Those who know me would not be surprised to learn that I think that I was a brilliant supervising lawyer and mentor. Not necessarily because I was, but because I had a fairly high opinion of my own skill set. Many of us lawyers do. Not all of us are right, although I am.
Every time I phone a call centre for just about any company, it turns out that they are experiencing a higher volume of calls than anticipated, and although my call is important to them, they must keep me on hold for a very long time. It really makes you wonder why, after all of this time, they have not yet started anticipating a higher volume of calls and hiring more staff. Especially since my call is so important to them. I know that something does not quite add up, even if I have not zeroed in on the exact problem. I suspect that it has something to do with them lying to me and my call not actually being all that important to them.
As a continuation of my public service, I offer the following additional translations from Lawyer Talk to Plain English:
As a public service, I offer the following translations from Lawyer Talk to Plain English:
Warning: The article below contains 30 seconds of material about accounting. Please power through and do not tune out.
How can you possibly explain why a lawyer at a substantial firm took on a file that was outside of his expertise and made a costly mistake, when that very same lawyer had three partners and two law clerks in his department, all of whom would have easily spotted the error if consulted? To make matters worse, had the lawyer involved one of the law clerks on the file to keep costs down, as would normally be done, the clerk would have immediately spotted the error. However, this lawyer chose to do all the work himself at a billing rate higher than the billing rate of the law clerks.
I once had a law partner named Marvin who taught me what he called the “fish theory” of marketing. According to Marvin, marketing was simply a matter of throwing a fish back to every referral source who threw a fish to you. If you were referred a file from someone, you owed that person a file, and so it went.
Law firms like to encourage their lawyers to produce as many billable hours as possible. In order to keep the lawyers ‘motivated’, law firms usually set a target number of hours that they expect each lawyer to bill. Some firms like to set the target at a number which is higher than they expect the lawyers to bill.
I am, of course. But I don’t have to make sure that everyone else knows it. Whenever I forget this simple truth, the client ends up paying for it somehow.
There is an easy way and a hard way to develop a good client base in the legal profession. The hard way is to work extremely long hours and be phenomenally good at what you do. I have met a few people who have done it this way, but not very many.