TRP 351: Practicing Law at the Speed of Light with Dr. Larry Richard

[00:00:10] You're listening to The Rainmaking Podcast, hosted by legal dealmaker, author, and professional speaker, Scott Love.

[00:00:25] You're listening to The Rainmaking Podcast, and my name is Scott Love. Thanks for joining me on the show. I'm excited about our guest today. His name is Dr. Larry Richard. You may be familiar with him from the books that he's written and seeing him speak at legal conferences. His latest book is called Thin Skinned, Why Lawyers Are So Low in Resilience and the New Signs of the Year.

[00:00:45] Larry is going to talk about ideas and strategies in his book today. And our topic title is Practicing Law at the Speed of Light. Now, if you're not familiar with Dr. Larry Richard, he's a consultant to the legal world that takes a scientific approach in terms of the psychology and the science behind that to help lawyers thrive. We put all of Larry's contact information in the show notes, as well as a link where you can order his book directly.

[00:01:11] As always, this podcast is sponsored by SurePoint Legal Insights, formerly known as Leopard Solutions, turning legal intelligence into opportunity. The show is also sponsored by The Rainmaking Magazine, the largest free publication of content and ideas for rainmakers, totally free. Visit therainmakingmagazine.com to set up your free access and chart your course to greater rainmaking success.

[00:01:37] Thanks for listening. And I'm sure you're going to get some great ideas from my conversation with Dr. Larry Richard today. Hey, this is Scott Love with The Rainmaking Podcast. Our special guest today is Dr. Larry Richard. And today we're talking about practicing law at the speed of light. Larry, thank you for joining me on the show today. Thank you, Scott. Pleasure to be here.

[00:01:57] Thank you for being here. And one thing I want to promote, because I know that a lot of people in the industry know you, this is your new book, Thin Skinned, Why Lawyers Are So Low in Resilience and The New Science That Can Help. I'm sure we'll talk about that. But I just wanted to thank you for writing this book and contributing to the legal industry, Larry. Thanks a lot. And so let's get right into it. Practicing law at the speed of light. What does that mean exactly, Larry?

[00:02:17] Well, the basic idea, Scott, is we're in a time right now that's really unprecedented in terms of the pace of change and the uncertainty that that change produces. And the reason that that matters is everybody's brain has a threat circuit. And most of us don't pay much attention to it because it's all working in the background. And it's scanning the environment 24-7 to protect us.

[00:02:43] And what it's protecting us from is any sort of an unknown that could hurt us or even kill us. And the mechanism that our threat circuitry happens to use is change. So a simple change, in fact, the kind of thing that our brain was designed for, would be like a loud noise. You know, so if there were, say, a fire alarm while you and I were speaking here, we would both redirect our attention to the alarm.

[00:03:10] We'd lose interest in talking to each other at that point. And we'd immediately assess what's going on. Is there some sort of a, you know, a threat? Do I have anything I can do to mitigate it? And then once that's over, a couple of minutes, we'd return our attention to what we were doing. Our heartbeat returns to normal. Our respiration returns to normal. That's the normal way that that threat circuit is designed to work.

[00:03:35] But the reason I say practicing law at the speed of light today, the external environment is so hyper-speeded up and so changing and so uncertain. And that was true even before AI hit the screen. But now AI is changing more rapidly than any technology I've ever experienced. I'm sure you have the same reaction. Absolutely right.

[00:03:58] And as a result, all of that uncertainty is triggering our threat circuitry not just occasionally, not episodically, but nonstop. And that's causing stress for everybody, not just lawyers. But as I mentioned in this book, there are certain qualities of lawyers, particularly seven atypical personality traits. Those traits help us practice high-quality law, but they have an unfortunate series of side effects.

[00:04:27] And one of those side effects is it makes it much, much harder for us to adapt and cope with this kind of unprecedented change. What are some of those attributes that you mentioned in your book, Larry? Well, there are – the test that I've been using for 30-plus years is a test called the Caliper Profile. Caliper's been around for 60 years, believe it or not. And it's really a bulletproof, high-quality, industrial-strength, reliable, and valid scientific tool.

[00:04:56] That's why I went with it. And I've now got 10,000-plus sets of data on lawyers, and those personality data tell a story that's quite consistent and a bit surprising. And the story is there are 21 traits on the Caliper. Each trait is measured on a standard percentile scale, 0 to 100, or technically 1 to 99%.

[00:05:19] Any individual on any one of the 21 traits could score anywhere between 1 and 99, and they do. But once you gather large amounts of data, like data from a whole occupation, all teachers, all accountants, et cetera, most things that are measured on percentile scales tend to have a tendency to form a bell curve.

[00:05:43] Most people score in the middle, 40, 50, 60 percentile scores, and fewer people will score in the more extreme ends of a personality trait. So when you look at the aggregate, every one of the 21 traits will have that bell curve shape with the majority of people in the middle and an average of around the 50th percentile. So 21 traits, 21 50% averages. And that's true for accounting and for teachers and bus drivers.

[00:06:11] And every occupation you can think of except one. And that one is lawyers. And my data show that lawyers have been outliers on six of the 21 traits for 32 years. And a seventh trait, which is empathy, has been dropping as well. And a couple of years ago went below the cutoff. Anything between 40 and 60 would be expected.

[00:06:38] Anything below 40 or above 60, that's considered an outlier when the average score for an occupation drops below 40 or above 60. So empathy hovered at around 41 percent. It was close, but we couldn't call it an outlier. But it's been declining precipitously. In fact, it's the only outlier trait that's moving. All the others have been rock steady. And the reason empathy is declining has nothing to do with lawyers in particular.

[00:07:06] It has to do with being younger than 40 approximately. And the data around the world shows that people in general of all occupations are declining in empathy. And you can kind of see it in things like road rage and air rage and snark that you see on social media and things like that. Those are all sources of evidence that empathy has been declining. Political polarization is another one. So empathy is declining for lawyers as well.

[00:07:34] But the other six traits are as follows. Lawyers have unusually high skepticism. Instead of a 50 percent average like the public, the average skepticism for lawyers is upwards of 90 percent. Because we're trained in law school to think skeptically. That's what we do. Have high abstract reasoning.

[00:07:53] We love analyzing and using logic and solving problems because the practice of law gives us an opportunity to exercise our large brains. We're high on urgency. We're impatient. We want to cut to the chase. We're very high on the need for autonomy. We don't like being told what to do. And in fact, practicing law is a good environment for people who don't like being told what to do.

[00:08:20] Because compared to a very structured corporate hierarchy, practicing law gives you a lot of latitude in doing what you do. So high autonomy people find it much more satisfying, much more of a fit for their high autonomy needs. I've already mentioned low empathy. We're low on a trait, Scott, called sociability. Now, this one requires a little explanation. Most people hear that word. They think extrovert, introvert. But that's not what Caliber is talking about.

[00:08:48] There's another Caliber trait that measures extroversion. This trait, sociability, measures intimacy or vulnerability. People who score high are people people. They really are drawn to other human beings and they like connecting in an authentic, emotionally open way. Just that sentence alone would scare most lawyers away from out of a room. You know, the words like emotion, open, vulnerable.

[00:09:16] Most lawyers are now either rolling their eyeballs or throwing their hands up and screaming. Because we're not only low on this. We're not 50%. We're not 40%. We're not 30%. The average sociability for lawyers is 12%. We are really, really guarded. We don't want any conversations that pierce the surface and require us to show our humanity. We want to keep things at an intellectual level. It feels safer emotionally. Let me ask you this, Larry.

[00:09:45] Do you think that's because of the training people got in law school or just the makeup of those people who are attracted to law? Anyways, what do you think about that? The sociability trait is the most puzzling one to me. Every other trait, every one of the outlier traits, I can see how it serves our interest in practicing law. Low sociability, I don't see how it helps us other than to say there are probably a lot of people who are really smart and are socially uncomfortable.

[00:10:15] And so these are the kids in college that stay in on a Saturday night and study instead of going out to a party. And a lot of them, probably a disproportionate number. I'm guessing here. I don't have data on this. But I'm guessing that, you know, the smart geek, the person who likes to study instead of going to parties, is disproportionately entering the legal profession. And so we see that in the low sociability numbers.

[00:10:39] Because you don't get penalized for being low in sociability and you do get rewarded for being smart. So that's likely. Now, the one trait, I've said seven. I've only mentioned six so far. So the seventh trait, holding the best for last, is resilience. It's what the book is about. I called the book Thin Skinned because somebody who's low in resilience is thin-skinned, insecure, defensive, easily wounded.

[00:11:06] You know, that type of low resilience score is a measure of how we respond to stress or obstacles or missteps or bumps in the road or criticism or any of the things that, you know, kind of are part of the struggle of being human. And high resilience people are adaptable. They cope with light bumps well. Sometimes it doesn't even affect them. Sometimes it affects them and they bounce back quickly.

[00:11:34] But low resilience people, it's just like a vulnerability to anything. And I'll use criticism as the example because it's the one that I see most often low resilience lawyers reacting to. And the data on this particular trait are really interesting because they look different on a graph than all the other traits. The other traits still look like bell curves, but the bell curve is just, you know, unusually high or it's unusually low.

[00:12:00] But resilience, it's like somebody took the bell curve and squished it all the way into the basement. And another way of saying that is 90% of the lawyers we test consistently score in the bottom half of resilience. You'd expect in any normal population half below the midpoint. But we have 90 of us below the midpoint, which means you could basically assume when you're dealing with lawyers, 9 out of 10 lawyers are going to be thin skin.

[00:12:29] And that is something that has been rock steady. In fact, it's been the most reliable finding in the data for 32 straight years. So the ABA came to me a couple of years ago and said, we've seen you reporting this year after year after year. And it's puzzling how consistent this is. Why are we so low in resilience so consistently? And they said, is there anything that science offers that we can do something about it?

[00:12:57] Because it's no fun to go through life as a low resilience person. And I'm right there with the rest of the profession. I had a 19% when I took the caliper. So be kind to me, Scott. So when somebody's thin skin, my answer to the ABA was, I can explain why people are, why lawyers are so low in resilience. And we can marshal some really, really good social science to give people tools that they can use to raise their resilience.

[00:13:27] And in the process, not just raise resilience, but manage stress and promote well-being. And then even I like the part in your book talking about leading these people, too, in an organizational context. So let me ask you this. I mean, I kind of assume certain problems that would ensue if somebody does have low resilience. What have you seen? What are the impacts of that in a negative way and how it can really keep partners and law firms and those that practice law from reaching their goals and dreams? What do you think about that, Larry?

[00:13:57] Why is that such a big problem? It's a problem because there are so many triggers that can set off a low resilience reaction. And when a person is low in resilience and they're triggered, their perceptions become distorted. So let me give you an example. Someone, this is an actual client, a former client. This happened a while ago. An associate in a law firm makes a mistake. And it's a common mistake.

[00:14:25] It's a, you know, a beginner's mistake that many, many, many associates make in law firms all around the country. And she is a perfectionist. So she makes this mistake. And what she says in her brain, because we, anytime we have a setback, it's normal human behavior to have our brain kind of issue some internal dialogue, some thoughts. So the dialogue in her head sounds something like this. Oh, my God, I made a mistake.

[00:14:55] I'll never be able to show my face again. I can't work for this partner because this partner will never trust me again. I can't work for any other partner because they all talk. I'll have to go to another firm, but they talk too. So I won't get a job at any other law firm. I don't have any training in any other field. Oh, my God, I'm going to be living in a park in a tent. Now, that's what we would call catastrophizing. Is it possible that her concern would actually come to fruition?

[00:15:24] Probably not. It's just remotely, you know, very, very, very improbable. But in her mind, it's the most likely scenario. And so she's paralyzed with anxiety about this mistake that she made. That's a typical example of a low resilience unwinding. We see it in other settings in law firms, firms that have origination credit systems. There are always arguments among lawyers about, hey, how come you only gave me this percent?

[00:15:54] Why didn't I get this percent? That's somebody feeling slighted because of low resilience in many cases. You see it when somebody's in a leadership role. Leaders get, they draw fire from other people. Because when you're a leader, you're a person with influence and other people want to get some of that influence. And you're more visible. So they will, you know, challenge you or make proposals or suggestions to you.

[00:16:19] And the distortion of a low resilience person is if I'm in a leadership role and somebody says, hey, why don't you do X? What the leader hears is you're deficient because you're not doing X. And so we get defensive about that. Hey, I made a good faith effort, blah, blah, blah. So low resilience shows up in many, many, many ways. We talk in one of the chapters in the book. I think it's on the, there's a chapter devoted just to the trait of resilience.

[00:16:47] We give a lot of examples of some of these triggers. And it's just the tip of the iceberg. I mean, there are over 100 different triggers that have been identified. And one thing I wanted to turn to in your book, Larry, let's talk about solutions. Things that you give in terms of ideas that can help people build their resilience skills and that mindset. What are a few examples of some of the skill practice exercises that you write about? Sure.

[00:17:13] So to understand those solutions, Scott, I want to first explain that most personality traits, we used to say personality is half nature, half nurture. But that was what psychologists said before we had data.

[00:17:27] So now we've got 30 plus years of research data where they discovered that if they identify twins who were separated in birth, because twins have either identical or 50% shared DNA, depending on whether they're identical or fraternal. And so you can gather twin data with personality testing and then make comparisons that are much more statistically accurate than just armchair guessing.

[00:17:56] And so from those studies, they've been able to ascertain that personality is more genetically predisposed for most traits and less social learning. There's some of each, but it's more genetic. And depending on the study, it could be anywhere from just slightly more to twice as much genetic predisposition. And one trait, extroversion, is almost 95% genetic.

[00:18:22] So the caliparized 21 traits, 18 of those traits are predominantly genetically predisposed traits. Three of them are more learned and significantly more. A trait that's more genetic tends to be very stable over time. It's hard to change. You can make an effort, but it's like a rubber band. As soon as you take, for example, urgency is a trait that I have that's very high.

[00:18:49] If I try to be patient, if I try to talk slower to you, I can do it when I'm vigilant about it. But as soon as I stop being vigilant, it's like a rubber band snaps right back to my comfort zone and I'm going to be urgent again. But if the trait is more learned, then you can move it and it stays moved. It's not going to have that rubber band effect.

[00:19:13] So it turns out that the three more learned traits are all among the seven outlier lawyer traits. Those three learned traits are empathy, skepticism, and resilience. The fact that resilience is one of the most learned traits, even though it has a little bit of a genetic set point for people, the fact that it's learned means you can do something about low resilience. You can raise it.

[00:19:40] You can improve your skill at getting more adaptable to life bumps. And so we scoured the literature, social science and the neuroscience literature, and we identified over 50 different evidence-based strategies that people could use. Most of them are self-help strategies. And we divided them into four, let's say, buckets, four categories. And each category gets a chapter in the book.

[00:20:07] So the first one is cognitive strategies, reducing your negative thinking or compartmentalizing it. Use your skepticism in your role as a lawyer, but turn it off when you're trying to build important relationships, right? Or take the magnitude and dial it down a little bit. We don't need to have our brain shouting fire, you know, in a theater, metaphorically speaking.

[00:20:33] We can tone it down and have our brain give us a little bit more toned-down messaging. And we talk in the book about a good 60, 70-year history in the social sciences about cognitive restructuring and what's often referred to in therapeutic circles as CBT or cognitive behavioral therapy.

[00:20:53] These are methods that have been, you know, tried and tested and proven over time to really work that enable anybody to tune into the thoughts in their head and modify them so that they're less stressful, less negative, but still protect us in the way they were intended to. So that's the first chapter. We talk about that. And in fact, there is a particular strategy for the kind of catastrophizing that I gave an example of a minute ago.

[00:21:22] There's a well-established, very effective cognitive strategy that's made just for catastrophizing. So if you're a catastrophizer, there's something in there for you that you can use. The second bucket, and to explain the second bucket, I have to mention one other thing. There is in the social sciences a kind of a three-legged stool model for how human brains work. And the three legs consist of your thoughts, your feelings, and your actions.

[00:21:52] And there are brain structures for all three of those. And in the old days, in the days of Descartes, I think, therefore I am, Descartes' original idea was that thinking is a unique skill. And it's separate and apart from emotions. And those are separate from actions. But neuroscience research has shown that that is absolutely not the case. In fact, there's a neuroscientist named Antonio Damasio who just came out with a new book.

[00:22:20] I think it's his sixth book over the years. He's gotten more and more and more precise over the years in showing us how thoughts and feelings are really just the same mechanism. And they're two ends of the same stick, if you will. And if you change your thoughts, it changes your feelings and your behaviors. If you change your feelings, it changes your thoughts and your behaviors. And if you behave differently, it changes your thoughts and your feelings.

[00:22:48] So these are three components that are intimately linked with each other. And changing any one of them changes the other two. I start with thoughts as the first remedial chapter because lawyers are experts at thinking. So I thought it would be easier to teach lawyers how to use a cognitive strategy than the other two legs of the stool.

[00:23:12] But the second remedial chapter is about raising positive emotions because when you do that, it also reduces negativity and increases positive thoughts as well as positive feelings. Now, a lot of lawyers, when they hear the word positive feelings, they think happy talk, rainbows and unicorns. You know, we're going to be talking about all that kind of silly, trivial stuff. It doesn't have a good reputation in the legal profession.

[00:23:43] Well, I like the fact that you brought science into this, Larry. And that's something I am passionate about, Scott. Everything in this book is documented. We have over 500 footnotes. So when lawyers react to the phrase positive emotions and they react negatively, it's completely misguided. Because the science tells us not only do positive emotions feel good, but here's an interesting thing we learned in researching this book.

[00:24:11] Every emotion produces chemistry. Our brain is a veritable chemistry set. Negative emotions produce negative hormones that make us feel the bad emotion. If we feel anger, there's a hormone producing that angry feeling. If we feel sad, there's a hormone producing that. When we feel positive emotions, other hormones are making us feel elevated. And it's not just a feel-good thing. Here's the money payoff.

[00:24:39] Positive emotions produce positive hormones, and those hormones actively, chemically neutralize the damage from the negative hormones in our system. So, and when you stop the positive emotion, they have a tail. They stay and continue active work at a chemical level even after the emotion has passed. So, if you work in a profession where you're trained professionally to think skeptically,

[00:25:06] and where every day you're rewarded for negative thinking, for glass half-empty thinking, for what could go wrong thinking, you're producing negative chemicals. It just makes common sense that you'd want some sort of a chemical antidote in your system every single day that you're producing the negatives. So, positive emotions become a really, really important intervention, and we fill that chapter with lots and lots of different strategies that people can use. This is great, Larry.

[00:25:35] I want to thank you for being on our show, and I want to ask you to come back on in a few months, because I know that this rabbit hole goes very deep, and there's no end to what we can learn about the human mind. But more importantly, how people, they're very special in our world, the attorneys that listen to this, can really grow and live a healthier life and be more fulfilled in many ways, thanks to what you've written in your book, Thin Skinned. And for everybody listening, we're going to put all of Larry's contact info on the show notes. We'll put the link where you can order the book.

[00:26:03] And Larry, let me ask you this, if we could bring our conversation to a close in terms of three action steps. What would you recommend three action steps people can take to really implement some of these ideas that you shared with us today, Larry? So I think the three action steps, Scott, really are the actions that we recommend in the book. There's no right order to use these things, and what I tell people is read through the various interventions that we propose and ask yourself, is this something I could do?

[00:26:32] Could I maybe already am doing one of these things? If you have a track record of tuning into your thoughts already and you know how to adjust them, do that. If you find that taking a walk in nature to produce some positive emotions works for you, give that a try. If you find that the chapters where we talk about building social connections is easier for you, give that a try. Your body and mind don't really care which of these interventions you use.

[00:27:01] The goal is to raise the positivity and reduce the negativity, and there's lots of ways. That's great, Larry. Well, I appreciate you being here today. And then tell us, I know a lot of people have heard of you before, but tell us a little bit more about what you do, what services do you provide that you'd like everybody to know about, Larry? So the easiest way to answer that question, Scott, is to tell people to go to our website, lawyerbrain.com, and we list the services right there. These days, the number one thing that people are reaching out to us about

[00:27:30] is coping with change and uncertainty. Sometimes that takes the form of dealing with some issues around AI, around its adoption, around the effect that it's having on morale, around getting lawyers to do stuff that they resist. Sometimes it's dealing with teams in law firms. Lawyers are really good at being individuals, and we focus on how do you get them to work as teams. We focus a lot on leadership and developing leaders

[00:27:59] and helping lawyers understand the science of leadership instead of just, you know, kind of seat-of-the-pants leadership. And well-being is always on the menu. It's something that we spend a lot of time with law firms and legal departments on. Great, Larry. Thank you so much for being on the show. And like I said, we'll have you back on the show. Thank you so much for being here today, Larry. Thank you, Scott. Thank you for listening to The Rainmaking Podcast. For more information about our recruiting services for international law firms,

[00:28:28] visit our website at attorneysearchgroup.com. To inquire about having Scott speak at your next convention, conference, sales meeting, or executive retreat, visit therainmakingpodcast.com.