Everything Is Fragile: The Need for the Discipline of Paying Attention and Tending
Articles
From the President’s Desk
Everything Is Fragile: The Need for the Discipline of Paying Attention and Tending
Nothing lasts on its own. The few things that do were noticed first and tended second. They have more in common than you would expect.
I turned 54 this summer.
I am told this is the age at which a person grows reflective. Over these past months, I have assembled a list of axioms: plain statements I have come to believe because I have watched them prove out.
One of those axioms I’ve developed is this: Everything is fragile. Things need tending. Nothing lasts once you stop.
Fragility is the default condition. Things come apart on their own, at no cost and with no assistance, and anyone who has run a firm, a business, or a team of people knows it. Decay explains itself. The harder question is the reverse: If everything leans toward coming apart, why (or how) does anything last?
My answer is two disciplines, practiced in order. The first is attention, which begins with taking nothing for granted. The second is tending. Attention notices the hairline crack while it is still a hairline: the client whose emails have grown shorter, the colleague who has gone quiet in meetings, the friend you have not heard from since spring. Tending is what you do next. The call, the lunch, the honest word... the action taken before the crack becomes a break. Neither works alone. Attention without tending is spectating. Tending without attention is guesswork, and it usually arrives late. And what you don't pay attention to goes away.
I call them disciplines on purpose. Discipline is a habit kept on the days you would rather not keep it. Nobody needs discipline to answer the urgent call. It takes discipline to make the call nobody is waiting for, one that could be put off until later.
So, this summer I took an inventory of what has survived three decades of practice. Friendships that have gone the distance. Colleagues I can call and text at all hours. Client relationships older than some of the lawyers in my firm now working on them. None of it was the product of luck or proximity. It was the product of attention paid and tending done, year after year. And in every instance, I found three things in common.
The first: Every durable relationship I have was funded years in advance, when there was no visible return and no particular reason to expect one. The instruction that arrives in year 27 of my career as a lawyer traces back to a lunch or a chance meeting in year two that had no agenda. You cannot build a relationship at the moment you require it. The need is not exclusive, and everyone experiences it. The finest business developers I know are not more charming than the rest of us (frequently they are less so). They are just earlier.
The second: Every enduring relationship survived a change in circumstance. The general counsel who trusted you takes a position elsewhere and calls you from the new desk. The friend who knew you before the title is indifferent to the title. A relationship that exists only because two people share a building or a matter ends when the building or the matter does. It will feel like a betrayal, though nothing was betrayed. The test is not whether a relationship is pleasant. It is whether it outlives the circumstance that produced it.
The third: The one I resisted longest – in every lasting relationship, somebody is doing more of the reaching. Not occasionally. Always. The correspondence is uneven, the invitations run mostly one way, and the person doing more decided at some point not to keep a ledger. When both parties are waiting to see who writes first, and both are counting, the relationship has a term, and the term is short. I have been on both sides of it. The years have made me far more interested in being the one who reaches.
The three hold for institutions as much as for people, because a firm's reputation is a relationship with a market, conducted over a longer period. It is built before it is needed or not at all. It must survive the departure of whoever built it. And it depends on partners who reach first and have stopped calculating what each contribution earns them. Our Six Pillars (integrity, excellent work product, reasonable fees, continuing legal education, civility, and community service) read best in that light. They are not a certificate collected on admission. They are the maintenance schedule of a durable enterprise. Attention tells you which pillar needs work this quarter. Tending is the work, the focus on improving. The firms in Primerus that have prospered longest treat the Six Pillars exactly that way.
A word to the clients who read this letter. You are the other half of every relationship described here, and you are entitled to hold your lawyers to the same standard. The three observations make a fair test for any lawyer you retain, ours included. Did this relationship exist before there was a matter in it? Would it survive my moving to another company, or my lawyer moving to another firm? When no fee is attached, who calls whom?
Then watch for the two disciplines. A lawyer paying attention notices your business changing before you have to explain it: the acquisition, the new market, the regulator who has started asking questions. A lawyer who tends calls with a thought and no invoice attached. If that describes the lawyers you have, you are being accompanied, not merely served. The difference is invisible on an ordinary day. It is the only thing that matters on the day that something goes seriously wrong.
None of this is a discovery. My grandparents would have recognized all three, and yours would too. That is exactly why they go unpracticed: they are unglamorous, they “pay late,” and nothing bad happens on the day you skip them. Neglect never sends an invoice. It simply stops sending anything at all.
To the younger lawyers reading (and as a reminder to the rest of us): The relationships that will define the second half of your career are being built now, in the least remarkable weeks of your life, in conversations that appear to be about nothing and will turn out to have been about everything. You cannot identify them at the time. Nobody can. The only sound policy is to pay attention to all of them, and to tend each as though it were the one that mattered. You water the entire field, not just an individual plant.
Everything is fragile. Durability is not luck. It is thanks to daily attention and tending, done before anyone asks. Both are available to every one of us, today and every day after. Take nothing for granted. Be the reason something lasts.
Christian Stegmaier
President and Chief Executive Officer-Designate
The International Society of Primerus Law Firms