Your Lawyer/ Doctor/Board Member is worse than you want to believe

When hiring professionals in high-stakes/adversarial scenarios, your standards are probably too lenient. How to reassess your relationship with hired experts

One of the most common and self-defeating lies which nearly all of us tell ourselves: “I know a good lawyer/ doctor/ therapist/ realtor/ angel investor.”

No.

Statistically, no you don’t.

You know *a* lawyer/ doctor/ therapist/ realtor/ angel investor, and the basis which you judge their ability and competence is that this individual knows more about law/ medicine/ psychology/ real estate/ startups than YOU.

A very low bar, when you consider what’s at stake.

There’s an old joke/riddle relevant to this discussion which goes like this:

“what do you call the person who graduates at the bottom of their Medical School class?”

“Doctor.”

The joke is less funny when you consider the possibility that this Doctor may the one making life-and-death decisions about your medication, surgery or cancer treatment.

In every vocation/profession, there exist top 2% overachievers who absolutely dominate their peers in knowledge/competence, a cohort of above-average practitioners in the upper quartile, a big mediocre middle … and a bottom-quartile who are barely-qualified to practice their nominal vocation, but count on the fact that their shoddy knowledge and poorly-developed skillsets are undetectable by 80% of lay outsiders.

On the other side, you have people who confidently brag about the fact they got into competitive professional programs with bottom-tier credentials:

Assuming she graduates from the law school which gave her a scholarship, would any of you reading this be interested in hiring her to represent YOU in any high-stakes lawsuit or legal conflict?

When you hire someone to represent you, especially in adversarial win-lose scenarios (attorneys, realtors, investment bankers, etc.) the goal isn’t to hire your friend or cousin who “needs the business” - the goal is to punish your counterparty for hiring the second-best lawyer/realtor/investment-banker in the room.

In high-stakes situations (hiring a surgeon to remove a cancerous growth out of your sister’s lungs, choosing to add an investor/Board member to your startup to help you navigate the precarious growth phase after receiving your Series A Venture round), we all want, at minimum, someone in the upper-quartile of their vocation - not just a mediocre plodder of their respective fields who’s doing the minimum (but still comes across more-knowledgeable than you, the lay outsider).

But even though that’s what you (and everyone else) WANTS, by statistical definition, 75% of these professionals are NOT top-quartile representatives of their fields.

And unless you take extraordinary measures to vet your team, you’re unlikely to just stumble across top-performing professionals. While tempting (and certainly what everyone else does) you should not judging them by what they know relative to you (the low bar which most people judge lawyers/ doctors/ realtors/ investors), but you should evaluate them by how they stack up against THEIR peers.

I understand this is an uncomfortable topic to consider - this may be the first time you may be wondering if your own doctor, lawyer, investor/Board member are indeed merely mediocre representatives of their profession … or even worse, bottom-quartile posers, trading off your ignorance of their profession, while collecting market-rate (or even higher!) compensation built off the backs of the earned reputations of their more-competent peers, while delivering substandard advice to which you are entrusting your life or livelihood.

Oh no. I suspect I have a mediocre lawyer/ doctor/ board member/ banker - HELP!

Ok, now that I’ve got you paranoid and mistrusting your lawyer/ doctor/ Board Member, take a step back and relax a moment. In many instances, having a mediocre lawyer/ doctor/ investor, while suboptimal, is not death sentence. Many low-stakes professional services (incorporating a standard LLC, conducting a routine blood test, filling the paperwork for a follow-on investment) can be competently executed by middling practitioners with minimal problems, indeed - hiring a top-notch professional in such circumstances and paying top-notch fees may end up being overkill.

However - when the circumstances are more complex/ unconventional, or the penalties for being wrong far more dire, that’s when the limitations of mediocre practitioners become a serious liability - they are literally not worth the money you pay for their advice/presence since they will misdiagnose or drop the ball in ways that result in catastrophic damage to you, just when you most need their specialized expertise.

How do you discern if you’ve got a mediocre (or worse) professional in your corner, hamstringing you with incomplete, erroneous or outright damaging advice? Well, they certainly wouldn’t confess their mediocrity to you, the paying client.

You’ll need to smoke them out.

How?

Zoom out a bit and consider that, unless they are utterly delusional, the mediocre or bottom-quartile lawyer/ doctor/ investor/ realtor is well-aware of how they stack up in comparison to others in their industry.

One of the most-reliable “tells” of a mediocre/bottom-quartile professional is their habit of “pulling rank” - a term originally used in the military (where rank is most-strictly observed/respected).

“Did YOU spend three years in law school and know what year the 18th Amendment to the Constitution was passed without looking it up online? Can YOU name the exact sequence of a Krebs Cycle without Wikipedia? Didn’t think so.”

They strut and flex their knowledge of information which is mundane to their profession, but unlikely to be known by outsiders as a mechanism to bully laymen who question their competence. If you ever question a lawyer/ doctor’s conclusions and they peevishly throw such jargon at you, that’s a strong indication that you may need to quietly start shopping for another professional.

Contrawise, top-quartile performers who have achieved genuine mastery of their professions understand their subject well enough to to zoom out and articulate their specialty/profession in varying degrees of granularity based on the technical knowledge and IQ person they are speaking to. They can walk uneducated lay clients through the 10,000-foot-view of what they do, or zoom in and dive into technical details to clients/outsiders with amateur/imperfect understanding of their specialty … or go toe-to-toe with other apex practitioners in their field when the situation calls for it.

As someone who has has hired (and then fired) middling lawyers and other professionals, I arrived at these lessons through a number of expensive firsthand experiences.

Hopefully, this essay will help others from needing to pay the same high price.