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Knowing More about Law Firms

published March 06, 2013

By Author - LawCrossing
Published By
( 2 votes, average: 4.5 out of 5)
What do you think about this article? Rate it using the stars above and let us know what you think in the comments below.
I learned to demand more and more from paralegals, secretaries, and word processing people, and to make it clear that they'd be held accountable if they weren't available when I needed them. I tried to be decent about it, but the work had to get done, and friendship came after performance on this job.

Not all attorneys considered it particularly important to be decent. In the worst cases, lawyers had, as one partner put it, a "screw the secretaries" attitude. One associate took it to the extreme, smiling as he told me that he had fired more than 30 secretaries in the past few years. And I can't tell you how many times I've seen secretaries crying.


Perhaps the classic example of human kindness in the practice of law was the partner who dismissed the employees of a newly bankrupt company (for which he was now responsible, as its attorney in bankruptcy) simply by telling them to get the hell out. An hour later, he had so forgotten about them and their lives that he could turn to me and say, "Hey, it's kind of fun here, running the old bucket shop."

According to the National Association of Disgruntled Attorneys (NADA), associates are not exempt from similarly harsh treatment. When my classmates and I were interviewing during law school, we often compared notes on whether a particular firm had lots of "screamers," which was our term for partners who frequently yelled at their associates. The general attitude, even among non-screamers, is clearly that you are a hired hand, not a colleague, and that if a bit of abuse gets you down, your best bet is to find another job.

In case you were wondering, you don't take off these attitudes like a jacket when you find yourself outside the office. It is extremely difficult to keep your professional way of thinking from dominating your entire life. Many lawyers certainly have nobody but lawyers for friends. Too many of us found ourselves conducting cross-examinations in the kitchen at home, because we couldn't understand our own spouses and children until they learned to express themselves like lawyers (or until they walked out the door).

Sometimes, the rage of attorneys in top firms is more comical than threatening. I've seen partners yell so hard that they spit on themselves. When a typewriter ceased to function for one attorney, he responded by throwing it against the wall, pounding on it with his fists, and stomping on it until he had broken it to bits. I worked for a partner who hired some kind of Buddhist therapist, painted his office walls raspberry red, and began playing handball in there, in a desperate effort to relax. At least it was good exercise - after all, a waist is a terrible thing to mind.

At some point, though, you stop being crazy like a fox and start being simply crazy. When attorneys destroy typewriters or play handball on their raspberry-red walls, you know that they are either very senior, so that they don't have to answer to anyone, or very far gone, so that everyone's afraid to ask, or both. In fact, there is evidence that "a significant number of bar applicants and attorneys are afflicted with psychiatric problems.

Along these lines, a couple of lawyers in my firm had speech problems. One of them had a hard time expressing himself, and sometimes even stuttered. The other one's problem was that he could not stop talking. As you might have guessed, they wound up working together in the litigation department. The one would talk for 20 minutes, and then pause for feedback; at that point, the other one would stammer and mumble, trying to think of what to say.

The garrulous one sometimes left three or four consecutive messages on my answering machine at home, because he couldn't deal with the machine's 60-second deadline before it would cut him off. In my first few months at the firm, before my workload got too heavy, he twice cornered me in my office at 6 p.m., blocked me from leaving, and started three-hour monologues about cases in which I had no interest - until, well past the point of caring anymore what he thought, I grabbed my coat and bolted for the exit.

The second time I ran like that, he went with me, right on out to the elevator, talking all the way. When it arrived, he actually climbed in with me, without his coat. Incredulous, I looked at him, my heart sinking, and asked, "You're going down?" "Oh, uh, no," he said, and then stepped out and just held the elevator door and continued to talk while the buzzer went off. I think the doorman, hearing the buzzer and the voices must have feared some kind of emergency, because eventually another alarm sounded. At that point, my friend finally let the door go and I watched, in relief, as it closed.

I admit that Wall Street attorneys work under enormous pressures. But army generals, for instance, operate with the ultimate pressures on the battlefield, and yet, for the most part, our storybooks don't make them out to be lunatics. I don't know. Maybe it's that generals are dealing in life and death, hearts and minds, while many lawyers just pursue money, and maybe we all tend to take on the best and worst characteristics of the gods we worship.

The bottom line is that, if you wanted to make it to partnership, you had to absorb the proper amount of paranoia and intensity, but you couldn't let it carry you over the edge unless you were so darned good at your work that no one cared.

Get Positioned

I don't mean to stress the obvious, but in your climb up the ladder of success, you'll find it essential to position yourself politically. If you're a real turkey, you need a place to hide; otherwise, you should link up with a powerful partner who'll display your good points for all to see.

As a favorite of a leading partner, you'll get more interesting tasks, since this partner is probably important precisely because he brings in a variety of clients. It doesn't always work, but, all other things being equal, it's a better risk than working with some partner whose jobs are consistent, predictable, and absolutely guaranteed to make you snore.

Also, by working for the powerful partner, you gain an excuse to look down your nose at people who try to dragoon you into horrible labors. Law firms are full of junior partners and senior associates who have nothing better to do than slither into your office and demand your help on thankless tasks simply to avoid boredom or to remind you whose boss.

Political positioning includes a variety of other topics. Senior associates, for example, are so paranoid about the risk of doing something wrong, and thereby spoiling their chances for partnership, that they turn into androids for the year or two before the partnership decision is made. See no evil, hear no evil, and speak no evil.

In some cases, the sense of position and rank can go too far. For example, I started work at the firm in January, rather than in the customary August or September. When a new associate joined the firm the next autumn, his eyes lit up when he heard that I had started late. "Oh," he asked, "you mean I'm only eight months behind you?"

I bow and defer to the many good books on the subject of proper political manipulation of the office environment. Here, I mean only to say that you cannot ignore these things if you want to continue on your rise toward success.

Sometimes, especially after those all-nighters, I'd get partway through the day, and then have a desperate need to take a nap. I consoled myself with the thought that studies show people are more effective after that kind of midday break. But I obviously couldn't sleep in my office, because (a) my office-mate would stare at me, and (b) people would come trooping in and think that I was goofing off, unless I closed the door, in which case they'd first knock, and then come trooping in and think that I was goofing off. So, instead, I'd sneak into that storage room with the sofa, climb onto it, load those blasted loose boxes onto my legs, and take a short snooze. I don't think anyone really knew where I was at those times, but I didn't feel I had any choice when the alternative was to spend the afternoon nodding off at my desk.

Not everyone is happy with the pressures on young attorneys to bill so many hours. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, for example, has complained:

Does such an associate have time to be anything but an associate lawyer in that large firm? It seems to me that a law firm that requires an associate to bill in excess of 2,000 hours per year is substantially more concerned with profit maximization than were firms when I practiced.

published March 06, 2013

By Author - LawCrossing
( 2 votes, average: 4.5 out of 5)
What do you think about this article? Rate it using the stars above and let us know what you think in the comments below.