Washington Lawyer - November/December 2024 - 30

NEWLY MINTED
Making the Case
for Thinking Small
By Eric Tarosky
F
ormer British cycling coach Sir
David Brailsford has a theory
that is as profound as it is
obvious. Rather than trying to
improve performance through
large, sweeping overhauls, teams
should instead try to identify
discrete, and often overlooked,
areas to improve by 1 percent.
Over time, the aggregation of these " marginal
gains " (to use Brailsford's words) leads to significant
and lasting improvement. In Brailsford's
case, they included things like painting the floor
of the team's mechanical van white to more easily
spot dust and other debris that could otherwise
get into the gears of the team's bikes and
cause performance issues. Brailsford also focused
on keeping his athletes healthy, even going
as far as having a surgeon teach the team
how to properly wash their hands.
As a cycling enthusiast whose love of the sport
is outweighed only by my decidedly average
ability, I don't think there are any changes, big or
small, I could make that would lead me to the
two-wheeled success that Brailsford and his
team enjoyed for the better part of a decade.
However, the marginal-gains mentality has
served me well in these early days of my legal
career.
As I write this, I am nearing the close of my first
year of practice as an attorney. This milestone
(and being asked to write this article!) has served
as a good opportunity to reflect on the past year
and take inventory of all that I have learned.
I remember a 1L professor describing the first
year of law school as something akin to " trying to
learn to swim while simultaneously trying to
learn a new language, all the while making sure
you do not drown or get eaten by a shark. " If this
30 WASHINGTON LAWYER
* NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2024
was true of the 1L year, it applies with equal force
to the first year of actual legal practice.
My early days at my law firm job were marked
by equal parts excitement and anxiety (I made
every effort to conceal the latter). I specifically
remember being impressed, and intimidated, by
my more experienced colleagues' ability to just
know things. They had a seemingly eidetic ability
to recall substantive information like obscure
cases or the language of specific subsections of
the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure. But they
also appeared effortlessly fluent in everything
Everyone is striving to
be just a little bit better.
The small things matter
and, over time, will
compound into lasting,
meaningful improvements.
from the specific formatting requirements for
pleadings in the Southern District of X to esoteric
vocabulary pertinent to whatever nonlegal
industry was implicated by a case. I remember
feeling there was a great chasm between my
knowledge and abilities and those of the people
who were now supposedly my peers (a feeling
that, to be clear, I still experience on a quite regular
basis).
It was in these early days that I recalled the story
of Brailsford and his transformation of British cycling.
While I diligently applied myself to quickly
getting up to speed in major areas, I also forced
myself to be disciplined in finding small opportunities
where I could improve something about
my work by just 1 percent.
For example, as I began working on different
cases, I found myself looking up the same substantive
or procedural information over and
over. Rather than resigning myself to continuously
scanning back through my Westlaw history,
or Control+F-searching the same massive
document containing a court's local rules, I
started assembling my own documents on different
topics that I'll confess now look an awful
lot like a law school outline. These are pinned as
favorites on my computer so I can quickly access
them. Now I have a growing repository of
information that I can turn to in future cases
when the same substantive or procedural items
reappear.
Another 1 percent improvement I made has
nothing to do with the law. We lawyers often
use the same words and phrases repeatedly in
our writing, and while it may only take a moment
to change " USC " to " U.S.C. " to cite to the
United States Code, adding that abbreviation
to my computer's autocorrect dictionary means
I no longer have to fix it each time I type it. (Fair
warning, this may not be worth it for any University
of Southern California alums reading this.)
Similarly, I have either learned or created shortcuts
for placing common symbols (e.g., § and ¶),
inserting privileged stamps at the top of documents,
and automatically adding nonbreaking
spaces between periods in ellipses (after first figuring
out what exactly a nonbreaking space is).
Such simple things have allowed me to save
time and ensure consistency in my work.
By design, these changes are minor, and I am in
no way suggesting that they have an absolute
and universal benefit. Rather, they are illustrative
of the types of marginal gains I have discovered
and will continue to seek. Everyone is striving to
be just a little bit better. The small things matter
and, over time, will compound into lasting,
meaningful improvements for athletes and attorneys
alike.
Eric Tarosky is a litigation associate at Kirkland &
Ellis LLP.
Washington Lawyer - November/December 2024

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