“I’ll Have to Redo It Anyway.” Are You Protecting Quality or Protecting Your Way?

By Christine Shimoda

Part 2 of a 3 part series on Delegation Read part 1 here For lawyers, concerns about delegation aren’t theoretical.

The work has consequences. There are professional obligations, client expectations, budgets, deadlines and reputational risks attached to the outcome.

So when an experienced lawyer says, “It will be faster if I do it myself,” or, “I’ll just have to redo it anyway,” there may be legitimate experience behind that conclusion.

But there’s another question worth asking: Does the work actually need to be redone, or is it simply not the way you would have done it?

That distinction matters.

Standards and style aren’t the same thing

There are elements of legal work that are genuinely non-negotiable: legal accuracy, client requirements, risk parameters, deadlines, budget and professional standards.

Those aren’t preferences.

But experienced lawyers also develop preferences about how work gets done: structure, drafting style, sequencing, process, how an argument is framed or how someone moves from question to conclusion.

With enough experience, those preferences can start to feel like standards.

Then someone approaches the work differently. And we correct it.

The challenge is learning to distinguish between different and wrong.

If we don’t, delegation can become an elaborate process in which someone else does the work and the senior lawyer then converts it back into something that looks as though they did it themselves.

That’s frustrating for the senior lawyer. It’s also a lousy development experience for the person receiving the work.

Track changes isn’t feedback

Imagine getting a draft back covered in edits.

You can see what changed. But can you tell why?

Was something legally inaccurate? Did you miss a client preference you couldn’t have known? Was the analysis insufficient? Or would the senior lawyer simply have written the sentence differently?

Without that distinction, the junior lawyer can accept every edit and still learn very little that improves the next piece of work.

Yes, a real feedback conversation takes more time than sending back a marked-up document. At first.

But the goal isn’t to have the same lengthy feedback conversation forever. Good feedback gives someone learning they can carry into the next assignment, so the amount of explanation and correction required should decrease over time.

That’s capability building.

Staying close isn’t the same as hovering

The alternative to control isn’t abdication. A lawyer can transfer meaningful ownership while remaining appropriately involved.

One way to do that is through agreed alignment points. For some work, a 20/50/80 structure can be useful: test direction early, check for emerging issues while course correction is still relatively inexpensive, and review for accuracy, nuance and client expectations near completion.

But the percentages aren’t the point. The scaffolding is.

Different work will call for different alignment points. The useful question is: Where would alignment reduce risk without taking ownership back?

And those checkpoints have to mean something.

If an agreed internal checkpoint is missed without warning, followed by an anxious email or unexpected drop-in from the delegator, both sides can walk away with very different interpretations. The delegator worries that the work isn’t under control. The delegatee experiences the follow-up as a lack of trust.

This is where explicit expectations matter. A checkpoint isn’t a casual suggestion simply because it isn’t a client deadline. The delegator has a responsibility to make its purpose clear. The delegatee has a responsibility to meet it or raise a flag before they can’t.

If those expectations were clear and checkpoints are repeatedly missed without communication, we may no longer have a clarity problem. We may have an accountability or performance problem.

That’s why delegation works best as a two-way conversation rather than a broadcast. Both people have agency. Both have responsibilities.

The goal isn’t to get work off your desk at any cost. It’s to build enough clarity, ownership and alignment that excellent work can increasingly happen without everything having to happen through you.

Where does your team draw the line between a non-negotiable standard and individual style? That conversation alone can reveal a lot.

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