat and help (message me through the contact form), including making recommendations on other coaches, or therapists if I’m not the right coach for you to overcome your perfectionism.
