Partnering a Law – Making a Big Difference

As I settled into the role of attorney, I found myself briefly lacking tangible goals. I'd gotten so used to having exams, interviews, and all those other school-related immediate pressures on me that it required some readjustment to deal with a lifestyle in which nothing more was expected of me than that I function as a lawyer and do my job well.




That was, however, a temporary phase. As it dawned on me that eight years could pass fairly quickly in this law firm environment, I became much more interested in a goal that had previously seemed distant, namely, partnership.

After you've worked in a law firm for a while, the possibility of partnership grows on you. It has its benefits, like making you a boss, giving you more money, allowing you to assign boring tasks to your associates, and notifying the entire world that you've made it to the top.

So, within a year or two of being at the firm, you'll arrive at a certain level of consciousness. You'll know who's "in" and who's "out" in the eyes of the partners, and you will know much more about how to behave if you, too, would like to be a partner one day. There are a few things, in particular, that will make a big difference for you.

Be Perfect

If you want to "make partner,'' the first thing you must do is to be perfect. But it's not as easy as it sounds. In a law firm, being perfect does not mean being perfect.

As you probably realize, perfect people have perfect lives, which means you don't find them suffering as junior associates in Wall Street law firms. They're off smoking dope in Tibet, maybe, or floating on a cloud in heaven.

That leaves the rest of us screwed up to handle the law in places like New York. It's a dirty job, but someone's got to do it. To make it all a bit more tolerable, we try to refrain from truly huge failures. We still make them sometimes, but they're frowned upon.

We have a funny way of discouraging errors, though. It probably wouldn't take too much brilliance to discover that people who work in a cooperative team effort tend to help one another avoid mistakes, while those who go it alone have no one to keep an eye on them and help them when they need it.

Some societies and some organizations seem to have recognized this. It continues to elude the legal community, however. Instead, on Wall Street, we reward the person who does the best job of pretending that s/he does not commit mistakes, and we punish those stubborn individuals who insist on admitting their shortcomings and who sometimes seek assistance when, in their best judgment, they'll need it to produce quality results.

As your guinea pig, I, for example, once made the terrible mistake of taking a half-finished document to a partner, showing him what I had accomplished so far, and asking him if I was on the right track. It was the silliest thing I could have done. Somehow, despite my words, he treated it as finished work. He criticized it harshly, and then took the project away from me and assigned it to someone whom he considered more capable of handling it properly.

Naturally, after a few of those experiences, I learned the time-honored, safe, and utterly inefficient approach of agonizing over projects for hours on end, taking my questions to relatively ignorant junior attorneys rather than to partners, and handing in my work only when I was as certain as I could be that it was perfect.

Maybe I learned too much in business school. But I don't believe in human perfection. I believe in screw ups: in learning from, anticipating, and managing them. That is, I believe that you get a more reliable mechanism when, instead of expecting people to do everything right, you give them feedback and set up intelligent systems that keep them from going too far astray.

But that's not how it's done in a Wall Street law firm. There, your rebuke comes only once a year, in your year-end annual review. It's as though the partners hated being punished by Santa Claus, in the dog days of each childhood December, for having been bad boys, and can now, finally, get even with the world by dumping upon their junior associates just when the Christmas spirit has reached its peak.

As a young attorney, you can take steps to avoid screw ups. For example, when you find yourself in a new situation, you can try to make yourself look good, and then get out at all costs, before anyone can hold you responsible for anything. You can also learn that worrying always helps, because it makes you think of solutions before trouble strikes, when you still have time for that kind of thinking.

Finally, it pays to understand that the partners in your firm will remember your mistakes much more than they'll appreciate your hard work. The wisest course is to assume that they're looking for an excuse by which they can simple-mindedly view you as either a "winner'' or a "loser." If that assumption proves to have been paranoid, at least you'll have been prepared for the worst.

Be the Right Kind of Crazy

The dean of admissions at Columbia once told me that it might be nice to be well-balanced, except that being balanced seemed to make people mediocre. I don't know whether all deans of admissions would agree, but, if so, that would explain some of what I saw during my years of practicing law.

There's such a thing as being crazy like a fox. Consider, if you will, these guidelines for attorneys who wish to be successful negotiators:

Use two negotiators who play different roles [i.e., good cop, bad cop]. Be tough - especially against a patsy. Appear irrational when it seems helpful. Raise some of your demands as the negotiations progress. Claim that you do not have authority to compromise. After agreement has been reached, have your client reject it and raise his demands.

And there's also such a thing as a sensible level of paranoia. After all those years in law school, you begin to realize how much legal risk there is in the world.

Besides paranoia, you can get a lot of mileage from aggression. According to the common advice given to attorneys, "If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the facts and the law are against you, pound on the table and yell like hell." With enough energy and nerve, even a losing position can win.

I took these lessons to heart and applied them in everyday life. For instance, in the grocery store parking lot, some anonymous person once swung his/her car door against mine and put a little dent in it. I was already in the habit of carrying a small tape recorder in my pocket to record random thoughts, and after this experience, I made sure to record the license plate numbers of the cars I was parked next to before I went into the store. I was disappointed that no one else dented my car, but, as a second-best, I once arrived late for a flight, when they were already moving the jet away from the loading area, and was pleased to be able to shove the recorder into the faces of the airline people working at that gate, demand their names and statements of why the flight was leaving early, and stand there, yelling and threatening, until at last they informed me that the plane was coming back and I would be permitted to board after all.

But others - including, most importantly, partners in law firms - aren't so sympathetic:

That's what we hear from students - that life for a young lawyer in a large firm is very stressful I'm not sure that's accurate. I think a young lawyer has to be prepared to put in time. That's how young lawyers become good lawyers.

In some jobs, young people say, "TGEF "or" Thank God It's Friday." In law, young attorneys say, "So Happy It's Thursday." That's because, when Thursday ends, there are only three more days left in the work week.