Failure is success in progress

The legal industry is hard-wired against failure, but sometimes it can be the best route to success.

People don’t often like talking about failure. It can be seen as a pure negative — even a dirty word. That’s natural; no professional likes the idea of failing. And it’s particularly true in the legal industry, where we are specifically trained to identify, mitigate, and avoid risk. 

That said, the ability to build effective solutions that not only solve real problems but can also adapt and evolve is the cornerstone of legal innovation. And to define and measure their success, you need to first embrace the concept of failure.

As Albert Einstein once said: “Failure is success in progress.” But that’s only true if you take the right steps. To make sure you benefit from failure, you need to fail in the right way and — crucially — learn from it.

Read on to discover five rules that will help you benefit any time you fail, and some of the most important lessons failure can teach you.

Five golden rules to help you fail until you succeed 

1. Fail fast

If you’re going to fail, it’s best to fail as early in the innovation process as possible. The earlier you know something’s not going to work, the less time and resources you’ll spend pursuing it. And the quicker you can identify the wrong path, the sooner you can change direction and find the right one.

2. Set expectations

Always set expectations with your team and stakeholders from the outset of the innovation process. You’re innovating and creating something new, so there is a chance that it might not work — or it might not work in the way that you first expect. If your team knows that the road ahead may not be quick, simple, and straightforward, they’ll be less likely to give up at the first speedbump. And, when you do find a successful route forward, you’ll exceed expectations.

3. Listen to feedback

When something fails, it fails for a reason. If you can identify the why, you can avoid it in the future. Rather than walking away, think about what went wrong and what you can do better next time. Listen to everyone’s point of view and diagnose the problem before moving forward.

4. Learn lessons

It’s not enough to just listen to feedback. Once you’ve understood the root of what went wrong you need to learn from it. While failure is an important step to eventually finding success, this can only happen if you change the way you do things. If you don’t learn from what went wrong, you’ll just continue to fail in the same ways and never make progress.

5. Go again

It’s crucial not to get disheartened when things go wrong. The most important step in turning failure into success is to get back up and go again. Whether that’s trying again with a similar idea — keeping the lessons you’ve learned at the forefront of your mind — or adopting a completely new approach.

There’s more than one lesson failure can teach you

You can learn the biggest lessons from major attempts at innovation. When you attempt to come up with a completely new solution and it doesn’t work, you’ll get a massive amount of new knowledge to take away from that situation and apply to the next one. But, just as importantly, you can also learn smaller — but more frequent — lessons from everyday failures. So, make sure you pay attention to the little things you can do better, too.

You can also learn from other people’s mistakes, not just your own. Keep an eye on what your peers and competitors are doing in the market. If they are trying a similar idea to you, learn from the mistakes they make. That way, you can avoid making the same ones.

One really valuable lesson you can learn from failure is when to pivot from an idea. By understanding what doesn’t work you can similarly understand the bits that did; the fundamentals of success. Learning when it’s time to change direction with an innovation while keeping those fundamentals is key to future successes.

But it’s also important to know when it’s time to stop altogether. Understand when an idea has fundamental flaws, and don’t be afraid to refocus on something else that will be a better use of your time, effort, and resources.

Want to learn more?

At iManage, we help legal professionals and organizations turn challenges into opportunities for improvement — including knowing how to turn failures into future successes. Book a demo now to learn how we can contribute to your team’s success.