My cousin, an extremely accomplished plaintiffs attorney, remarked to me; "you know, we secretly go around thinking that we're not really doing a good job".
An old partner of mine, who has been a successful lawyer and politician, remarked to me years ago; "all lawyers go around secretly believing their incompetent".
I think these observations, at least from good lawyers, are common. Maybe the rule. My cousin wonders if it has to do with our Catholicity, which would be accordingly informed by our moral world view, but the other lawyer who made that observation is Mormon, so apparently it's a little broader than that. A lawyer I practiced with years and years ago regarded it as a good thing if a lawyer was always "worried". The worry must have gotten to him as he quit and became a school teacher as a third career (law was already his second).
Of course, as we're not engineers, and we work in which there's always a lot of guess work and strategy, we have the agony of never really knowing if whatever we're doing will be 100% effective. I'm sure that this is true of other professions as well, most particularly, I'd guess of medicine.
Another thing they don't tell you in law school about, basically, yourself. Of course, law school professors have escaped the realm of doubt. Indeed, they're often refugees from the practice of law and the real law itself.
We generally know, of course, whether we're doing a good job or not. But we also have a backdoor view of ourselves that nobody else has. Dealing with uncertainty is something lawyers do every day, and not only that, but uncertainty founded in desperate situations.
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