“Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time.” Chinese proverb
The Chinese were on to something. We all make the mistake of teaching things to younger generations based on our own experience. Here is some of the bad advice that I gave to my Associates:
I was a super-fantastic lawyer. Really, almost everyone says so. And yet, there were a few clients who did not appreciate what I did for them or what it cost to have me do it. Luckily for me, during most of my career Google Reviews were not much of a thing. And until they were, those few and far between ignorant and unappreciative ingrates who did not like me did not have much of a public forum for spreading their lies.
This morning someone remarked that much of my writing about the legal profession is a tad negative. She said, “you practiced law for a long time; you were good at what you did; you made enough money to retire and travel the world. Surely you must have liked something about being a lawyer, didn’t you?”
Susan and Bob are unhappy spouses who own and operate a business. Sue enacts some resolutions to remove her husband as a director and officer of the corporation. Then she goes to the office before business hours, changes the locks, tells Bob that he is fired, and hires a security guard.
Bob shows up for work and is refused entry. He calls the police. The cops come and tell him that they are just there to keep the peace, which they will do by preserving the status quo. Since Sue is on the inside, she gets to stay there. As Bob is on the outside, he has to stay there.
There is currently a great deal of talk about mental health issues in the legal profession. It remains to be seen whether the profession will finally take mental health seriously, or whether the topic is simply the ‘flavour of the month’ and useful material for recruiting and marketing.
So imagine that you are a newbie lawyer working for a firm. When looking for your first job, nobody told you that the most important consideration was to work for a competent person of good character, so you chose your job based on other factors which seemed important at the time, like prestige or money.
I speak to many lawyers who strike out on their own soon after being called to the Bar. They have various reasons for doing this. Some cannot obtain positions at established firms. Others get positions that come with no mentoring and abominable working conditions and decide that they would be better off on their own. And then there are those who are entrepreneurial by nature, distrusting of established law firms (often for good reason) and eager to build something for themselves.
“It just doesn’t matter.”
Bill Murray in Meatballs
I am a Boomer who never owned a Beemer. The best that I ever did was a Honda Accord and I had to make my way through a Chevy Citation, Dodge Aries, and a couple of Pontiacs to get that far.
I had a few partners who owned Beemers. They all said that they bought them because they liked how they drove, but we all knew the truth. What they really liked was how they looked in them. Successful and well-off.
One of the many nice things about being retired is that I feel free to write about topics that I would not have had the guts to speak up about back in the day. So, here we go again!
The year was 1995. It was one of my first forays into law firm management. I helped develop our firm’s first ‘maternity leave’ top-up policy and presented it at a partners meeting. We were getting a bit of buy-in, but that ground to a halt when one of our partners said, “let me get this straight. The people who come to work every day are not earning nearly enough (author’s note- we were never earning ‘nearly enough’) and you want us to earn even less so that we can subsidize people who are not coming to work at all? Seriously? You are all f**king crazy!”
The other day I heard a story about a furniture store in Toronto that was known to cater to the wealthy. The owner purchased an unusual item in Vietnam for twenty dollars. He brought it back to his store and promoted it as a one-of-a-kind item from an exotic destination. He sold it to someone with more money than brains for $10,000. The person who told me the story swears that she has fifth-hand knowledge of the incident and that it is absolutely true. Having shopped in that store once, I do not doubt it.
Welcome to the concept of value billing. Things are worth what people are willing to pay for them.