As we approach Super Bowl weekend, I am slowly coming to grips with the fact that this is another year when the Bills will not be the league champs. Growing up in Buffalo, I was around a lot of sports fans who had something akin to Charlie Brown’s “I got a rock” approach to their teams. Like San Diego, Buffalo has never won a championship in Major League Baseball, the National Football League, the National Hockey League, or the National Basketball Association. Perhaps fittingly, Buffalo’s NBA team left the city in 1978 to come to San Diego, before ultimately departing for Los Angeles. In fact, no city has gone more seasons without a championship than Buffalo. But that made me admire all the more the athletes that competed in my city. They had resilience.
Lawyers need that trait, too. Transactional lawyers often work in an environment where what benefits one side of the contract will be to the detriment of the other. And litigators work in an arena where there is almost always one side that wins and another side that loses. But, so often the results are dictated more by the facts of the situation than by the lawyer’s knowledge and skill. Nonetheless, in a career where practitioners invest a lot of themselves into representations, it can be a challenge to deal with defeats.
The fictitious Ted Lasso advised his players to be goldfish, to forget about things that went wrong. Of course, dealing with setbacks is not forgetting about them, especially when we are expected to advise our clients on how to overcome the setbacks they suffer. But, in a profession where compassion fatigue can strike hard and fast, lawyers need to be careful not to dwell on them. Just as in sports, there will be an opportunity to get them next time. You just need to be resilient.
Yours,
David Majchrzak
2022 SDCBA President