The Importance of Learning When and How to Say “No”

BE WELL

BY KAREN S. VLADECK, WITTLIFF CUTTER PLLC

In the first few years of my practice, I suffered from the same delusion that afflicts many of us: In order to be successful, lawyers need to work all the time; to the detriment of their mental health, well-being, and happiness. That feeling, if I wasn’t available 24/7 then I would not be successful, manifested in my inability to say no, even when I really wanted (and, perhaps, needed) to. A client wants to schedule a call for 7:00 p.m. even though I had a prescheduled dinner? Sure, I can be late. Working over a vacation instead of just asking if the project could come in a few days later? You bet. Attending a non-billable meeting instead of squeezing in a quick workout? The workout can wait, can’t it?

As young lawyers, and especially some women lawyers, we feel the need to please everyone, which often times means saying yes even if we know we should be saying no. There is always the fear that saying no will cost us; whether in credibility with our colleagues, in our relationships with our clients, or in our own sense of whether we’re doing everything we can professionally. Junior lawyers can too easily prioritize their perceived professional health over their personal health and to assume that résumé care takes precedence over selfcare. This is a toxic mindset the legal profession does not do nearly enough to push back against.

As my career progressed, though, I looked around and increasingly saw that the happiest, most well-adjusted lawyers in the profession seemed to share something in common: Unlike me, they knew when and how to say no. They had figured out that working constantly did not actually make them better or more successful as attorneys and, more importantly, had learned what they could and could not turn down. More than that, they had figured out not just when to say no, but how to do so artfully. The result was not just that they seemed happier in their jobs; they also seemed more able to triage effectively when necessary and to actually balance their work and personal commitments, versus subjugating the latter to the former.

In many cases, the right kind of “no” works out better for everyone than the wrong kind of “yes.”

This is not to say that you should say no all the time. To the contrary, you need to be saying yes most of the time; that is how we all grow as attorneys and develop our practices. There will also always be emergencies that just cannot be ducked. But there are different ways to say yes to those things that are not emergencies that also won’t necessarily derail your personal life, which is where the art of saying no becomes important. Something I noticed a few years ago is that more senior lawyers, and in particular more senior male lawyers, never make excuses for why they’re not available at particular times. Instead, they say no, but follow it up with how they are also saying yes, thereby accommodating the requester. In many cases, the right kind of no works out better for everyone than the wrong kind of yes. For instance:

• That 7:00 pm client call? “I can’t do 7:00, but I could do tomorrow morning at 9:00.” Yes, that usually works.

• Working on vacation? “I am going to be out of pocket Monday and Tuesday. Can it wait until Thursday?” In general, that’s no problem.

• Pushing working out for a non-billable meeting? “I can’t make the meeting. Can you send me bullet points of what I need to do?” Workout achieved.

• It’s time-sensitive but I’m totally slammed. “I just don’t have the bandwidth right now, but [colleague or attorney at another firm] might. Can I connect the two of you?” I said no while still being helpful.

Belatedly, lawyers are finally beginning to pay real attention to mental health and to how our productivity in the workplace is correlated to our happiness out of the office. Saying yes to everything may seem like a good thing in the moment, but my experience is that saying yes too often increasingly redounds to the detriment of both work and our personal lives. You should still say yes to those things that you want or need to do but only on a timetable that works for you and the requester. And I promise that once you start to see the power of saying no, you will wonder, like I do, why on earth you did not start doing it sooner. AL

Karen S. Vladeck is a partner at Wittliff Cutter PLLC practicing employment law and counseling. She co-hosts the podcast In Loco Parent(i)s with her husband Stephen, a law professor at the University of Texas. She can be reached at karen@wittliffcutter.com or on Twitter at @KSVesq.