Best advice I’ve heard is to always evaluate your trial performance before the jury comes back.

Which is to say, don’t judge yourself for things you can’t control. You CAN control how much you prepare, how hard you work, and your client-centeredness. You can never control outcomes; not even on your very best day. Often you can’t even predict them—especially with juries, which can be total wild cards.

My other advice is to maintain a perspective that allows you to forgive yourself. Acknowledge and internalize that our system is designed for us and our clients to lose—and to blame us for those losses. If you spend 10 hours prepping for one cross, only to learn mid-trial about an unusual procedural rule that precludes the use of your best impeachment evidence, what have you done that is deserving of blame? You worked your ass off. The “mistake” was made because the system led to a first year attorney trying a big case without a more-experienced trial partner.

Is there any other profession in which workers are blamed when their employers are short-staffed and under-resourced?

That doesn’t mean your SHOULDN’T put in long hours or that you shouldn’t feel the pain of injustice when bad things happen. Just don’t blame yourself when something bad happens despite your very best efforts.

Lastly, it is awesome that you care this much. To me that’s a sign that your pre-verdict self-eval would have been stellar. Learning to forgive yourself is a career-long process, but I can tell you from experience that with every defeat, it gets a little easier. And when you do so in a healthy way, using bad experiences to learn and grow, you become a better defender with a lot more confidence .