Wednesday, August 01, 2007
Big law firms are very harsh places
So, the Anonymous Lawyer gets an email that complains that big corporate law firms do not want to hire "nontraditional" -- meaning second-career -- graduates from law school. AL's response is, I'm afraid, brutally true:
My comment? Your e-mail proves the point. You were reading the National Law Journal. And then you took the time to e-mail me. That's time you could have been billing clients. That's time you could have been working hard and making partners money. But you weren't. You were slacking off, just like everyone your age does, with their "children" and their "elderly parents" and their "doctor appointments." Young associates don't read the National Law Journal. They use it to wipe themselves after they go to the bathroom in their office trash cans because they don't want to take time out from billing clients to go to the bathroom. Young associates don't think about whining to someone like me because they're too busy knocking on my door and asking me how they can make my life easier and my clients happier and my contractor richer.
It's not my fault, or the fault of any of my colleagues, that you decided to go to law school. It's not our fault you got into debt. It's not our fault you want a job you can't get. Baseball players can't get jobs after age 40 either. It's the same thing here. Your skills may or may not deteriorate (I can argue both sides of that), but your stamina certainly does. Your energy does. Your drive does. If you're just starting out at age 40, you know you're never going to get to the top, so why even try. You're complacent. Not because you're choosing to be, but because you're too old and experienced in life not to be. Young people don't have perspective. They don't understand that the kinds of things we demand from them are pointless and not worth getting all worked up about. They don't get that we're not going to fire them. They don't get that most of the pressure they feel to stay here all night is pressure they're putting on themselves and that the consequences for living a normal life are all in their head. But older associates know it's all a bit of a game. Older associates know I don't really have the power to behead an associate in the guillotine I stole from the Studio 60 soundstage when we took the summer associates on a tour. But the kids don't. They think it's going to really happen. They think we're really going to kill them if they don't finish the document review by 6AM tomorrow morning. And that's why we like them.
Maybe you're willing to work hard. But you're probably not willing to be humiliated, and honestly it's a lot less fun to humiliate a 40-year-old, with 2 kids and 3 ex-wives and a mortgage and a limp than it is to humiliate a 25-year-old without any responsibilities except to the firm.
All of this reminds me of a famous exchange almost twenty years ago between a (then) senior associate at my old firm and a brand new "nontraditional" first-year just out of school. It was the Friday before Labor Day weekend, and the senior associate called the new guy in to describe to him a huge pile of work that needed to be done on a short schedule. Suddenly it dawned on the new associate that he would have to do, oh, 200 hours of work over the next five days. He held up his hands palms out, as if to stop the freight train coming at him, and said "Whoa. I have plans."
Unfortunately for that nontraditional associate, "Whoa, I have plans" became something of a term of art around that office for years to come.
CWCID: Ron Coleman.
6 Comments:
By 
Purple Avenger, at
Wed Aug 01, 08:29:00 PM:
I've often thought of going to law school. I've got 2 degrees in computer sci and good B.S. detector having spent 10 years as a test engineer probing for weakness in designs and implementations.
Maybe I should give up on that idea, or would tech patent law wind up being a different deal?
By D.E. Cloutier, at
Wed Aug 01, 09:36:00 PM:
Anonymous Lawyer's argument has validity. Nevertheless, I prefer employees who work smart, not hard.
Innovation often comes from lazy employees. Lazy people search for easier ways to do things.
By SR, at
Wed Aug 01, 09:43:00 PM:
Don't know if it generalizes to law, but unfortunately,
just as the senior members of medical groups want to work less hard, newly minted MD's of this generation finishing their training where the hours have been limited by law, don't want to work all that hard either. They are often hired by HMO's offering 40 hours a week without hassles. Tha fect that half are women results in many of them just retiring after a few years.
By Purple Avenger, at
Wed Aug 01, 09:56:00 PM:
I prefer employees who work smart, not hard.
This is something my dad drilled into me since I was knee high. The appearance of brisk activity doesn't necessarily equate to progress.
I'm often accused of being "slow" by those who aren't familiar with my work, but when its all said and done, I've somehow managed to accomplish the work of 3 or 4 people in about half the time it would have taken them.
When I'm doing some hard core programming stuff I may stare at the wall for 3 or 4 days, but the wheels are turning internally. Then the solution blooms out in a day or two, which may be several thousand lines of code whipped out very quickly, and it works perfectly on the first shot.
IBM used to have an internal metric that a programmer would be evaluated on -- 2,000 lines of code debugged documented in 3 months. I would wind up doing that in a week even though I looked "slow".
By 
, at
Thu Aug 02, 12:54:00 AM:
Of course the law firm of BUZZARD,VULTURE,HYNA,JACKAL,SLUG and SNAKE are not looking for small time plantiffs or defendents
By Locust-Eater, at
Fri Aug 03, 11:21:00 PM:
Sad, but with some truth. The newcomer has to pay his dues in every profession. I worry that the legal profession lacks a certain sense of ethics in general though, in its approach to how it uses new associates.
