It’s inevitable: the end of the year marks a time for reviewing your triumphs and your disappointments. This retrospection often leads to a determination to do better in the coming year. In that spirit I offer some New Year’s resolutions that I hope will be easy to keep and will enhance both your practice and your enjoyment of it.

First, resolve not to be so hard on yourself when you make a mistake. Every lawyer you know has made some mistake, perhaps has forgotten a deadline, or misdirected an email, filed the wrong document, or missed an issue on appeal. It can happen to the best of us. It’s not a lack of mistakes that makes a good lawyer—it’s how that lawyer deals with their mistake that matters. Don’t waste time beating yourself up—use your energy to take responsibility for the mistake and do what you can to remedy it, not in self-recrimination. Fix the mistake, learn from the mistake and don’t make the mistake bigger by trying to hide it. For more on when an attorney must disclose an error to a client, see American Bar Association, Formal Opinion 481, ”A Lawyer’s Duty to Inform a Current or Former Client of the Lawyer’s Material Error,” (2018) (“Even the best lawyers may err in the course of clients’ representations. If a lawyer errs and the error is material, the lawyer must inform a current client of the error.”). You can find it here.