Day 20: “Fail Early, Fail Often” for Lawyers

In their book, “What Do Entrepreneurs Create: Understanding Four Types of Ventures,” Michael F. Morris and Donald H. Kuratko write,

“Three critical things happen when someone tries to launch a business: (a) the entrepreneur makes a number of mistakes; (b) there is resistance to the new venture; and (c) unexpected developments impact the business.”

Note the unconditional here: Morris and Kuratko - both leading entrepreneurship scholars - don’t say three critical things may happen after new venture creation. They say “three critical things happen.”

What follows is a long (and, for the fledgling entrepreneur, potentially intimidating) list of mistakes, resistance, and surprises that are likely to occur: The entrepreneur prices the product too high or too low, emphasizes the wrong products, pursues the wrong customers. Funding requests are rejected, family members pressure the entrepreneur to get a stable job. Uninsured inventory is lost, an employee quits and becomes a competitor.

Photo by Austrian National Library on Unsplash

The point Morris and Kuratko are making here is not that the entrepreneur should have done things differently, or shouldn’t be an entrepreneur in the first place. The point is that some, even many, of these things will occur in every business, no matter how well devised.

Because mistakes, resistance, and surprise are part of all ventures, Morris and Kuratko write,

“The key to what becomes of the venture lies in how the entrepreneur deals with mistakes, resistance and unexpected developments.”

Successful entrepreneurs are not the ones who fail less - they’re the ones who learn more quickly. In fact, one of the secrets to a successful venture is trail and error. The entrepreneur who fears failure is already less equipped than the one who is eager to experiment, assess, and adapt.

Learning to Fail in the legal profession

The legal profession neither selects for nor encourages this mindset. Admission to law school is competitive based on grades, and aspiring law students learn early that it doesn’t pay to take college courses that are outside their wheelhouse or taught by rigorous professors. In law school, the competition for jobs steps in, and again students are incentivized to do what they already excel at. In practice, only the boldest or the most desperate clients want their lawyers to try the risky theory or strategy. In most cases, safer is better.

This bias toward safe success in the legal profession may be one of the biggest inhibitors for lawyers in adapting to a profession that is on the verge of being disrupted by technology. How can those of us steeped in this system learn to “fail early, fail often, but always fail forward”?

The entrepreneurship method and mindset teaches this habit. In this method, the process is iterative; “failure” is baked in. So in a way, the only way to “succeed,” according to the entrepreneurship method, is to fail - early, often, and forward.

Once this is understood, even the most type-A legal professional should be able to master the art of failure.