I just finished reading a really interesting book about... checklists. Yeah, I know that reading a book about checklists sounds about scintillating as watching paint dry. I was skeptical, too, at first. The book is The Checklist Manifesto by Dr. Atul Gawande, a writer and surgeon at Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston.

I was able to purchase and read it on my Kindle, but it appears that you can't do that any more, presumably because of the insane death match between Amazon and Macmillan publishing.

In any event, the central message of the book is that checklists prove enormously helpful when used in complicated undertakings. The author recounts stories of checklists used by pilots, surgeons, restaurants, venture capital investors and high-rise construction and engineering companies. The stories are fascinating, but I wouldn't recommend reading the accounts of air disasters while you are on a plane. That was not a good call on my part at all.

Checklists, according to Gawande, function best if they are short and comprised of quickly performed tasks. Their function is not to convey novel substantive information but rather to serve as a prompt for some of the little things that, if unperformed, could have disastrous results. Gawande references the law as a profession with many complicated projects, and thus ripe for the use of checklists; he does not, however, have any stories about law firms using checklists.

I had a run-in with checklists some years back in my own legal career.

A number of years ago I was busy practicing law in a boutique law firm and my senior partner (who was an avocational pilot) and I came to loggerheads over using checklists. He saw how useful they proved in flying planes and wanted to put them to use in the law firm, particularly for our newer associates. Training and managing our new associates was my job, and I balked at the use of checklists. Our work was too specialized and too individualized to be reduced to a checklist, I contended.

The fact was, I hated the idea and so I continued to push back until it finally went away. Looking back, I see that what I hated about the idea of using checklists was that it felt demeaning, as if practicing law was just a few steps down the continuum from flipping burgers. I argued that our associates would feel demeaned, but really, I was the one with the emotional reaction to the idea.

In reading The Checklist Manifesto, I learned that a lot of professionals have that reaction to checklists, at least at first. Once you have had your bacon saved by checklist, apparently, you immediately grasp their value.

In retrospect, both on the book and my argument against the use of checklists in my law practice, I was wrong. Not only is there nothing demeaning about using a checklist to keep from making dumb mistakes, but the extra protection using checklists can afford to a lawyer's clients and reputation only serves to enhance one's credibility.

The Checklist Manifesto is not meant to be a how-to manual, but rather a conceptual take on the value of checklists. To serve blogging penance for my earlier anti-checklist sins (I am a lapsed Catholic, after all), I'll share a few pragmatic tidbits I took from the book:

1. Pause point: you must define a clear pause point at which the checklist is supposed to be used. Think, right before you file a complaint or execute an agreement.
2. Read-Do vs Do-Confirm: decide if you want the checklist to serve as a guide before a process is undertaken (read-do) or as a safety net before the process if finalized (do-confirm)? 
3. Length: keep the checklist between 5 and 9 items and make sure it fits on one page. Longer is not better.
4. Easy to Read: keep it free of clutter and jargon and use upper and lowercase text in a sans serif font.

Maybe that's enough to whet your appetite for learning a bit more about how you might use checklists in your law practice. If not, here are a couple of short takes on Gawande's book by a couple of guys with some pretty good ideas of their own: Steven Levitt (author of Freakonomics) and Macolm Gladwell (author of The Tipping Point, Outliers and some other thought provoking stuff).

Check it out.

I apparently should use a checklist for blog posts to help avoid using bad puns.