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.
And what happened to the basic idea that you have to do it to the best of your ability so you can simply look yourself in the mirror?
ReplyDeleteHear hear. This. I want to see it on Above the Law.
ReplyDeleteI recently hired someone to do a first draft of a brief for me and they gave me something several days late, in an unformatted and unbluebooked MS Word document, with holes to be filled in. I expressed surprise at the incomplete state and she explained that she usually has the paralegals do all that stuff. Um, there are two lawyers here, you and the guy that hired you. Do you *see* any paralegals? Furrfu.
If I haven't already recommended the comedic but accurate guides "How to use an apostrophe" -
ReplyDeletehttp://theoatmeal.com/comics/apostrophe
and
"How to use a semicolon"
http://theoatmeal.com/comics/semicolon
I do so now.
Also, show some damn common sense. If the part-time senior associate tells you that she needs you to move a meeting that you set without checking with her first because she needs to pick up her kids at that time, don't email the clients and tell them that the senior associate needs to move the meeting because she'll be picking up her kids at that time. Just say you need to move the meeting. Is that not painfully obvious?
ReplyDeleteOof. Seriously? That's when my review starts with ... "Associate Smith lacks judgment..."
ReplyDeleteI would tell junior attorneys not to think that they know what I want more than I do. If I say I want bullet points or an outline or an informal email, don't give me a memo. It's not impressing me, it's pissing me off because I'm going to have reformat whatever you gave me to what I asked for...
ReplyDeleteDon't wait until you give me the results of your research or your memo to tell me that you're "not really sure that you understood the assignment."
Oooh, I hate that one! I'm a teacher, and I've lost track of how many times I've said to my students, "The day of the test is NOT the time to tell me you didn't totally get that concept when I explained it. The day the assignment is due is NOT the time to tell me you weren't sure what you were supposed to do." Which is bullshit anyway since I gave you a written outline of EXACTLY what you were to include in your assignment, and went through that outline with your class.
ReplyDeleteMy favourite is still the one that comes up every single time I give a writing assignment - "Do we have to do this in French?" I am your French teacher. I gave you the assignment. What do you think? I actually have a poster in my room now that says, "Yes, you have to do this in French."
Related to that, Maggie: don't give me a memo which shows off your entire research process and effort. Just give me an answer to the question I asked.<span> </span>
ReplyDeleteI must have had substantially better junior associates than y'all, or else I actually am good at management. (Who would have expected that?) This may also explain why one partner (incorrectly) assumed that I was mean to junior folks, as I tended to get good work out of them.
ReplyDeleteSo what you're saying is that these junior associates et al are the only group more annoying than first-year law students?
ReplyDeleteA friend of mine gave me a phrase I've used many times in that situation: Just a piece of the pie please, not the recipe.
ReplyDeleteAs someone who's now a senior associate, but still sometimes winds up on the other side of the table, some points from the senior perspective to add to Isaac's:
ReplyDelete1. Ask the questions you want/need to ask up front. It's OK to ask questions. Frequently, I give a little background on the case not because it's necessarily important to the particular assignment or because you need to write down EVERY WORD I SAY, but to make sure the junior associate is clear on the big picture.
2. After you've turned in an assignment and the work product is in final form, look at that final form and learn--ask questions as appropriate.
3. A limitation (word/page, amount of time) should be viewed as a high-end target. Just because the brief can be 25 pages doesn't mean it needs to be 25 pages. If you can make your argument in 15, don't feel the need to fill up the additional 10 pages with string cites, endless verbosity, or other things to prove how smart you are and how hard you worked.
4. When I tell you "don't start with Westlaw," there's a reason for that--it's that I believe the answer can most efficiently be found not by plowing through endless word searches, but through looking in a major treatise--be it a general one (Moore's), a jurisdiction specific one (the Rutter Group red and blue binders for California), or a practice-specific one (McCarthy on Trademarks). It's not to torment you and make you do it "old school," it's to save both you and me time and effort.
5. Write appropriately for the audience. A brief, an internal memo, and bullet points in an e-mail/case summary are decreasing levels of formality.
6. Answer the question in a way that's useful--I was doing due dilligence about a potential acquisition a while back involving a target that had a lot of litigation against it. The task of summarizing the litigations fell to first years, who could happily tell me when the case was filed and what the current docket status was (e.g., "in discovery"), but wouldn't bother with what the case was about, how much might be in dispute, or anything that would let us assess the merits--I and another senior associate had to redo the whole process over a laborious weekend.
From a junior perspective:
1. Be clear about what you want, what you're looking for--don't give an assignment like "write up the cases about legal issue X in jurisdiction Y." Try and ask a clear question you want answered wherever possible, or at least say "I'm looking for the last 10 years of cases concerning (a specific issue). Give me the cases, along with bullet point, two sentence summaries."
2. Recognize that not everyone works on your time clock. Yes, sometimes it's necessary to pull the all-nighter or work 72 hours straight, but planning ahead can save everyone a lot of heartache (and get you better work product than what's written at 3 in the morning the day the brief's due).
3. You don't always need to do this, but don't be that guy/girl who habitually dumps on the junior people and you leave to go home. At least be available for questions--you'll get better work product that way.
4. Say thanks, even though that's what the money's for. It's a little thing, but it goes a long way.
Good advice. It's the sort of advice that ought to be beaten into associates so that they do this *even when they are explicitly told not to* -- took me a while to figure this out because I started with bosses who said they didn't actually want this, even when they obviously did. Of course, it's taken me a while to figure out that while I am a good lawyer, I was a shitty employee because I too often followed instructions even to the detriment of my own work. ('Write a summary judgment motion, we need it in four days' followed by 'why did you spend so much time on a summary judgment motion and why did you do all the stuff to support a summary judgment motion?' 'Uhm, because we needed to file it in four days and I was here this weekend and you were not')
ReplyDeleteOh, one more thing on the junior perspective: when the associate calls you at home at 11pm (when instructed to do so at any hour) in the midst of 260-hour December with a very specific, technical question the day before a deal's going to close, he's doing it because he cares about getting the job done correctly. 11pm is not the time to give the associate 'an opportunity to learn how to figure this out for yourself' -> 'i'm sorry, [Senior Partner.], do you know the answer - i've got four hours of work still to do tonight - the rule is ambiguous and i don't think what we did on the last deal applies' -> 'i know, but i think you need to learn how to drill down and figure this stuff out' -> 'so you don't know' -> 'good night'
ReplyDeletethe next email was to a head hunter
I don't mean to suggest that I wasn't guilty of these same things when I was a junior attorney. I'm sure there were senior attorneys who said (or, in some cases, still say) the same things about my work.
ReplyDeleteI fully admit that I have high (ok, maybe unrealistic) expectations for the people with whom I work. But I feel like some of my unreasonableness is balanced by the fact that I'm generally available for questions or consultation and I'm willing to be flexible about deadlines to work around a junior attorney's out of work commitments. All I really want is for that junior attorney to make my life easier, just like I'm trying to make the partner's life easier and we're all trying to make our client's life easier.
Be sure to be clear: "in this memo, do you want me to make the best case possible for our position, or to tell you what the law is?"<span> </span>
ReplyDeleteI'm particuarly fond of this one, which is less useful as a guide but has more bile:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.angryflower.com/bobsqu.gif
Those are awesome. If the author is teaching high school composition s/he should be given a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree that a senior attorney needs to be flexible about a junior attorney's out of work commitments. But there is also a limit to that. If a junior attorney says "I have to fly home for my mom's 60th birthday this weekend and then I have a long-planned trip to Las Vegas the following weekend," then of course I'd work around that. Except that I wouldn't if those two requests were followed by "and then my girlfriend and I are going whitewater rafting the following weekend, and the next weekend my college roommate is getting married, and the weekend after that I'm going to see the US Open, and then the next weekend I have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to play Spyglass." Any one or two of those is reasonable, but at some point a junior associate is going to have to come to grips with the fact that life involves a lot of tradeoffs, and the ability to hold a job that allows you to do some of those things will also prevent you from doing all of those things. You have to figure out how to have flexibility. If you convey to Second-Lowliest Peon or anybody else that they can't have a life because you do, you will not be long for that job.
ReplyDeleteAnd since Matt brought up reciprocity, I will say this: since I became a mid-level associate, I have made it a point to spend time with more junior people going over every significant writing assignment brought to me -- what changes I made, why I made them, what things they should think about, and how this all fits into the strategy of what we're trying to do. This sometimes takes a while and usually is not billable. But I feel like it's a personal responsibility (it also happens to make their work better when they keep working for you, so that's nice too). It was something that a few people did for me and that I very much appreciated. I can tell that some people appreciate it and others are resistant to it, but my feeling is that they don't get to opt out.
I once had the thankless job of being in charge of a committee that collected feedback from associates about what the partners for whom they worked did that was productive and what was unproductive. For a number of associates in one particular workgroup, the biggest complaint was "partner will not return my phone calls." Those of us on the committee who were in other work groups were like, "the fuck? won't return my phone calls?" And the people on the committee in that workgroup were like, "yeah, sometimes you're doing something and you literally call twice a day for two weeks because there's something that needs a decision and they literally will not respond to calls or emails. And by 'literally,' we mean 'literally,' not 'figuratively.'"
ReplyDeleteNow that is messed up.
Oh, also, just because everybody is totally cool about you having a commitment that can't be disturbed doesn't mean that you have less work to do. It means you have to work extra hard to get all of your work done, and not in a half-assed way, before you become unavailable. To me, the only exceptions to this are birth, death, and matrimony, but I know for a fact that there are other people who believe that the only exception is death, and that's because you can't plan ahead for that one.
ReplyDeleteNot to threadjack, but many of us might enjoy participating in the crowdsourced law school and law review rankings. More details here:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.theconglomerate.org/2011/01/crowdsourced-rankings-of-law-schools-and-law-reviews.html#tp
I completely agree on your outside-of-work thing. One note for senior people based on my long-ago experience: let your junior people cover for each other. When a bunch of young associates are staffed long-term together on a case or deal, it's natural for them to help each other find ways to have a life outside the office. I feel strongly that if two second-years have a deal where A will cover B while A goes to mom's birthday dinner, and the following week B covers for A so B can take B's spouse out for their anniversay, then unless there's a ridiculously good reason to need A to be the one doing the job instead of B, let them figure this stuff out themselves. I saw way too many people quit law firm work because senior partners got in the way of these sorts of arrangements.
ReplyDeleteIs it possible that the "which is better of these two random law reviews" isn't the best way to get the crowd that you need to source? All I want is a list that lets me put Green Bag at #1 and then I'm out.
ReplyDeleteI'll give you an answer to the question you asked if you promise not to then stand there saying, "Did you check X? What about Y? Did you expand your search in this way? Can you try Z search term?"
ReplyDeleteOther pet peeve: senior people who will not sufficiently respond to questions. When I send an email with three questions, none of which are yes/no answers and all of which represent legitimate, important concerns, "Okay" is not a sufficient answer.
ReplyDeleteCompletely agree. I have oversight responsibility of a monthly project that involves a team of junior people reviewing a lot of documents. They each have their assignments, but they know that I don't care who reviews the documents, so long as I get their comments on time and they notify the paralegal who keeps the schedule. So if associate A is busy with other client work or is celebrating their anniversary or what not, they can ask associate B to switch assignments with them.
ReplyDeleteThat is messed up. There is a least one partner that I try not to work with any more because he doesn't respond to phone calls or emails in a reasonably timely fashion. The only way to get his attention is to keep stopping by his office to speak to him in person, which is outrageously inefficient and so frustrating.
ReplyDeleteI'm not a lawyer, but a substantial part of my job involves writing technical reports that go to sales guys in the field, and then to customers. I take a lot of pride in my reports being correct, both tehnically and grammatically, because I think that poor grammer and misspelled words show a lack of respect for my final product. I work with several people who feel that this is wrong, that as long as the data is good, who cares about spelling errors and poor grammer? I'm getting mad just thinking about this.
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry that I missed this post earlier, because it goes directly to one of my favorite junior associate anecdotes.
ReplyDeleteI was a 2nd year associate on a case where we represented a MAJOR LAW FIRM accused of malpractice. Staffed above me were a 5th year, a junior partner, and the firm's senior litigation partner. The client contact was the firm-wide Head of Litigation for the MAJOR LAW FIRM we were defending.
At 5:00 p.m. on a Friday afternoon, the judge overseeing the case inadvertently caused a crisis that threatened to expose the MLF to serious embarassment. None of the senior lawyers on the case were available (mostly due to Sabbath observations), and I found myself talking to the head of litigation of MLF and explaining the situation. He asked me what we were going to do, and I dithered briefly. He then told me exactly what I have been telling junior associates for ten years: "I hired your law firm, which means I hired you. YOUare my attorney. As my attorney, what are YOU going to do?"
Although (of course) it's not possible for a junior associate to understand every facet of every case, that's the attitude that they should take -- I am client X's attorney. I am not a cog, and if every attorney above me drops dead, I will represent my client to the best of my ability.
<span>Also good advice and a lot of this goes to the fact that there needs to be an appropriate allocation of authority and responsibility. Firms often go very wrong in that they want junior associates to be in a position to answer these questions, but never ever let them actually answer the question. It's not about 'client contact' - it's about 'client interface' - not only giving associates the responsibility to get something done right but also giving them the authority to get it done right. </span>
ReplyDelete<span>I often got in trouble for talking directly to clients, even when clients called *me* for answers. And had this very issue you describe. My boss was out of town, and in very sporadic v-mail / e-mail contact, and a small client wanted an answer -- didn't want to wait -- so I emailed the boss said that the client wanted an answer to this, that I was dropping other work to do this, and would answer him directly. If he wanted in on the action, he needed to call me before I finished. He didn't - so I answer with a short, efficient memo which the client thanked me for - and promptly got shit on with a sort of 'don't talk to my clients without talking to me first' attitude. Morale spun rapidly down hill from there.
A total random stupid law firm moment that just popped into my head: Senior Partner: 'Can I put you on hold for a second'? 'Sure' --- Twenty minutes later, I get a different call and accidentally drop the call I had on hold. Ten *seconds* later, there's a voice message blinking. '[TPE] did you just *HANG UP ON ME*?' Of course, this same guy had a fairly large lamp on his desk and when I was in meetings with him, he would lean back in his chair to position himself so I couldn't see his face. When I moved in my chair so I could see him, he would move back again. Also, he kept books on his guest chairs, and when you came in for a meeting, you'd always have to move the fucking things. And he would never offer a place to put them, and he would never accept the first place you suggested you put them. </span>