At Above the Law, fellow curmudgeon Mark Herrmann confuses new lawyers with a foreign and hated concept: responsibility.

I recently heard an in-house lawyer bemoaning her fate.

But she didn’t have to be in-house; lawyers at firms experience exactly the same thing.

“I was told to accomplish a certain thing. Only one person could make it happen — a very senior executive had to make a phone call to strike a deal. So I sent an email to the senior executive asking him to make the call. He didn’t. Three weeks later, people were blaming me. How can that be? I’m just a low-level in-house lawyer. I can’t force Mr. Big to act. How can people possibly blame me for this?”

Sorry, Charlie — it’s your fault.

With minor variations, this scenario plays out with pathetic regularity. For the corporate types, it may be an executive. For the criminal law types, it may be a client, family member, witness perhaps, or even the prosecutor.  One moving part in the Rube Goldberg machine fails to budge, and so we sit there, stymied, helpless.

What can we do?

It’s your fault until you either (1) accomplish the thing you were asked to do or (2) make it absolutely clear to everyone in the neighborhood that you aren’t able to accomplish your task and that you need help.

This is a variation on “the buck stops here.”  There is little we do as lawyers that doesn’t involve others in some way.  There is an interdependency, and someone along the line is going to fail to perform, neglect their bit of responsibility and leave us hanging.  We can shrug, feel the warm glow as our responsibility to accomplish a task fades away, secure in the knowledge that we were ready to perform, but that other guy, that jerk, was the problem.

Except it’s a lie.  The duty to accomplish the task is ours, regardless of whether others are cooperating or not.  Indeed, our task is to get them to cooperate, to find a way to make others who don’t owe us obedience, who can tell us to go suck eggs, to do what we need them to do.

This happens constantly.  It’s one of the reasons clients come to us to accomplish things they can’t accomplish on their own.  If it was easy, if everyone was cooperative, then the need for lawyers would be substantially reduced.  Sure, the boat moves swiftly with all oars rowing in the same direction, but there is always some impediment.

That’s your job, removing the impediment.  Getting over, under, around the impediment.  Making things happen when they’re hard because if they don’t happen, you can’t complete your task.

“As you’ve seen, I’ve pestered Mr. Big relentlessly about accomplishing my task. I’ve shamed him in front of you, and I’ve threatened to go higher up in the organization. But the guy is just ignoring me. I’m not going to be able to achieve my task. Can you help?”

Only now — multiple emails, and phone calls, and requests for help later — is the failure to accomplish your task no longer your fault. You knew this was your job. You tried to accomplish it. You deployed public humiliation and threats of more humiliation to get Mr. Big to act. And, when all that still didn’t work, you asked someone higher in the organization to help you out.

In a corporate environment, there is a bigger boss, someone higher up the chain of command, to whom you can go for solace and a sweet tummy rub, who can issue special dispensation and say, “you’ve tried really, really, really hard, but to no avail.”  You are absolved of responsibility for failure to accomplish your task.

But we’re not on the corporate ladder. We can go to our client and tell them, implore them to go ask Aunt Matilda to be an alibi witness, but most of the time our client will be of no help as the clog isn’t on their side, but ours.  While the client may well be sympathetic to our efforts and understand that we’ve done “our best,” what distinguishes a lawyer is the focus on effectiveness rather than efficiency.  Do it, rather than do your best.

Will we fail?  Of course. There will be times that our efforts, no matter how extreme, won’t be enough to make someone move, something happen.  But it will not be for lack of trying. It will not be because we’ve created some excuse for doing less than we can, for remaining in our comfort zone, for avoiding that awkward phone call or that unpleasant email where we state with extreme clarity that the other guy’s failure will cost a person their freedom.

Will the other guy be miffed with us for calling them out, laying blame where it belongs? That can happen.  The happiness vendors in law prefer the adage that you can get more flies with honey than vinegar, which is often the case.  But when the honey doesn’t work, the first, third or seventh time, vinegar may be required.

But that’s the job, making things happen when others just won’t do what we need them to do.  If we fail to accomplish the task, at least we should be certain that we did everything possible to do so.  Even so, the failure remains our fault, not the other guy’s.  That’s why we’re the lawyer.