The Law Firm Environment

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 all the 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.


A. 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 screw-ups 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 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 (see below), at least you'll have been prepared for the worst.

B. Be the Right Kind of Crazy

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.

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 kinda fun here, running the ol' bucket shop."

According to the National Association of Disgruntled Attorneys (NADA), 281 associates are not exempt from similarly harsh treatment. When many are interviewing during law school, they often compared notes on whether a particular firm had lots of "screamers," which term they use for partners who frequently yell 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. We all might have 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. There was 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."

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.