HOW HENRY FORD RUINED GENERATIONS OF LAWYERS (AND IT'S NOT THE ANTI-SEMITISM): Please pardon the overly occupational topic of this post, but our grammar melee chipped off a piece of a "these kids today" rant that I've been working on for several years now, and I thought I'd roll out the rest of it here. Nobody reads us on the weekend anyway.
There's an entire decade or more of people now for whom the phrase "Big Law" is as ingrained as "Big Tobacco" or "Military-Industrial-Entertainment Complex," and there is a concomitant tendency for a lot of lawyers, young and old, to bemoan their station as cogs in a machine or workers in a law factory. Although nobody means this literally, there is an alarmingly common trait among young lawyers -- one of my three least favorite traits, along with "sense of entitlement" and "stupidity" -- to view their responsibilities as akin to jobs on an assembly line. I'm sure this is not unique to young lawyers -- it's probably true no matter what line of work you're in.
Junior lawyers, editors, staffers, whoever -- listen to me. There may be anywhere between one person and twenty people senior to you on your matter, and it may be a virtual certainty that one or all of them are going to take anything you give them, break it into a million pieces, and reassemble it. That does not mean, though, that your job is just to deliver to the next person the raw materials necessary for this exercise. Your job is not to deliver a decent first draft or something where it's all there once somebody edits it down and the Word Processing Department cleans it up but I have a plane to catch because Vegas, baby, Vegas. Even if you are the lowliest of peons delivering something to the Second-Lowliest Peon, your job is to deliver something that you believe is absolutely ready to file/send/publish as is.
The Second Lowliest Peon and everybody on up to the King of Siam may rewrite every word of your submission. The edits and rewrites may improve your brief, ruin it, or write it sideways. They may result from the superior skill of others, from superior experience, or from pure personal preference. It doesn't matter. Your job is to hit the bar every single time.
In other words, you do not work on an assembly line. You do not have a task to do before handing it off to another person with a different task. Your responsibility is not a piece of the whole; it is the whole of the whole. The Second-Lowliest Peon has the same responsibility, and so does everybody up to the King of Siam. Do not rely on the Second Lowliest Peon to fill the gaps in your work. Get it right before giving it away. (As an aside, if you hand off a half-baked piece of work to Second Lowliest Peon or Mid-Level Peon or Petty Nobility on a Friday afternoon so that one of them has to spend all night or a weekend fixing it, sleep with one eye open.)
If you follow this advice, you may get promoted or rewarded, and you may find that you actually like your job. You may also get fired, screwed, ostracized, or brutally murdered, and you may find that you hate your job. Sorry, it happens. But for the most part, if you don't follow this advice, you make the bad things much more likely to happen and the good things much less likely to happen. Also, I do not want to work with you.
