I was speaking to a newbie lawyer the other day. I am going to call her Sue, which is definitely not her real name.
Sue is an intelligent young woman, but like many of us when we are starting out, is perhaps just a tiny bit naïve.
Sue told me that she was applying to a firm in a community where she lives in eastern Canada. To prepare for the interview, she checked out the firm’s website. She was delighted to learn that the firm prides itself on recognizing the importance of work life balance.
Hey law firms! Have you given much thought to your partners approaching retirement, and calculated what their retirement may cost you?
“Youth is always impatient, even though, ironically, youth alone has time for patience.”
Lucilla Andrews
In my new pastime as a cynical commentator on aspects of the legal profession which I whole-heartedly embraced and profited from for many years, I speak to quite a few folks at the early stages of their careers. I try to think back to when I shared their enthusiasm and optimism, but frankly it was way too long ago.
At my law firm, we had great human resources management. It was so good that information was hard to come by. In fact, it was just about impossible to get any really good gossip out of management until it had made its way down to the partners, after which it became more readily available.
Since we had some really smart people at our firm (as well as a few who were not so smart), it should not be surprising that we had to compensate for the lack of information flow by learning to read between the lines.
The image that accompanies this post is of a massive tree in the forest behind my house which came down in a storm, bringing down another tree, which brought down a third. As you can see, the root system was wide, but shallow.
These trees might have looked majestic, but when force was applied, their roots proved to be too weak to hold up their weight.
This is an abridged version of one of my first posts from several years ago.
Supervising lawyers fall into two groups.
The Users justify their approach in many ways. They are too busy. They do not believe in “hand-holding”. The “sink or swim” approach is the best way to train someone. At the end of the day, it is all nonsense – these lawyers simply do not want to earn less money by wasting billable time, and sometimes do not want to expose their Associates to their clients and risk losing the loyalty of the clients.
In my experience there are more Users than Mentors, and I believe that there is a historical reason for this.
In the old days, lawyers joined firms with a view to working their way up the ranks, becoming partners, and cashing in. Senior lawyers were willing to spend their time and effort in developing their Associates who would be their future partners and stay with their firms throughout their career.
Then things changed. Salaries of Associates increased beyond their actual value to the firms. In bad times, firms cut Associates loose. In good times, Associates rewarded the lack of loyalty by jumping from firm to firm for more money. Partners had to put in more hours to maintain the levels of profitability that they had come to expect, and gradually senior lawyers developed the attitude that they were not going to invest their time at personal cost in lost billings to train Associates who would likely not be with them that long anyway.
So here we are. We now have Mentors who will sacrifice their time and short-term billable hours to help the next generation develop, and Users who will not.
The challenge for new Associates looking for jobs is to find out who is willing to work with them to help them reach their potential, and who just wants to use them.
The worst partners meeting that I ever attended ended with me storming out, telling one of my partners to fuddle-duddle off (not in those exact words), and threatening to leave the firm. I was the managing partner and highest earning partner at the time. You would think that I should have been happy.
When automobile manufacturers first put vanity mirrors on sun visors, they only put them on the passenger side. Their reasoning was that the passenger was usually a woman who had makeup to apply. The car was being driven by a man and men did not wear makeup.
Why do you figure that the manufacturers eventually started putting vanity mirrors over the driver’s seat? Did they come to believe that men also like to look at themselves in the mirror? Or was it that they suddenly discovered that women also drive cars?
Now and then I will tell a story about something that I did back in the day when my wife Maureen and I practiced at the same law firm. Typically my story involves a brilliant legal strategy that I developed, a big win, and a grateful client.
Occasionally Maureen will observe, “how quickly my good idea becomes your great idea.” Her point, I guess, is that she was the brilliant one and I just took her idea and ran with it. It could have happened that way. It was a long time ago and it really is not in my interest to remember the details that clearly.
When I practiced law, I worried a lot. I worried about making a mistake on my files. I worried that I was too busy. I worried that I was not busy enough.