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Additional Posts in Law
My favorite office activity: canceling meetings.
Leadership advice for young associates?
Low on hours but brought in a client?
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Old school judge in Las Vegas back in the 90’s crumpled up a motion from an attorney he hated, fashioned it into a ball, threw it across the courtroom and hit said attorney in the head. Dead silence as the attorney just packed up his brief case and walked out. Nothing ever came from it, other than an amazing story.
About 15 years ago, I was working as a paralegal and had sent a partner a partially-completed document with a note that I needed to know A, B, C to complete it. Didn’t hear anything for an hour or two, so I decided to go through the client’s file to piece this information together myself and sent him an updated version noting where I filled in the blanks and where I found this information. Partner sent the incomplete *first* document to the client (actually the clients secretary). I noticed the mistake and followed up with the correct version, cc’ing the partner, saying “Hi please use this updated version instead.”
Within 2 minutes the partner came STORMING into my office, saying that I was “f—-in stupid!!!” and that I was a paralegal and how dare I overstep my authority like that!!! I was just so confused because I thought I was being proactive and doing my job by correcting his mistake and not wasting the clients time signing the wrong thing. It took me a bit to realize that he was so upset because I should have gone to **him** so that he could correct himself in front of the client rather than have me fix it and “make him look bad”. Even though I am 99% sure the client did not even think twice about it. To this day I am very sensitive to bringing up mistakes directly with lawyers, in private with no one around, no matter how tiny, because you never know how someone will react. Beware the wrath of egos of BigLaw partners - some of which know NO BOUNDS!
I once had a partner literally take my brief and fashion it into a paper air plane and throw it back into my office. The only feedback on the whole thing was “this is a paper-airplane rewrite the whole thing”
Airplane is impressive, my managing partner just balled it up and threw it at my office mate’s head once. While he was sitting at the desk a former partner had literally died on (they moved it to the associates’ area due to the creepy factor, but were too frugal to actually throw it in the trash.)
Chief
Oh, boy. I came up in the 90s under a bunch of hard core old school litigation cowboys, so I have an unlimited supply of stories of objects (staplers, pencils, a book, etc) being thrown at me and having partners scream at me, including one who yelled “I’m gonna fire you them I’m gonna f*****g kill you.” The fact that I had made a dumb mistake that almost resulted in him being held in contempt by a British court was mitigating, but I still thought the “kill” part was somewhat intemperate.
But my most memorable early partner “feedback” story involves constructive criticism of my writing style. A few months after I started my first job in private practice I was assigned to write a motion to dismiss a securities case pending before the judge I had just finished clerking for. I wrote it in EXACTLY the style I knew would appeal to the judge - spare, direct, and berift of adjectives, adverbs, and recriminations.
A few days after I send the partner my first draft, he called me down to his office. When I arrived he thrust the draft at me. It was slathered with his trademark illegible chicken scratch edits. On the front page he had written “This is boring and needs more color.” I flipped to page two and tried to make out his proposed insertion at the beginning for the section labeled “summary of material allegations.” “Could it be?,” I thought. “No. He is kinda crazy but not THAT crazy.” Upon further study I concluded that he had in fact written “Plaintiff’s counsel fucks sheep” as the first sentence in the fact summary. After letting me twist for a bit he added, “You can do it your own way if you want but you do need to liven it up a bit.”
Rising Star
This is my dream.
Had a partner with an ‘open-door’ policy slam a door in my face as he yelled, “No more questions!”
I had a partner send me an email on a Friday afternoon asking me to very urgently put together some financing documents for her to review by Monday - I worked hard all weekend and got everything to her Sunday night. Next Friday afternoon I get an email from the same partner asking me if I can help on an "urgent" project to put together some financing documents - im a bit annoyed shes asking me to work all weekend AGAIN, but when I read the email/LOI I realize its the same project she asked me to complete the week before, urgently, last Friday afternoon (that she forgot about)...
given the topic I thought the punchline was gonna be "I received it, now actually do it this time."
I got "did you even read this?" on a vendor contract I was supposed to review. (I mean, I had! But apparently not well.)
I had a partner approach me on the way into a meeting and tell me he needed my assistance urgently on a project. Told him I was about to hop into a meeting but asked him to email details and I would take care of it ASAP afterwards. Didn’t see anything in my mailbox and he wasn’t answering calls so assumed it was handled. Found out a couple hours later he had sent it to another female associate (with a similar skin tone but who otherwise looks nothing like me or practices in the same area) and he had been harassing her for an answer. Once we sorted it out it amongst ourselves and confronted him with the mistake he changed his tune...
I once had a case where OC argued federal law does not apply to local school districts. I cited Brown as saying they can be. Notes from the partner came back with, "Be meaner. They'll waste time in rage." Ened up stating, "It would seem counsel has never reviewed Brown." Sure enough earned a page of raging rebuke.
Rising Star
I've seen federal reporters thrown across the room, which gives away both how old-school my first firm was (hard copies of things) and how awful some of the leadership was. The paper airplane story is way better.
There needs to be more humanity in law.
When I was an *unpaid* intern, waiting on bar results, I had a partner review one of the first motions I ever drafted. It was met with with "What is the sh*t?" And him (being a 65 year old cantakerous old man who was a former partner at a huge law firm in So Cal) slamming his arms into his armchair. He asked me why I had such a "stupid look on my face" and continued to berate me for about 10 minutes. Him and I actually grew to pretty close after a year or so, and I consider him my mentor. Trial by fire as an intern, happy to say I made it and moved on.
I have so many good stories but one of the final straws that led to me leaving my old firm was when a partner asked me to urgently do some research on a particular issue and write memo for a case I had primarily handled but they had done a limited amount of “oversight” on. So...I did just that and found a case that was 100% on point in matter of 1.5 hours. Only thing was the case was detailed so if the partner didn’t want to have to read the memo and THEN read a 15 page opinion, I needed to include an explanation and short summary of it in the memo itself. I do this and keep the entire thing to a 2 pages and it is sent to the partner within 2 hours of the request. Next thing I know, I’m getting blasted by that junior partner who cc’d the managing partner on the email which started off with “Are you kidding me?” and was followed by how they couldn’t bill for the time it took me to write it and the time it took them to read it and that I need to “pay attention” in all caps. So, next time I had an assignment like that from that same partner, I responded with about 3 sentences of a general answer followed by the typical CYA sentence of “There appears to be much more detailed information on specific sub-issues, blah blah blah...so please let me know if you would prefer a full length memo with further analysis.” Got reamed out for that one too because it wasn’t long enough or detailed and was told how the entire firm was losing faith that I could competently do my job if I didn’t know how to write a memo. They ended that email with “If I have to do things myself why do we need you here?”
I went and told the MP that this was a “damned if I do, damned if I don’t situation” and I was trying to correct my prior “mistakes”. Left that firm about 2 weeks later and never looked back.
About a month after I passed the bar, a senior associate at my firm approached me about helping her with some research. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the research question was SUPER technical (securities). Senior associate wasn’t a securities lawyer either, so she didn’t recognize the complexity. I went to her a day later to say I was confused and would appreciate extra guidance. She asked me to send her what I had so she could evaluate first, which i did. A couple mins later she forwarded my exact email to the partner in charge. The partner later showed up in my office and berated me for a solid 20 mins about how stupid I was and how ashamed I should feel. I was so new that I didn’t feel like I could push back, so I just sat there and took it. About a year later, partner brought up my poor work during a partner meeting. Apparently, multiple partners ripped him a new one for expecting a first year to evaluate that type of issue. Needless to say, we have never worked together again.
Never had abuse my way because I’ve always believed that no one is above being told to go screw themselves, partner or not.