In my day job, I talk to top attorneys around the country, and one of the questions we often ask is, “What’s the best advice you’ve received?” Here’s one of my favorite answers, which came to us from multiple sources:

Take the work seriously but don’t take yourself seriously.

It’s advice I wish I’d heard 30 years ago. The first part I’m fine with—I’ve always worked hard—but I think I've always taken myself a little too seriously.

I kept flashing back to this piece of advice while watching Netflix’s 10-part documentary series, “Making a Murderer,” which Patricia and I binge-watched, like so many of you, during the final days of 2015. We watched one episode Tuesday last week, six episodes on Wednesday, the final three on Thursday. It has relevance to my work, but we kept going because Patricia couldn’t stop. She had to find out more; I already knew. I knew because, as editor of our Wisconsin magazine, I kept coming across the story.

“Making a Murderer” is about Steven Avery, a Manitowoc County, Wisc. man convicted of sexual assault in 1985 who was exonerated by DNA evidence in 2003. Two years later, in the midst of a $36 million lawsuit against the county and its police department, and weeks after key figures had been deposed in that lawsuit, Avery was arrested again, this time for the rape/murder of photographer Teresa Halbach. He was ultimately tried for her murder—all rape charges stemmed from a suspect confession from Avery’s 16-year-old nephew, Brendan Dassey, on March 2, 2006—found guilty, and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The 10-part documentary suggests this was a miscarriage of justice.

And it was a miscarriage of justice despite the excellent representation Avery had. I was in an odd position watching the doc because I knew the players. Once Avery was arrested for the Halbach murder, for example, his appellate lawyer, Stephen Glynn, recommended two criminal defense attorneys, and with each name, I went, “Oh yeah, he’s good.” I knew their reputations. I knew they represented the profession well. And they do here, too. 

Of Avery’s four main attorneys, in fact—two civil, two criminal—our publication has featured three of them, and, oddly, not because of their involvement in the Avery case. Robert Henak first came to our attention because he collected “drug tax stamps.” Glynn was our cover subject in 2007 because he was top-ranked, and has a long history of big cases, including representing (and exonerating) Native-American activist Leonard Peltier on a murder charge in Wisconsin. We ran our 2012 Q&A with criminal defense attorney Jerome Buting initially because he was a cancer survivor; he’d actually been diagnosed on, of all days, Sept. 11, 2001.

Each of these features, of course, also spends a good deal of time on the Avery cases. Together, they almost represent a timeline of his cases.

Henak’s story ran in 2005, and ends this way: “When Avery was set free [on the 1985 charge], Henak cried. Justice had been a long time coming—too long coming—but finally it had been done.” As we went to press, Avery was about to be arrested for the Halbach murder.

Glynn’s story ran in 2007 after Avery’s trial and conviction, and we focus on the emotional effect all of this had on the attorney who helped set him free: “Glynn never got over the feeling of guilt he felt the day Avery was arrested for the photographer’s murder.”

The Buting Q&A, from 2012, starts with a presumption of innocence. “I think his fight for justice is going to go on,” Buting says at one point. “It may take a long time before the truth comes out.”

The one attorney we’ve yet to feature is Avery’s other criminal defense attorney, Dean Strang. We’ll rectify this soon, I’m sure.

All four of these attorneys made me think of the above quote—the above piece of advice. Because they all take the work seriously but they don’t take themselves seriously. They’re advocates; they don’t grandstand or bask in the limelight. They know it’s not about them; they know it’s about something bigger.

Sadly, this can’t be said for every lawyer in “Making a Murderer.” There’s a lot of sad takeaways about our criminal justice system here, but one of the saddest to me is this: Attorneys who represent the profession well could not, in the end, win a case against those who don’t.