An interesting article in today’s New York Law Journal discusses the effects of checklists. Brook Boyd writes: "Lawyers can dramatically improve the quality, efficiency, and speed of their work by using "smart" checklists that are digitally integrated with their forms, and that reflect the complexity of their practices. But there are also other very important reasons to use these "smart" checklists and integrated forms."

He discusses the use of checklists in piloting.  Even in the least sophisticated single engine Cessna there are at least 5 checklists, covering normal operation, take off, landing, weight and balance requirements and emergencies.  As he discusses, these checklists save lives.  In lawyering, they save mistakes.

"Checklists Protect Lawyers Against Impaired Judgment Caused by Stress. But there is a practical problem. It takes time to make a good checklist, and clients will not pay for developing an internal law firm form that is intended for general use. So we take five minutes, and just copy a similar form from another deal that closed last week. Why invest any time in developing detailed checklists for any matter when we have extensive experience in similar matters, and every minute billed to preparing a detailed checklist, or reading it, increases the cost to the client?

Lawyers also have a much bigger problem, which we are not even consciously aware of. We are instinctively overconfident.26 We think we know more than we do, and we minimize the risk of error.27

Worse, we are especially likely to make errors when we are under time pressure, multitasking,28 anxious about impressing important clients,29 or otherwise stressed—in other words, a typical day for a lawyer. In these stressful situations, we also lose some self-control, react aggressively to provocations,30 are more gullible,31 and make poor judgments, just as we do when we have had a few drinks or too little sleep.32 We are also much more likely to see these deficiencies in others than ourselves.33

Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman illustrated the dangers of multitasking when he described a famous experiment based on a "short film of two teams passing basketballs. The viewers of the film are instructed to count the number of passes made by one team…. Halfway through the video, a woman wearing a gorilla suit appears, crosses the court, thumps her chest, and moves on. The gorilla is in view for 9 seconds. Many thousands of people have seen the video, and about half of them do not notice anything unusual. It is the counting task—and especially the instruction to ignore one of the teams—that causes the blindness. No one who watches the video without that task would miss the gorilla…. [W]e can be blind to the obvious, and we are also blind to our blindness."