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Subject Expert
He's a senior not a partner. You don't work for him.
Thank you all for the advice, insight and words of support. Over the last few hours, I spoke to my mentor (another senior associate). She mentioned that she’s received multiple complaints about this particular associate and that she brought the complaints up to the head of our department. The head told her he will not staff me on any of the senior’s deals moving forward and will speak to the senior as well as the partner in charge of the deal. Hopefully things get better
Love this outcome!!!
Mentor
It is in fact his behavior that is unacceptable and I'm sorry you are having to deal with it. Are there other people that work with both of you that you might be able to confide in and see what they think? I'd start there and go from there. Ultimately the only solution will probably be with someone else's help, but it might help to try to talk to him nicely and on a personal level, but I have a feeling that may not work.
Stop working for this guy as soon as you can. Go around him whenever you can and work directly with the partner.
You need to get work from other people, knock it out of the park, and they will keep coming back to you. Then you’re too busy to work for this hardo
All these messages are so good and helpful. In contrast my method has always been to passive aggressively sandbag the senior to the partner when they make mistakes but make it seem like the way I was phrasing things was a result of me not understanding.
I love this
Coach
These short deadlines seem obviously stupid and I would echo the others here to try to talk to a senior or partner that you trust about this. The shortness of the deadline combined with the refusal to extend them seems a bit troubling. A senior of your own firm will be able to see on which scale of unreasonableness the requests are because they will have been told all the details.
That said, yes you do work for this person and the fact that they did not get the chance to look at the work product does not make the deadline fake or arbitrary. I have had clients require turnarounds of whole LPAs within 24 hours which they then proceeded to not look at for weeks.
Mentor
I'm all for compassion but there is no sense in making everything about the plight of being senior and having responsibilities, imho. It's never acceptable if you ask an associate to get you something tonight, and you just go off and not take a look at it for a whole week, AND the junior is still in the dark as to why all that happened. It's not too much to ask that people with management and supervisory responsibility keep their team's apprised of things and at least act like they care what their juniors think of them. if you leave a junior thinking the deadline was arbitrary because you couldn't be bothered to let them know what happened, that's on you as the senior.
I feel that "just be more deferential to them in general" type advice is far too self serving to be taken seriously. I may not be a senior but as a mid level I manage people, and I know I have just as much work as the seniors. We aren't as clueless as you think, I'd say.