legal sanity

I’ve devoted quite a bit of blog space to discussing how lawyers can optimize their business relationships. As I’ve repeatedly observed, success in the law largely turns on the quality of our work relationships. When our client connections are impaired, we experience the fallout in the form of client discontent and defection and our own unhappiness and depletion.

A group of articles I recently gathered together for an upcoming program on Relationships for Business Success (PDF) got me thinking about the modern-day version of human-to-human connection and how it impacts lawyers endeavoring to build and sustain business.

Cultivating successful client relationships requires a kind of intimacy – a willingness to get to know the human being behind the legal issue or need that comes across our desk. It’s basically the same kind of intimacy that fuels healthy connections to family and friends. But, according to some observers, the tools that many of us have come to depend on for everyday connectivity may be compromising our capacity for intimacy.

In a Forbes.com article on PDAs (as in personal digital assistants) and intimate relationships, one expert describes this kind of wireless technology as “the modern-day equivalent to the spinster chaperone.” Although they appear to boost relationships by providing users access to one another 24/7, the kind of interactions PDAs facilitate are generally quick and impersonal. As these “nanosecond communications” become the norm for us, we expect “instant relationships as well as all other kinds of instant gratification.”

If we lift our eyes from the BlackBerry screen for a minute or two, it becomes very clear that this expectation doesn’t play out well in the real world of human connection.

This WSJ.com article on BlackBerry Orphans recently made the rounds among my friends and family. While some of the quotes from kids dealing with PDA-obsessed parents are funny, the sentiments behind the words are powerful and hard to ignore (and I speak from personal experience here). These kids are expressing a real need for attention – they want to be more visible to their parents. But, at many points throughout the day, they’re largely invisible because their parents have exchanged intimacy for constant connectivity.