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Transition from Compliance to Risk ? I work for major brokerage in compliance. I’ve been in this field almost 5 years. The person I work with made me absolutely hate my job and every day for past few months is soul destroying. He doesn’t share project work with me, he re writes my notes. I raised it with manager few times but not much happened. Never knew someone so difficult . Now risk wants to poach me to retain me in business.Am I crazy to even consider this ??
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Lack of development/progression. You can be a great junior associate who takes and implements instructions well, but to progress you need to start taking ownership of your matters and being more autonomous and not needing instructions at ever step. This is the biggest factor for me differentiating those who I continue to mentor and support and those who I get frustrated with.
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This is a good one. Had a decent junior but he’s now a more midlevel edging toward senior and still performs the same but now has an attitude about performing junior tasks because he thinks he’s outgrown them… unfortunately, you don’t get to outgrow them, you get to do the harder stuff while also staying on top of junior stuff (now through delegation). He can neither do the harder stuff nor delegate/supervise juniors properly. I can’t justify his midlevel billable rates to just be a medium competence junior at this point. We’ve had multiple conversations with him about it, we shall see… :/
I’ve been lucky to work with mostly very good juniors. My biggest pet peeve is missing deadlines.
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Suggesting or saying that I’m nitpicking about work product when it’s only my client/case/name/reputation on the line and billing entries that are clearly inflated (and nonspecific) given the assignment at issue and/or sloppy/full of typos. Sloppy work product where the captions and signature blocks are wrong or where the local rules are not complied with because they never bothered to be through. Not asking for clarification and making sure they understand what I’m asking. Not being able to answer questions I have about assignments that they spent crazy amounts of time (full days) on, and not stopping/correcting me when I am clearly wrong or misguided about something, checking out early when there’s a filing/submission deadline without telling me I need to finalize something myself because they can’t do it.
I’m a younger partner with a family and a lot on my plate and expected to manage the younger associates when I’m completely overwhelmed. I am still learning/working on my management and communication skills and mentoring ability while making it a point to control my snark every day but when you don’t care enough to just do the basic things correctly, I’m going to eventually have trust issues and distance myself from you or just do it myself so my life isn’t made more difficult.
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Thanks I appreciate that. I am trying and screwing up along the way but it’s coming along. Trying not to go off the rails from stress, and trying to take the time to mentor (and speak calmly and appropriately when I am losing my mind) only makes life harder but we have to do it right.
I know what it’s like to have the worst bosses known to man and get treated like absolute dogshit. Believe me, I get it. It can take years to recover from the worse ones. I would know. Your life can be orders or magnitude harder and much worse when you work for someone who sucks and doesn’t really care about your advancement. But believe me all firms aren’t the same. There actually are decent bosses out there that will bring you along. I think for a lot of partners as they get older, more tired, more burnt out, etc., they just get totally jaded and sick of seeing associates constantly come and go for whatever reason and they give up. I’m not there yet, but I see how others get there. Not making excuses for your boss specifically, but a lot of times If you read between the lines you can make sense or why some of these folks act the way they do. It’s ashame because when they give up (or are just straight up psychos) they don’t realize that some of their associates are or will be tremendous assets.
My life was a lot harder because I didn’t really have a mentor for most of my time coming up and when you don’t have that partner willing to bring you along and build you up and pass on business to you, you gotta fight your way up all on your own and risk losing your sanity to get ahead. That’s what I had to do. It’s working out okay but it took a lot out of me for a lot of years and I don’t need to be putting anyone else in that position so long as they are willing to bust their ass and make the sacrifices. But a lot of associates don’t want to or don’t care to
Assuming you mean for purposes of giving them work - laziness, sloppy work product, and repeating mistakes instead of learning from them.
Do you have a specific situation you want more feedback about?
A6 what's up? If you're being sarcastic, hope you feel good about yourself.
Also, what about quick turnaround v. sub-par work product? Would you prefer a shitty MSJ completed in an hour or a quality MSJ completed in 10 hours?
A1, I feel your pain. One partner I support wants me to put 40 hours of quality work plus 40 hours of overkill detail into an MSJ, and the other partner I support wants the MSJ tomorrow and doesn’t seem to care if it’s a pos. But I do.
Blaming paralegals and legal assistants.
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Yep, of course. Just like the senior partners I handle cases for who don’t want to hear me blame an associate.
I try to be patient but an associate who does not learn, does not cooperate is disruptive might have problems