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Tact goes a long way…As a specialist, I’m often on 6-8 matters a day from anywhere from 1-5 shareholders/partners. If I received that email, I’d be less inclined to drop everything to meet perhaps an arbitrary deadline versus a simple ask of 1) Do you have capacity to help in this matter? 2) We need it by X, is that doable? We all have our obligations to other projects. If yours is more important, being rude to the specialist that you need is not the way to go about it.
Coach
Yes, I obviously meant individual lawyers lol. But still a ton of groups. A5, you’re right that doc services can handle some of this for us, but regardless who is doing it that still takes time (especially because doc services also has their own competing workloads) that can delay the rest of the process.
Regarding whether our deadlines are real, you’re right that sometimes Wednesday afternoon is ok even if the client said Wednesday morning... but we often don’t know and a random specialist sure as fuck doesn’t know and shouldn’t just guess or assume that a deadline is fake, unless the person asking has a particular reputation for it.
The biggest issue that pisses off specialists to no end is fake internal deadlines. When you ask for something by a certain time, that should be as close to the moment the doc will go out to the client saving time only for adding the changes to the master — you shouldn’t be saving tons of time for a partner. This single failure causes more problems and inter group fighting than any other. When M&A attorneys regularly impose false deadlines on specialists the specialists don’t take future deadlines seriously. When there’s a lot going on, the first matter on the list to get less attention is the one with the regular fake deadlines.
Also, as others have noted, at any given time a specialist has huge amounts of deals on her plate, and any number of them can blow up at any moment. Those deals with actual deadlines and emergencies will take precedence.
It’s very easy to see how a specialist schedule can be overwhelmed very easily. You should work with more specialists and build your relationships with them. And be tactful and respectful about how you go about seeking their help. It’s very easy for specialists to get pulled in 20 directions at once and your deal is one of many the applicable M&A team believes to be the most important matter on the specialist’s plate.
M&A associates who don’t take these dynamics seriously are in for a rude awakening when it comes to scaling their own practice and making partner if that’s a goal. It’s absolutely critical specialists like you. If they don’t, you are going to have problems down the road. Specialists talk and your bad rep will make your life a lot harder than it needs to be.
You’re talking about client driven deadlines. That different. That said, a good M&A attorney can get a client comfortable with slightly slower pace for better, more targeted work product. Some won’t agree. And that’s life. That’s not fake deadline territory though.
And if someone is making the deal more difficult than it has to be, the thing to do is talk to them. Not say nothing and try to give them minimal time to do the work out of fear they will increase costs. That’s all assuming the person believed to have a heavy pen actually does…specialists know the domain not the generalists. What looks like a heavy pen may be them being strategic in ways people who don’t actually know their domain don’t understand. Keep in mind they have done a lot more deals than the M&A team. A LOT more.
Subject Expert
You’re not the boss of me. That’s why. Also how did you know it was a reasonable deadline? Mostly kidding about the first portion. Fake deadlines are really obnoxious tho
I feel like this is probably addressed in many other comments, but the answer is because you sent a project with a deadline like your someone’s boss even though your not there boss and should be respectfully asking if they have the capacity to help within a certain time frame.
Coach
Good specialists think of themselves as part of the team, bad specialists think they are the boss and act like they’re the DMV. I have been at places where teams quietly steered clients to use outside tax co-counsel instead of our own specialists bc of these issues.