How Lawyers Can Make Better Decisions Under Pressure
The Lawyer As Decider
I’ve had to decide whether a patient could receive life-altering medication. On more than one occasion.
I’ve had a career full of M&A deals, big litigation disputes and financial exposure that gave me the sweats. But because I worked as a lawyer in healthcare, it was always those individual decisions about real people facing a real personal health crisis that kept me up at night.
Lawyers may be making recommendations and giving advice but if you're good at what you do, your advice is effectively a decision.
There were always legal risks and it was never straightforward. At some point the law runs out of answers. You need to act based on something else.
Your ability as a lawyer to make good decisions under pressure.
Daniel Kahneman spent a career studying why smart people make bad calls under pressure. His answer: we run on two systems. One is fast, automatic, built for survival. It's what makes you flinch before you consciously register the noise. The other is slow, deliberate, and shockingly lazy. It only shows up when you force it to.
Lawyers are trained to live in the second system. Check every angle. Leave no gap. That works well at a desk with time to spare. It falls apart the moment the room needs an answer in five minutes or a patient can’t wait.
So who's actually good at making better decisions under real pressure? We study business executives and sharp-minded lawyers but the vast majority of us do not face the kind of life-or-death situations that might actually teach us something.
So who does?
Disaster survivors.
Deciding When There's No Time to Decide
Joe Simpson broke his leg 20,000 feet up a mountain in the Peruvian Andes in 1985. Then it got worse.
His climbing partner, Simon Yates, was lowering him down on a single rope, in a whiteout, with no way to see or hear him. Simpson went over an ice cliff and ended up dangling in open air, unable to climb back up, unable to signal for slack. Yates couldn't pull him up either. His own anchor was failing under the weight. He had one choice left: hold on and probably die with his partner, or cut the rope and save himself.
He cut the rope.
Simpson fell into a crevasse. He assumed, correctly, that Yates believed he was dead. Nobody was coming.
Simpson had no plan. He had a compound fracture, no food, no water, and three days of glacier between him and camp. He crawled. He hopped on one leg using his ice axe as a crutch. He slid on his backside down sections too steep to walk. None of it was proper technique. None of it was in a manual. He used whatever got him five more feet.
He made it. He dragged himself into camp hours before Yates, wracked with guilt, was set to pack up and leave without him.
Two people. Two impossible decisions, made almost blind, with the worst outcome fully on the table. Both of them got it right. Neither of them knew that at the time.
5 Survival Rules For Lawyers To Make Better Decisions Under Pressure
Simpson didn't out-think the mountain. He ran on a handful of rules, mostly without knowing he was using them. The same rules explain why some lawyers freeze in the room and others don't.
Perceive and believe. Simpson's first fight wasn't the mountain. It was denial. He had to accept he was actually in trouble before he could do anything about it. Lawyers do the same thing with a bad deal, or a collapsing client relationship. The instinct is to keep working it like it's fine. Stop. Name what's actually happening before you plan the next move.
Break it down. Simpson couldn't think about three days of crawling. He thought about the next twenty minutes, then the next. A complex decision feels unbearable in full. It gets manageable in pieces. Pick the next single move, not the whole solution.
Be bold, then be careful. Simpson took real risks, jumping into a crevasse he couldn't see the bottom of, but he tested each move before committing his full weight. Decide fast. Execute carefully. The lawyers who freeze aren't the ones who lack information. They're the ones waiting for a certainty that was never coming.
Use what works, not what's correct. Simpson didn't climb down that mountain using proper mountaineering technique. He crawled, hopped, and slid, whatever got him the next five feet. Lawyers are trained to reach for the correct answer: the fully supported position, the airtight structure. Sometimes correct isn't available in the time you have. Use what's in front of you.
Make the call, live with not knowing. Yates cut the rope with no way to confirm it was the right decision. It was, but he didn't find that out for three more days, and he spent years afterward defending it. Some calls in a boardroom are like that: no confirmation, no certainty, just a decision and the discipline to live with it either way.
The Real Skill Isn't Legal
I never found out what happened to those patients after they received their medication. I lived without knowing. I was never even sure if I had made the right decision.
But what I do know is that doubt is the price of the job, not proof you got it wrong.
Most lawyers never build that muscle.
You can.
Jonathan Cullen
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