Identifying customers as well as managing with fellow attorneys

The People

For me, the people with whom I worked were the most important and interesting aspect of practicing law. As I settled into the grind, I grew to believe that I would be stuck forever in the structure of the law firm, dealing with a few very distinct groups of players.

1. Clients

I had a variety of clients. But, as a rule, these were not the kinds of people you'd see coming in the door at the local Denny's restaurant for Sunday brunch. The clients we worked for were hard-nosed people who knew exactly what they wanted from us. I didn't get to experience much of the pleasure of serving, as a general practitioner might, in the role of watchdog for my client's welfare. Once our specific job was done, the client was gone.

So I worked for a tyrannical Napoleon, a little guy who was as mean as they come; for a Harvard Business School graduate who always apologized for bothering me when he'd call me at work or at home, any time of day or night, a half-dozen times a day, "just to check up on how things were coming along"; and for any number of others who, although less nasty or weird, were nevertheless all business when they dealt with me. At the rates my firm charged, I guess it was only to be expected.

I learned one thing very quickly: I was there to serve the client. This meant working all weekend, if that's what it took. I'd arrange to have documents delivered to clients at their homes, and to be in the office on Sundays and holidays - along with secretaries, word processing people, and messengers - to modify my copies of the documents as soon as the clients had had a chance to look at them and phone in their comments. If the client didn't call, and decided instead to spend the day drinking margaritas, that was my problem.

It may sound odd of me to say that, despite all this, the clients really weren't so important in my work. It's true, though. They'd come in or call every now and then, and I'd answer their questions. At some times, they absolutely dominated my schedule. But on average, the people in the office were the more important actors in my day-to-day job. It's different for partners, who must deal directly with their clients, but I was just a lowly junior associate.

1. Fellow Attorneys

The longer I hung around the law firm, the more I saw differences in the styles and abilities of the partners for whom I worked. Some could make the client relax, confident that everything was under control. Others specialized in providing quick and dirty service for the client who wanted the most bangs for the buck. And still others, going in the opposite direction, were unsurpassed at providing utter thoroughness, for those clients who were facing the ultimate dangers and wanted no stone left unturned.

As I saw these things, and tried to apply what I was seeing to my own work, I felt that I really did want to become good at practicing law. It did not help, though, to realize that none of these attorneys provided a meaningful role model for me. Some were too arrogant or mean. Others made no sense. The closest I ever came was with a partner named Ed, who seemed to have become an authority in his specialty without either sacrificing the personal qualities that made him well-liked or ignoring his family's needs. But he kept me at a distance, so that no mentor-protégé relationship could develop.

If I had a hard time finding a role model among the partners, it was even worse with the senior associates. One of them finally pushed me too far. It would be appropriate, I think, to refer to him here as "Bub." He had spent five or six years at the Boston office of my firm before transferring to New York. And now he needed to establish himself by making clear that I was his lowly assistant.

Bub had made a grand entry into the New York office by announcing, to the annoyance of nearly everyone, that he was absolutely certain he had passed the New York bar exam. We were all praying for him to fail. He didn't. But there were other opportunities to derail his chow -chow, and I, for one, took advantage of a few of them.

One time, Bub started getting on my back about a 40-page partnership agreement he had ordered me to draft for him. I had been working my tail off for other lawyers whose work I considered more important and I simply did not have enough hours in the day to do this thing too.

He increased the pressure. In desperation, I decided to try an experiment. I handed a set of instructions to a parole-gal named Kate. She had had no formal legal training, but I asked her to work up a rough draft of the agreement anyway. I gave her an old agreement to use as a guideline, and hoped for the best.

Within a day or so after I handed her the instructions on this partnership agreement, she gave me back a finished draft of the document. I didn't even look at it, except to make sure that the words "Partnership Agreement" appeared on the first page. Instead, I just said a prayer, gave it to Bub, and waited for his response.

It was not long in coming. But it was not what I had expected. I figured he'd probably get to the middle of the second page and start screaming at the mess I had perpetrated upon him. Instead, as it turned out, Kate's old editing experience had come through. She had done a reasonable job of it.

So now Bub said that he just wanted, in the spirit of fatherly advice, to show me a few ways in which he thought I could improve my drafting technique. I sat down in his office, and we began to work through the document together. I quickly saw that, despite her general success, Kate had made a couple of hilarious mistakes, and I started to snicker. He asked me what I was laughing at, and I confessed the whole thing.

And you know what? He didn't get angry. Instead, he said, with a straight face, "Ray, I knew as soon as I saw this document that it could not have been something you would produce. I just knew you were capable of better work than this."

Although Bub and I didn't always hit it off, he was one of "us," the associates, and we all socialized together at times. And this was important to me. I understood my fellow attorneys much better out in the bars and restaurants, totally sloshed, than I did when I asked myself, in the office, whether I wanted to be like them. Depending on who went along, our outings would range from having elegant cocktails at La Tour d'Or to rubbing elbows with the traders and screaming over the din at The Bull & Bear.

It was interesting to watch this stuff, and to feel more involved with the big corporate deals and the various kinds of attorneys. I liked a lot of the lawyers I worked with: the punk-rock wonder woman; Bill, the social greeting partner who had been "high" on me; and Len and Rob and my other friends there. I liked another partner, with whom I worked on a few deals, for being such a friendly guy, even if he did mess things up for me sometimes, and I liked him even more when I heard, much later, that he had gotten thrown out after they caught him on his desk with, I think, a secretary. I liked the supposedly gay attorney whom I saw with a lovely blond - woman - at the bar at PJ. Clarke's at 5 p.m. on a sunny summer afternoon, just in time for happy hour, when both of us were supposed to be back at the firm working hard. These people were pretty tough on me sometimes, but if I caught them in their weaker moments, I genuinely enjoyed them.