If you are an introverted, shy, or socially anxious individual considering or wading through law school or law practice, and wondering whether this career path is truly for you, I understand. You are on the right journey. I was you. Please allow me to share my serpentine story.
For nearly two decades, I believed my introversion and social anxiety were flaws. I worried that colleagues would determine I was not cut out for practicing or teaching law and eject me from the profession. I kept “just doing it” as the rousing Nike brand inspires us, and “just failing.” When forced to feign extroversion to fit the lawyer stereotype, my nerves frayed and the palpable desire to work alone persisted. Eventually, after studying the science of introversion and the origins of my deep-seated fear of judgment that fueled my social anxiety, I finally understood that I could be my most effective self—as a client advocate and an educator—by being authentic. I stopped trying to fake extroversion, mined my personal history for the origins of my interpersonal anxiety, and quietly reinvented myself.
Entering law school at 21, I let the Socratic Method bully me. I never grasped that it had a discernable pattern; I operated in a fugue state and regarded my law professors at The University of Virginia School of Law as enigmatic gurus dangling nuggets of knowledge beyond my reach. In class, my body rattled like a turbulent airplane. My Civil Procedure professor cold-called me to explain the concept of federal diversity jurisdiction to my 65 peers. Although I understood this rule completely, having bullet-pointed, flow-charted, and practically story-boarded the assigned reading, I delivered a barely audible response based entirely on the faulty geographical premise that Seattle and Portland occupied the same state. Red stress blotches speckled my neck and cheeks daily. In my first-year oral argument, I developed a nervous tic of yanking on my hair. Even though I had over-prepared and brandished impeccable outlines, I could not access the names of cases or respond coherently to layup questions. My 1L year was a nine-month migraine.
I landed a summer associate position with a Washington, DC–area law firm, a fraternity of aggressive, confident, ambitious, “work hard/play hard” partners and associates practicing construction contract litigation. Our softball jerseys taunted, “Losing is not an option.” The firm represented developers, owners, builders, architects, and engineers in transactional contract-drafting and multimillion-dollar lawsuits involving complex breach of contract issues related to power plant, hospital, assisted-living facility, and sports stadium projects. We resolved conflicts over late payments, completion delays, faulty designs, weather events, unanticipated underground obstructions, and other disruptions.
The partners and senior associates dispensed difficult legal research assignments to the summer associates, requiring us to delve into the nuances of multi faceted construction and government contracts disputes. With each research and writing project, I raced to the law library—in my cornflower-blue mini-suits, channeling actor Calista Flockhart’s character on the 1990s TV show Ally McBeal—nestling into the quiet stacks to find the answers. I loved poring through the burgundy casebooks and online judicial opinions, ascertaining the big picture of the client’s circumstances, and brainstorming possible solutions to the legal dilemmas facing the client at each incremental stage of the case. I was happy writing, and circumvented most command speaking performances that first summer, letting my memoranda and briefs do the talking.
After an additional summer at the firm that culminated in a full-time job offer that I hungrily accepted (student loans looming), law school graduation, and a successful bar exam, my supervising attorneys and mentors chucked off my training wheels and heaved me into a hefty lineup of depositions, client meetings, and court appearances. I developed an elegant pre-game ritual of throwing up. Although I loved the substance of my work and the research and writing process, the often stubborn and combative construction industry was a tough junket for an introverted young female associate. I wanted to write, but needed to fight. I believed I had to fake an extrovert persona in every interaction with a construction client or opposing counsel. It was inauthentic, draining, and ineffective. Although I adored and respected my fellow junior associates, I sought solitude in my workspace, preferring to hole up in the library or my office and research and write alone.
The construction clients were smart and tough, and generally had strong personalities, as did the lawyers and project representatives on opposing sides of every case; the cast was predominantly alpha-male across the board (with the exception of a few vivacious, whip-smart, and assertive female partners and senior associates at our firm). Contract negotiations for new construction projects and contentious lawsuits over troubled jobsites typically involved armies of extroverts, and they tended not to be happy-go-lucky folk. When too many dominant characters were involved, negotiation and litigation positions quickly cemented on all sides, forestalling progress or reasonable compromise and costing the parties and players additional money and stress.
For six years, I felt happy and calm researching and writing client opinion letters, memoranda, and briefs, yet sick and stressed arguing, negotiating, and performing (and, like other associates, absorbing verbal blows from a particularly volatile partner). My personal relationships suffered greatly. During my life’s most traumatic breakup of a 12-year relationship—which still feels like I hacked off a limb with a rough saw—I left everything and moved to New York. I accepted a new job in a law firm on a mid-level floor of Tower Two of the World Trade Center. My office abutted a senior partner’s office, and unfortunately he was another unpredictable and often explosive character. Each day, while I grieved my relationship and former life, I stared out the waffle windows at sailboats circling the Statue of Liberty and wished I could trade places with the boatmen. For nearly a year, I flinched every time the senior partner erupted at associates and staff over mishaps as minor as misaligned staples. Each night, I escaped by placing my handbag in a Redweld folder and marching with purpose toward the back staircase. In late summer 2001, I decided I needed time off to regroup. I booked a spontaneous trip to Greece and was flying back home on a Lufthansa plane, after connecting through Frankfurt, Germany, when the towers fell. My pilot diverted the plane to Gander, Newfoundland, joining 38 flights and 6,000 grounded passengers and crew. The Canadians fed, clothed, and boarded us at schools and churches. Eventually, five days later, I returned to New York, after first having to fly back to Frankfurt due to border closures and then hopping on the next flight home. 9/11 smacked me out of my self-absorbed grief; I no longer had any excuse to feel sorry for myself. My sadness, anxiety, and depression had saved me from being in my tower office that day, and I happened to be on the right plane, not the wrong one. It was time to get on with it, and to be grateful for my life. I quit the law firm (which had relocated to midtown after we thankfully and miraculously lost no employees), took time off to write my first litigation book and feel mentally strong again, and thereafter joined a small firm as a brief writer.
Fourteen years into my litigation career (still battling anxiety during performance-oriented events), I was living out West working on a California-based lawsuit for the law firm, and a West Coast law school hired me to teach legal writing. Armed with three-ring binders of lecture outlines in large typeface and color-coded highlighting, I stepped into my first classroom as a teacher rather than a student. Staring from the podium at what I worried were a sea of skeptical 1Ls, hives crept around my neck. My face sizzled. I gulped and started speaking. I explained who I was, where I came from, that this was my first day of teaching, that I loved legal writing, and that I wanted to help them love it too. My academic career launched.
Although I often reveled in the classroom environment, especially those light-bulb moments when students grasped a legal rule framework or crafted a creative public policy argument, the nerves lingered. I overprepared and believed every class needed to be perfect or the students would deem me a fraud. In my mind, no amount of pre-planning could avert an “epic classroom fail” if students simply were overstressed that day, or I flubbed an answer, or an interactive experiment flopped. In the early semesters, I turned scarlet in those instances, every time, and worried my students perceived me a charlatan. They didn’t. After a semester or two, when an awkward moment arose in the classroom—a student posed a question I hadn’t thought of, classmates battled a little too heatedly over a controversial topic, or I misplaced my next page of teaching notes—I began sharing my internal dialogue instead of faking through it. I would say, “OK, I’m turning red right now, and there’s nothing I can do about it, so I’m going to keep on going.” Students laughed. We exhaled, bonded, and opened up a communication flow, committing to making our classroom a place where everyone could be themselves. We worked hard to understand the law and how to talk and write about it, and tried to eliminate intimidation or a tenor of judgment that could lead to self-censorship.
Ultimately, my students instigated my own introvert revolution and reinvention journey. Observing many of my quiet students—who were often my strongest writers—stress about class participation and oral arguments, I finally snapped into action and began studying introversion, shyness, and social anxiety. Thanks to myriad helpful psychology resources, it finally made sense why authenticity and vulnerability felt good and bonded me to my students, but faking it in the law classroom, office, courtroom, and faculty meetings felt bad. I began to strive to be myself in every legal encounter, even if I blushed or took a while to formulate a coherent thought. Meanwhile, at the suggestions of the many authors whose books on social psychology, shyness, and anxiety I devoured, I undertook the not-so-pleasant task of quarrying my personal history. I reflected back and identified antiquated toxic messages that derailed my present-day confidence: sarcastic comments by middle school teachers, disapproval from well-meaning formative influencers, and judgment from high school “cool kids” and “friends” whose stinging words chopped the legs out from under my blossoming ideas and individual opinions. I eventually realized that their obsolete words about my quiet inquisitive nature and nascent independent thoughts no longer had any relevance in my life in the law. It was time to delete and overwrite. I also began to notice that some of the loudest lawyers I had encountered over many years were not necessarily the smartest—about life or the law. I had been confusing brawn and belligerence with brains.
While my introversion research gained traction, I continued to practice and teach law simultaneously, which provided real-life opportunities to test new mental and physical strategies for optimizing assets and managing anxiety as a naturally quiet advocate. Through trial-and-error and continuous personal reframing, I adjusted my approach to the substantive legal work, flexing instead of suppressing my introvert strengths. My law firm’s practice, although litigation-heavy, entailed a significant amount of transactional work: negotiating high-level, multimillion-dollar (sometimes even billion-dollar), construction-related contracts among various players. Having litigated disputes involving these types of agreements for years, I had learned the many ins and outs of what made a strong contract, or one that best protected the interests of my client, whichever side of the transaction he or she (usually he) represented. Instead of engaging in my well-practiced stress-out meltdown routine in anticipation of a fight with opposing counsel over language and content, I started tapping into my quiet power, focusing on the intellectual enjoyment of scrutinizing every word of these sometimes 80-page agreements and carefully crafting proposed changes.
While previously I believed (based on my litigation training at three different firms) that I had to adopt the most aggressive, client-favorable stance and dig in my heels to battle for every word (which went completely against my nature), my drafting and negotiation strategy shifted. Instead, I commenced each contract negotiation by letting my writing do the talking; I took the lead on drafting reasonable but firm client-favorable language and circulating a redlined version—electronically—to the opposing party for review. Dueling redlines can easily devolve into an all-out brawl if opposing lawyers will not budge from their perceived client-biased positions. I used to think I had to meet an opposing counsel’s tone with a similarly resistant attitude. But instead, when a party’s lawyer proposed alternative language, I took the time to consider each word or sentence. If I agreed that the new phrasing added clarity and did not detrimentally affect my client’s contractual rights or negotiating stance, I accepted the change. If I disagreed with the revision being pushed by opposing counsel, instead of faking outrage and stoking temper flare-ups in others (techniques I had observed in mentors at all three firms and believed (correctly or incorrectly) that I was expected to mirror), I calmly explained as transparently as possible why the new language did not work for my client, or offered an example of how such language had fomented unnecessary litigation in the past. Instead of digging in like many of my counterparts across the negotiating table, I communicated reasons for my position, and invited opposing counsel to do the same: “Hmm, can you send me the statutory language you are relying upon? I’d love to take a look. Do you have a sample of an alternate contractual provision that has worked better in the past?” By not just asserting “no,” and instead saying, “well, I acknowledge what you are saying, yet the reasons why I have an issue with this language are (a) … (b) … and (c),” dialogue usually continued instead of ending in a stalemate.
Of course, some clients wanted a hard-hitting negotiation, no matter what—on the phone, or in person. Welcome to the introvert’s nightmare: the dreaded multi party conference call, where loud voices often browbeat like bullies on a playground, and introverts who cannot stand interrupting people could flail. Jumping into the mayhem to interject a thought among clashing dominant voices is, in the words of one of my favorite law students, “so not my jam.” Even worse, when I negotiate face-to-face, each time I try to fake a rigid immovable negotiating position, I blush—a lovely biological lie detector. While I worked on understanding my natural habits and traits and cultivating my introvert fortitude, my strategy for telephonic and in-person contract negotiation also transformed. I realized that speaking in a calm friendly voice—if on a conference call, while physically standing up in the privacy of my home or office to garner a boost of energy—lent authentic power to my ideas. In preparation, I wrote out the reasons underlying my proposed contractual language; I never demanded a term simply to win (that will never be my style) but rather, I always had a justification for why the provision was fair. I stated my position steadily and clearly, and I did not demand acceptance on the spot. If someone interrupted me, and someone always did, I continued talking in my composed and slightly amplified voice and did not stop. Once I stated my piece, I gave the other side time to mull my ideas over, even if it meant scheduling a follow-up exchange of emails or another conference call. This strategy puzzled some participants; they were not always sure how to handle the soft-spoken female on the line or the serial blusher in the room. At first, many pushed back, stamping their feet and repeating their positions. If that happened, instead of letting rigid or increasingly antagonistic stances begin to unravel me, I ignited newly adopted mental and physical strategies (explained in the seven-step process in the second half of this book) to manage my instinctive anxiety responses. I restated my position, and explained that yes, I heard their contention, and already accounted for that in either my language or my thought process.
With repeated practice, although it wasn’t always smooth, this method began to work for me. I experienced much greater success using my authentic voice than I ever did trying to act like an argumentative jerk. My contracts eventually got signed, and I unexpectedly had opposing counsel and project representatives send me “thank-you” emails, commenting on how refreshing it was to engage in productive and reasonable negotiations in our often-bellicose industry. An executive vice president of one of my construction clients once wrote, “You have a talent that not many have to understand and respond to a client’s needs.”
Likewise, in my litigation role, instead of immediately adopting a combative “attack dog” persona when ghostwriting letters for clients to their counterparts in a construction dispute, or when crafting my own emails to opposing counsel to resolve discovery disagreements, I tried to diffuse personality conflicts caused by too many raucous voices talking over one another. Instead, I attempted to suss out the real root of the clash. I engaged the introverted preference for internal methodical thinking before speaking (a tendency described in Chapter 1). I carefully processed the applicable facts and law. I tried to employ empathy (another trait of many introverts and individuals who struggle with anxiety, as explored in Chapter 3) to consider what aspects of human nature were holding the key players back from resolving the conflict. I then used my all-time favorite skill of artful legal writing as a tool to try to move the case forward instead of just churning the status quo with unhelpful rhetoric. Of course, this aspiration does not always work; some clients (and bosses and co-workers) were accustomed to the fight, and—100 percent of the time—resisted the kinder, gentler approach, demanding a tougher tone. But often, my letters and briefs laid stepping stones of progress toward a successful resolution.
Now that I have I transitioned out of law practice entirely to focus on full-time law teaching and writing, I continue to hone my introvert strengths so that I can be my most impactful self when interacting with students and faculty colleagues. Still prone to anxiety, I work out every day, continuously learning how to channel physical strength to power my authentic voice (techniques discussed in Chapter 8), calm my constantly racing mind, and corral my nerves. I try to model vulnerability and honesty in my interactions with students, so they know that their worries about law school in no way make them unfit to be transformational lawyers. Continuously making peace with my past, I aspire to be present in my interactions with others, exhibit empathy and a collaborative inclusive mindset, and look forward to great things instead of backwards. Yes, there are hiccups and bumps in the road, but (to paraphrase my favorite role model, Bono of the Irish rock band U2 as he regards “friends and enemies”) “all of them useful.”
My evolution was not an overnight metamorphosis. So far, this has been a nine-year journey of self-discovery—using the seven-part transformative process described in the second half of this book—and continues to be a work-in-progress. Every week, I encounter a new introverted challenge in the legal world. But I am much happier, calmer, healthier, and successful being my authentically quiet lawyer self than I ever was trying to “just do it” and “fake it till I made it.”
If you are a fellow quiet soul, come join me on this voyage.