It’s May and even if you are not a graduate or don’t know a graduate, May must stir up memories of law school graduation. The last graduation before you really worked, right? And surely you are moved by at least one commencement speech, whether by Barack Obama or Steve Jobs or some young fresh-faced kid. Do you ever think, what would I tell a sea of law school grads?  I do and I asked my attorney co-workers. Here’s what they said:

• Play nice. Be civil. To opposing counsel, court clerks, coworkers.

• Get organized or find someone who is. My father-in-law worked for the same Chicago law firm for 50+ years. Recently he mused aloud, “How many times being organized saved me. Not being smart, just being organized. It’s a critical skill, critical…” My father was also a lawyer, organized he was not, so he hired Minnie early on. As my brother quipped at his retirement party, “If not for Minnie, my father would have spent 49 of 50 years of law practice looking for his files.” He did better.

• Don’t adopt a scorch-the-earth, fight everything approach. Save your battles.

• Know the difference between the minimum standard and best practice. Adopt the latter and associate with those who do as well.

• Read the ethics rules. Reread them. Ask.

• Don’t cut corners.

• Communicate, communicate, communicate – early and often, with clients and partners and coworkers. No one ever lost a license for over-informing a client.

• Go to all the Bar-Bri classes.

• Pay it forward.

• Learn how to say “no.” If you can’t get it done, you can’t. Better to be honest. (This is the corollary to Nike’s “Just Do It”).

• Note the smallness of your legal community. You have one reputation, one chance to wreck it, few chances to rehabilitate it.

My follow-up question to my coworkers was, “What was your biggest mistake as a lawyer?” I was surprised by the smallness of their biggest mistakes – misspelling a guardian’s name in a will, going to the wrong city (St. Paul, not Minneapolis) to observe a bankruptcy hearing, checking posted bar exam scores at the Cathedral of St. Paul instead of the Capitol (Hey, if you’re new in town, from downtown St. Paul, the Cathedral looks a lot like the Capitol. Okay, there is the cross on the top…)

Guess what? All is well. The Will was corrected, the Bankruptcy Judge took pity and spilled the beans on what happened at the hearing, I passed the bar exam the first time around even though it was a long walk to figure that out. In other words, we are all still standing, even giving advice.

Happy May. Congratulations.