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How long did people take to feel confident during their articles?


Healthygarden

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Healthygarden
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I've been articling for a few months and I've had ebbs and flows of anxiety throughout. What helps me are regular convos with several lawyers who I work with and who can give me direct feedback on my work.

I'm still not wholly "confident" but is that even possible during articles? I am a bit burnt out as well, given my other responsibilities outside of work, so maybe I just need to gain some other perspective.

Edited by Healthygarden
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I’m several years out of articling now but the advice I always give our students, and even more junior lawyers, is that it’s totally normal to not feel wholly confident at any point in time. You’re continually learning new things - and you’ll continue to learn new things throughout your practice. The confidence comes with having learned how to do the basics (put together a motion record, write a useful research memo, what pleadings look like generally, etc if you’re in litigation for example). When you’re faced with new things in the future that make you feel unconfident, think back to how little you knew at the start and how you figured out eventually how to do those things. The same will be true with this new stuff. Most senior lawyers you speak with will tell you that they can still feel unconfident or like an imposter with some things. No lawyer knows everything, they’ve just learned how to figure out the answer the best they can and to be comfortable with that. 

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WhoKnows
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I've been called over a year now, still not wholly confident in a good percentage of my work. I would be incredibly concerned if an articling student was confident in everything they do. 

But your mention of anxiety and burn out are also concerning. Anxiety is normal, especially when something feels big and scary and you care about it. But if that sense of anxiousness and burn out starts to impact your ability to function in your role, and more importantly your life, you need to deal with that quickly. Only you can be honest with yourself about whether that's the case here.   

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BlockedQuebecois
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I think it’s fine to not feel wholly confident, but I also think it’s fine for articling students or young lawyers to be confident in their work.

I certainly felt confident in essentially all of my work product during my time as a student and that general confidence has carried through to practice. So long as you are not over confident and still try to incorporate feedback and improve your work product, I don’t think it’s a problem.

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WhoKnows
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20 minutes ago, BlockedQuebecois said:

I think it’s fine to not feel wholly confident, but I also think it’s fine for articling students or young lawyers to be confident in their work.

I certainly felt confident in essentially all of my work product during my time as a student and that general confidence has carried through to practice. So long as you are not over confident and still try to incorporate feedback and improve your work product, I don’t think it’s a problem.

To be clear on my end, I was certainly confident in my work in the sense of "I feel I'm on the right track here, I feel I've got the gist of things, this is quality, there aren't typos, etc." What I was far less confident in is the "Is this the most efficient way to achieve this result? Is there a better way to word this? Are there more practical solutions? Does this fit the client's business case?" types of questions that are far harder to answer. I was almost always confident enough to say "My general thoughts on next steps would be x,y,z", and have found my intuition is generally pretty solid, but there was less confidence in that being, yaknow, right. That's something that has greatly improved in my first year and a bit in practice, but there's still things were I say them and my boss is like "why not this" and I basically just put my head in hands because you feel like it should all be obvious now, but it just isn't that way. 

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BlockedQuebecois
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Yeah, again, I think it’s fine if junior folks don’t have that experience. I don’t think any students or junior lawyers reading this should be “incredibly concerned” if they aren’t having that type of experience. 

It’s fine to be confident in your work, so long as you are still trying to improve. Confidence becomes a problem when people stop trying to improve because they think what they’re doing is perfect (or close enough). 

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WhoKnows
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Well that's why I said "I would be incredibly concerned if an articling student was confident in everything they do". Take that for what it says. If an articling student is confident in every single thing they are doing, it's pretty clear we're likely into overconfidence territory. Or they just don't care about the consequences of their work, which is an entirely different problem. Neither is good. 

Though I suppose it's possible there are fringe cases where people are lawyer prodigies who are simply confident about everything from the get because they are just that good and have no reason to question whether anything they do is right. 

It's also entirely possible that we are defining confidence in different ways here.

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BlockedQuebecois
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We are obviously going to have to agree to disagree here, but I don't think it's bad for junior folks to be confident in everything they do. So long as your are receptive to feedback and continuing to improve it, there is nothing wrong with being confident in your work product and instincts. 

I spent a lot of time as a student concerned that I was not experiencing the stress and self doubt many of my peers seemed to experience. And the advice in law school was so overwhelmingly "it is normal to lack confidence and be worried" that I began to worry I was abnormal because I was confident and not worried. Fortunately, I realized pretty quickly (by 2L, really) that I was not going to have the same experience as many of my peers and that was okay. But had I not realized that, I imagine the rest of my law school career and my entry into the profession would have been much rougher. 

I understand how people who struggle with confidence may find it concerning that others do not. But I think it is important to recognize that just as it is okay for people to experience self doubt during their early years of practice, it is also okay for people to be confident in those years. Reflexively defining being consistently confident as "overconfidence" is unhelpful and can be harmful to those who have a healthy confidence in their work. 

It's okay for people to have different experiences on stuff like this, and I just wanted to note it for any folks who might be experiencing what I did in school. And I am happy for us to agree to disagree here, because I know how difficult it can be to imagine someone being healthily confident in their work (the same way I struggle to imagine lacking confidence in my work). 

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WhoKnows
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Yea, we can agree to disagree here. I think we're actually a lot closer on this than you think we are. I certainly don't find it difficult to imagine someone being healthily/consistently confident in their work - I am one of those people. I don't self doubt about it, nor do I stress - neither my articling or my associate jobs allowed for that. I'm fairly sure that 99% of my work is more than good enough to achieve a "better than good enough" result for my clients. I don't define that as wholly confident though, because I feel like it could always be better, cleaner, more practical, more efficient, etc. Maybe that's being too hard on myself, or too stringent in definition in the fact I'm almost equating willingness to learn/improve with not being wholly confident.

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