Trust is the glue of life. It’s the most essential ingredient in effective communication. It’s the foundational principle that holds all relationships.
~ Stephen Covey
A Canadian grocery chain has just announced that it will launch a new brand to sell low-priced groceries in Canada. Their announcement is being greeted with great skepticism. The reason? Canadians do not trust them. It could be because we just do not buy it when their CEO says that their increased profits have nothing to do with their increased prices.
Trust is just as important in the legal profession, and the fact is that it is in short supply there as well. Don’t believe me? Google, “respected occupations in Canada.” It turns out that grocery store owners rank significantly higher than lawyers, and that should tell you just about everything that you need to know on the topic.
Why is there a trust deficiency when it comes to the legal profession? Is it a case of 99% of lawyers giving the other 1% a bad name? Probably not. I would venture a guess that the vast majority of lawyers are quite trustworthy. But I challenge you to find a lawyer who can honestly say that they have not run across a significant number of lawyers who they do not trust. I also challenge you to find a law firm with ten or more partners where every partner trusts every other partner implicitly.
Sure, I trusted all of my partners not to steal from our trust account, and almost all of them to try their absolute best to stay on the right side of the ethical line. But did I trust each and every one of them to never put their own interests ahead of the firm’s best interests? Nope, I did not.
Good lawyers are often ambitious and competitive. The first Managing Partner of our firm made a big point of saying that he wanted our firm to be externally competitive, but not internally competitive. In some ways he kept that promise, and subsequent partners tried to honour his legacy as well. In other ways, human nature triumphed and we did what ambitious and competitive people do, and each put our own interests first, at least some of the time.
We did fairly well, but I can only imagine just how phenomenally successful we might have been if we had all been consistently and impeccably trustworthy.
If I could go back and do it all again, my most important question to consider before having someone join our partnership would not have been, “how good a lawyer are you?” or “how much do you bill?” or “how big is your book?”
It would have been, “Can I trust you?” Had I asked that, I might still be practicing law.
This article was originally published by Law360 Canada, part of LexisNexis Canada Inc.