Most lawyers spend their days forming assumptions and making judgment calls with incomplete information. When lawyers are presented with incomplete information, we instinctively fill in the gaps, and we rarely fill them in generously. We assume intent. We assume risk. We assume fault. Over time, this reflex becomes so automatic that we stop noticing it, even when it turns inward. 

Lawyers are trained to assume the worst. We’re paid to find the flaw, anticipate the betrayal, imagine how something could fall apart, and prepare for it before it happens. That skill keeps clients safe, but when it becomes a default way of relating to ourselves and our colleagues, it quietly turns corrosive. Because lawyers are trained to be skeptical, they often stop giving people the benefit of the doubt in day-to-day life, even when they’re no longer in a legal setting.  And that absence, I think, is a major contributor to the profession’s ongoing mental-health crisis.

Without the benefit of the doubt, everything feels heavier than it needs to be. A missed deadline by a junior lawyer becomes evidence of incompetence. A sharp email from opposing counsel feels personal. A mistake, any mistake, starts to look like proof that you don’t belong here after all. Living this way keeps the nervous system permanently on high alert. The body floods with stress hormones, and the parts of the brain we need for good lawyering go offline.

This is not about being soft or lowering standards. It is about recognizing that when everything is treated as a threat, the system eventually breaks down. Many lawyer-well-being experts have been pointing to this problem for years. Our training amplifies a built-in negativity bias that’s hard to turn off at the end of the day. We don’t just analyze risk, we become the risk analysis. Jeena Cho has written persuasively about how lawyers need to learn self-compassion, not as indulgence, but as a way to quiet the relentless internal prosecutor who treats every misstep as damning evidence.

Seen this way, the benefit of the doubt becomes a kind of cognitive tie-breaker. It is the pause that allows us to ask if there is another explanation here. Am I missing context? Would I judge a colleague, or a client, this harshly? Often, that pause alone is enough to de-escalate a moment that otherwise would spiral into shame, anger, or exhaustion.

Of course, none of this excuses negligence or eliminates accountability. The duty of competence still applies. Mistakes still have to be fixed. Hard conversations still need to happen. But there’s a difference between accountability and self-punishment. And when we deny ourselves the benefit of the doubt, we tend to isolate, hiding struggles until they become far bigger than they ever needed to be.

So, as the calendar turns, I’m trying a different kind of resolution. It is simply to practice the benefit of the doubt as a daily discipline. Not perfectly. Not consistently. Just intentionally. Sometimes that will look like letting a driver pass without assuming malice. Sometimes it will mean not turning silence into rejection or mistakes into verdicts. Maybe I can ask one more question before assigning meaning. To give myself, and when I can, other people, the same benefit of the doubt. To treat uncertainty as uncertainty, not as evidence. It is a small shift, but I suspect it’s the kind that changes how heavy life feels. And for me, at least, that feels like a resolution worth keeping.