Anonymous Lawyer

Every year I do this, I forget how busy interview season gets. It's one thing to get interrupted all day with junior associates asking me inane questions about the cases we're working on. But it's quite another thing to get interrupted all day with 30-minute interviews with law students. It makes getting anything else done relatively difficult, and by the end of the day I'm not much use to my clients, or to the law students I'm interviewing. If I charted how many students I gave a positive evaluation to against the time of day, I'm sure it would fall as the day gets longer. I have no patience at 4:30 for a guy who doesn't know we don't do Intellectual Property work, or a girl who has no idea why she wants to move to California.

What's making these past couple of weeks slightly more difficult is the bastard partner down the hall from me. He keeps signing up for a full slate of interviews, and then cancels almost them all, throughout the day, one by one, leaving the recruiters scrambling to find a last-minute replacement. And, more often than not, the replacement ends up being me, because they can't find anyone else. The most frustrating thing is that when he's not being a bastard, he's a great interviewer. He does it very well, I think leaves candidates with a favorable impression, and is able to cut through the crap and get as real a picture as someone can get in 30 minutes. He's smart. But he's unreliable. It carries over to his work product too. He made partner on the strength of the work he can do when he's engaged, and the client relationships he can effectively form. But for all his strengths, he's impossible to work with because you never know when he'll disengage and flake on something, or drop his work on someone else, or refuse to respond to e-mails, come to meetings, and really stay on top of things.

It's an unusual trait among lawyers who get far -- the lawyers I've encountered in my career tend, more than the average, to be reliable but boring, hard-working but unspectacular, diligent but predictable. He's more like a businessman. Moments of greatness but a general difficulty in always knowing what you're going to get. People like that are more interesting people. They're not better colleagues when you need to get things done, even if they're better lunch partners. But lately he's been worse than usual, and this interview season he's been making my life hell. He did a 7-minute interview with a candidate on Friday. After 7 minutes he told the guy he enjoyed meeting him, but had other work to do, and had the kid sit in the hall for 23 minutes waiting for the recruiter to come back to pick him up, while he called a client. The student mentioned it to the recruiter and apparently seemed pretty frustrated by the whole thing. Meanwhile, the partner loved him. He said that in 7 minutes he learned all he needed to know, and gave the guy a thumbs-up. We can't do it this way. We can't have candidates sitting in the hall, where they might see something we don't want them to see. We can't have them thinking we're shortchanging them, that we have other things to do that are more important than they are. He doesn't understand. And he keeps trying to poach one of my clients that I brought him into a deal on, just to help me out, and now he's getting too cozy with the CEO. My client, not yours. Deal with it.