Anonymous Lawyer

2009-11-05T09:22:00.000-08:00

I've been following the news this morning about the Ropes & Gray associate accused of insider trading as part of an investigation into the Galleon Group hedge fund.

Ropes & Gray released a statement, saying in part: "We are deeply disappointed about this situation, which suggests an extreme breach of this person's duty of trust to our clients and to the firm."

Well, no kidding. It's damn well a breach of the duty of trust to the firm. If an associate here found out some insider information we could use to make a killing, they better not be keeping it to themselves. They ought to tell a partner, tell the whole executive committee, give us all a chance to get in on it. If we can't trust our associates to bring us valuable opportunities to increase our own personal wealth, what do we really need them around for? I've spent years digging through client paperwork looking for information that I could use to make better investment decisions. And for an associate-- not even a partner-- for an associate to be running with this, without making the opportunity available to his superiors.... Well, it was a pretty easy decision to fire him. And it should serve as a warning to everyone else at the firm-- you find a good deal, you bring it up the chain of command and let us all have a piece.

Hey, it's not like I don't tell my associates when I go to mortgage foreclosure auctions and try to feast on the corpses of evicted homeowners. They're welcome to come along and join the fun.

As long as their work is done.

And they carry my briefcase. I hate carrying my own briefcase.

2009-11-01T06:42:00.000-08:00

Just read about a lawsuit against PepsiCo, regarding Aquafina water, where the plaintiffs won a default judgment of $1.26 billion because a legal secretary forgot to respond to the complaint.

This is why we have the associates do our secretarial work.

Gosh, what a lesson for firms that actually expect their secretaries to do anything. Of course secretaries can't be trusted to do anything, that's why they're secretaries. That's why we need eighth-year associates, supervising sixth-year associates, supervising fourth-year associates, supervising second-year associates, supervising first-year associates whose only job it is to stamp numbers on papers and sort things in the right order.

If we relied on secretaries to do important things like get me a highlighter or clean my shoes, they'd never get done and we'd lose billion dollar cases.

I don't know what PepsiCo was thinking having a secretary responsible for something. Everyone knows secretaries are only good for bringing in food and taking up space in the cubicles. And sometimes having affairs with, but only when extremely desperate and all of the associates are busy stamping numbers on papers and sorting things in the right order.

I once gave my secretary a task. I was filing a motion, and had woken up the morning it was due with an incredible idea -- instead of numbering our 135 exhibits A through EEEEEE, we should use the Greek alphabet instead, since the judge was Greek, and he'd probably get a kick out of it and therefore be much more likely to rule for our side despite the evidence completely favoring our opponents. So I needed someone to switch all the pages out and replace them with pages labeled with the Greek alphabet. Plus I needed all the references in the brief to be amended. Plus I needed the city's best gyro for lunch, just to get me in the mood.

After an hour of serious deliberation, I decided to send the associate for the gyro, and have the secretary do the re-labeling, because even though the brief had a 5:00 deadline, the gyro needed to be in my office by 1:30 or I'd be eating too late to still be hungry for dinner. So clearly the gyro was priority number one.

Sure enough, down to the wire, the secretary is running around trying to figure out whether beta comes before or after theta, and the associate is dripping tzatziki all over the exhibits binder... and then the secretary threw up, all over exhibit Eta. She claimed it was because the yogurt sauce had gone bad -- I mean, of course I had her taste the gyro before I ate it, just to be sure it wasn't poisonous, that's just part of the job -- but she could have at least avoided vomiting on the papers.

So we missed the deadline, our clients received a default judgment against them, and I had to come up with a phony excuse about how we did everything we could but the evidence just wasn't on our side. They paid the bill, so no harm no foul, but it taught me to never put secretaries in charge of anything, ever again.

Lesson learned.

2009-10-18T12:43:00.000-07:00

You may have caught a glimpse of the firm on national television this past Thursday, when we locked an associate inside the compartment of a hot-air balloon and sent her flying across the Colorado landscape. Unfortunately, she somehow escaped before the balloon took off, and when the craft finally landed, she was nowhere to be found. We were hoping she would stay in the balloon, and upon landing take the hint that we wanted her to relocate to the middle of nowhere. Instead, she's still here. And the firm is facing felony charges of attempted kidnapping and unlawful use of a balloon.

In all seriousness, I have to applaud the Heene family for pulling off its plan and getting live news coverage, across the nation, for what was apparently just an elaborate publicity stunt. Back when we were hiring associates, we did everything we could think of to get people to pay attention to us, to find a way onto the national radar screen. And all it would have taken was a hot air balloon. The money we wasted on pens and stress balls and recruiting fairs and full-color brochures. All we needed was a balloon.

I'd hire the father as marketing director in an instant, if we had any marketing budget left, or anything we were still trying to market. I wouldn't hire him as a summer associate (too entrepreneurial), but I might think about hiring him as a litigator (great liar), if only he had a law degree. Or even if he can pretend he has one and convince the state. Hire his son to do document review; he seems excellent at sitting in a confined space for five hours without going to the bathroom.

2009-09-29T07:50:00.000-07:00

A very successful annual firm luncheon yesterday.

We've been trying to figure out how to cut costs in a way that most associates won't recognize as cost-cutting. Trim some expenses that would otherwise be a little too much to bear in this economy.

Killing the annual luncheon would have been obvious. It's a longstanding tradition that every fall we officially promote the associates to the next class with a celebratory lunch. First-years become second-years, second-years become third-years, ninth-years become tenth-years. It's partly our way of apologizing that not everyone can make partner. It's partly our way of making them think we value their contributions.

But lunch is expensive.

So I had the idea to do it on Yom Kippur. With a quarter of the firm observing the holiday (although still in the office of course -- we certainly can't have them taking the day off), we'd save 25% on food costs. Easy. It gave us enough flexibility in the budget to upgrade from the usual Italian buffet to an entire roasted pig. Everyone who was able to eat loved it. And everyone else had an enjoyable time watching, I'm sure.

Cost-cutting doesn't always have to be painful. It just takes some creativity.

2009-09-03T11:42:00.000-07:00

Above The Law leaked a memo from Sheppard Mullin about problems in the firm's bathroom. Apparently a few weeks ago, someone urinated on the floor of the women's restroom. Today, "the perp struck again but this time the act was even more disgusting." They've got security cameras to narrow down the suspects.

Reminds me of a similar situation here that prompted a memo I thought I'd dig out of the archives.

FROM: Anonymous Law Firm
TO: All Associates
RE: Mandatory Urinary Catheterization

As many of you are aware, there has been a string of incidents this past week prompting attention from the managing partners. On Monday, we found what we believe was an associate's urine inside a Partners-Only toilet on the 18th floor. On Tuesday, we once again found associate's urine inside the same Partners-Only toilet, as well as evidence that three squares of toilet paper from the very same bathroom had been used without authorization. On Wednesday, we believe there were as many as three instances where associate urine was deposited into the Partners-Only toilet, and up to thirteen squares of toilet paper used. On Thursday, we received a report that there was not only associate urine but also associate feces in the Partners-Only toilet. We deployed a bowel-sniffing dog to match the odor in the bathroom with the odor of each associate, but were unable to find a match.

As we began our investigation, multiple associates made us aware that on the days in question, the Associate Outhouse on the 18th floor balcony was closed for repairs, and they offered the theory that some associates, rather than use the working outhouse on 26, decided to sneak into the Partners-Only bathroom instead.

While we understand the desire for convenient bathroom facilities, and the potential annoyance of walking up eight flights of stairs** to reach the alternate outhouse, this does not excuse the behavior in question. As you are all aware, bathrooms are a privilege not a right.

Thus, while we continue the investigation, we will be issuing mandatory catheters to all associates and closing the 26th floor outhouse until further notice. We have also installed scanners at the door of each Partners-Only facility. You will need to place your genitalia on the scanner before entering the stall. If the scanner recognizes your genitalia as belonging to a partner, the door will unlock and you will permitted access. If the scanner does not recognize your genitalia, it will trap you in position and an alarm will sound. Security agents will be automatically summoned to the restroom and you will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.

Thank you for your cooperation.

**The associate elevator is still under repair. We expect it will be another 8-12 weeks before it is operational. In the meantime, we ask that you walk up and down the stairs in silence and single-file to avoid creating unnecessary interruptions.

2009-09-01T05:13:00.000-07:00

There was a letter to the editor in the New York Times yesterday:

By taking away the possibility of easy employment in high-paying jobs, the economic downturn may end up helping the current crop of law students.

Very few law students at elite schools make meaningful explorations of the broad array of career choices available to law school graduates. Instead, lured by prestige and a high salary, they march through on-campus interviews to large urban law firms, where a great many end up leading unfulfilled lives.

As the jobs with large salaries disappear, law students will draw on the thoughtfulness, intelligence and perseverance that got them into law school in the first place in order to find employment that they actually find rewarding. They will also find creative ways to pay their loans and other expenses.

Most law graduates already do not expect a starting salary of $160,000 and yet are able to make ends meet. Graduates of elite schools will adjust to the new financial realities and come out better for it.

What an insane, paternalistic point of view. Anyone intelligent enough to read this letter should be offended by it. Poor law students! They used to have so many employment choices! Good grief! First of all, no matter how you feel about law firms, how can you possibly make the argument that a law firm job, at $160K/year, is worse than no job, poverty, and sitting in front of your computer all day desperately sending out resumes? Second of all, is there a SHORTAGE of lawyers for all these other amazing jobs that this guy wants lawyers to find? No! The places people can find rewarding employment? Those jobs are already filled! And when there's a vacancy, you know who ought to get them? The people who would have wanted them enough in the first place not to be seduced by the lure of a law firm job that wasn't right for them. Why should an abundance of choice be blamed for people making bad choices. People who make bad choices deserve the outcomes they get. People who are intelligent enough to get into law school should be intelligent enough to live with the consequences of their decisions. If you can be swayed to come work for a law firm, you deserve the law firm life. And if we hire you even though you won't like it here, we deserve to have you, and to have to deal with you complaining all day.

Here's the problem. What about the law students at "non-elite" schools, who don't have these choices, and have long had to do what this author says. Who had to use their intelligence and resourcefulness to find a job. These graduates who have long been "able to make ends meet."

Well, they're shit out of luck now, because all of those jobs they really wanted are going to be snapped up by "elite" law school graduates who'd rather be working at firms. So all these jobs that probably ought to be filled by people passionate about doing them (instead of just upset they can't work for a law firm and settling for an inferior backup choice) will be filled by the "elite" and everyone else can go sit on the unemployment line.

Taking away choices is great! Law firms are worse than poverty! The recession has vanquished evil from the face of the Earth!

Ridiculous.

2009-08-20T08:05:00.000-07:00

Above The Law writes about a legal organization that asks for a family photo along with a resume.

We tried that.

We stopped.

Most of the people we hire? I don't want to see a picture. Have you looked around law school recently? Sitting in front of a computer all day doesn't exactly do wonders for the physical appearance. I don't want to have nightmares. The less I look at the people around here, the better.

And their families? That's the last picture I want. I don't want to know what your kids look like as I'm forcing you to cancel your family vacation. I don't want to know what your wife looks like as I'm telling you to stay late on her birthday. I don't want to know what your dog looks like as I'm forbidding you to go home and feed her even though you had no reason to think you'd be here all weekend and there's no one with a key to your apartment who can go in and give her some food. I don't want to know what you look like in casual clothes. I don't want to know what you look like when you smile. No one smiles here. I haven't seen a smile since 1993. I don't want to see it in a picture.

The only picture I want with an application is a picture of your acceptance letter from a top-10 law school.

2009-08-18T07:57:00.000-07:00

There's been some news recently about Kate, a 19-year-old heading to law school at Northwestern.

Much of the reaction on the Internet has been negative -- she doesn't have any life experience, she's too young to be deciding she wants to be a lawyer, she'll find it difficult to make friends....

I say good for her, and we'll save a place for her here at the Firm (assuming, of course, we're hiring again by 2012, and that we've already let the classes of 2009-2011 have their start dates). Getting someone in here whose mother is still making her lunch and picking out her clothes means it's like we're getting a free secretary along with her. Hiring someone without previous work experience means she won't realize working 24 hours a day is unusual. And, she's close enough to an age where spanking is appropriate that it'll be much easier for us to throw office supplies at her without getting an earful in return.

It'll also be easier for senior associates to order her around, since they'll actually be older than her, in contrast to the usual awkwardness of having chronological peers as your boss. And since she probably won't have many friends, she'll be fine with working nights and weekends, and won't have any social obligations pulling on her.

The downside is that (at least as a summer associate) she won't be old enough to drink, which means she'll have to find a new vice to take the edge off. I recommend anti-depressants, but that's just me.

We'd go as young as we can find law school graduates. Want to come work here at 13, 14, 15? Great. Young people have energy. They're still optimistic about the world. They adjust to difficult circumstances. They like to please adults. They're not jaded. They don't care about making a difference in the world. They have good computer skills. They take orders. They don't eat as much. They don't need quite so much salary. Better health-- means lower health insurance premiums. They (usually) don't get pregnant. They're good at text-messaging. They (usually) don't have sex with clients.

There are no drawbacks I can think of. We'd even hire an eight-year-old if she could do the work. Which, of course, most eight-years-old can.

Welcome to the firm, Kate!

2009-08-12T10:30:00.000-07:00

I was on a panel this morning, a breakfast for unemployed lawyers through some organization that sprouted up sometime during the recession to help unemployed lawyers network with other unemployed lawyers so they can all pretend they're accomplishing something by talking to each other about unemployment. I like to go to these panels, collect resumes, and sprinkle them around the firm on the desks of associates slightly less qualified than the people whose resumes I collect, just to make the associates a little nervous. "See, there are people out there who we could hire, with just a little more experience than you, just a little better GPA, just a little higher LSAT score (yes, the LSAT score is on a good number of these resumes)." No, seriously, networking is great, I've seen a lot of my former associates at these events and I'm absolutely thrilled to run into them and find out they've had no success in the job market. Perhaps I shouldn't be happy about it-- perhaps it means our firm isn't respected in the industry, that our former associates aren't valued, and that we need to work on our image. But maybe I shouldn't overthink it. It probably just means there aren't any jobs out there, and it's not anyone's fault that they can't find legal work. Except it's no fun to think about it that way, no fun to believe it's all just about the economy, and the fact that all these specialists we trained to do securitization deals and real estate transactions just don't have much value in a world where those deals aren't happening. No, I choose to blame the individual.

That's what I talked about on the panel this morning. "Blaming yourself for the economy, and what you should have done better." That was the title of my talk. 74 slides, where I itemized out a series of things lawyers should have been doing before they got laid off. Not sleeping. Gaining experience in every other area of the law. Going to school at night for an additional degree. Training to be an expert in social media and search engine optimization. Inventing Facebook. And so forth. There were lots of things lawyers could have done to prevent being laid off, or to set themselves up for a fine career even once the legal industry imploded. Not my fault they didn't win that million-dollar Netflix prize for improving their who-likes-what-movie algorithm. Could have been working on it in their spare time. Not my fault they didn't win the lottery. Not my fault they didn't invest in land that ultimately proved to have oil beneath it. None of these things are my fault, or the firm's fault.

For some reason, no one seemed to like my speech.

2009-08-05T13:03:00.000-07:00

Day Pitney beat us to it. They've got a "new definition" of their summer program --

"The summer apprenticeship program will be an eight-week course designed to prepare law students for the practice of law through practical, day-to-day applications and on-the-job training. Apprentices will learn by shadowing Day Pitney lawyers and working with firm professionals in one-on-one coaching scenarios."

Yeah, that's called "we're having summer associates replace our secretaries," and we're doing it too. Every summer is shadowing an associate from the distance of, oh, about fifteen feet, in a cubicle, with a phone and a message pad. One-on-one coaching scenarios? Absolutely. "Here's how to pick up my dry cleaning and order my dinner."

Day Pitney says: "The newly designed program expands beyond reading, research, and writing assignments. We want a program that revolves around the key values that we stress for our attorneys."

Exactly. And over here, those key values are obedience, deference, and silence.

In fact, we're expanding our summer program to create year-round apprenticeship opportunities for all of the unemployed law school graduates seeking work. We'll be offering "apprenticeships" in document review this fall, in proofreading this winter, and in janitorial services this spring.

And the great thing about an apprenticeship? We don't have to pay anyone. If you're a summer "associate," we're compelled to give you market pay. If you're a summer "apprentice," we'll give you bagels every Friday and a voucher good for dry cleaning in the firm's laundry center (which will be staffed, of course, by our apprentices).

"We have decided to move beyond the traditional assignment-based summer associate program," says Day Pitney.

Well of course you have. Because there are no assignments to be had.

2009-08-04T09:56:00.000-07:00

Jones Day apparently thinks it's better than we are. Or at least one of their partners wrote a memo claiming so. Didn't name us personally, but I'm sure we're one of the firms he's referring to. "[P]rotecting partners' incomes on the corpses of associates and staff," "slash[ing] and burn[ing]" -- I'm pretty sure that's us. Describes our behavior in this economic downturn pretty accurately.

I'd like to argue in our defense. What's wrong with firing staff and associates? What's wrong with protecting partners' incomes? What's wrong with using the recession as an excuse to trim the dead weight and put the firm in the best position to thrive not only when the economy recovers, but right now?

Why not protect our partnership above all else?

Our value is in our partnership, entirely-- sad to say, but staff and associates are fungible. No firm in the top 50 can stand up and say its associates are any better or any different from anyone else's. No matter how discerning the hiring partner wants to think he is, no matter how many times you read a resume or how carefully you evaluate a second-year law student's ability to eat lunch at a fancy restaurant without choking, we're all interviewing the same pool of students and making offers based on four or five twenty-minute interviews and a cursory glance at a transcript.

We're all making the same offers to the same students, and they're choosing us based on whatever intangibles they can pretend set one firm apart from the next, but, really, if you switched our first year associate class with Latham's or Jones Day's or any of the top firms, it's a crapshoot. And once the economy recovers, we'll be able to go out and pluck a whole new batch-- a whole new, younger, cheaper, hungrier batch-- of associates to do the scut work. You think law students are going to be in a position where they're turning down offers anytime soon? You think they're going to care which firms laid people off and which didn't? They're going to be grateful for the jobs. And it's not like they all can't do this work. We're not asking our associates to do rocket science. Any graduate of a decent law school can do everything we ask them to. That's why offer rates for summer associates are 95%+, everywhere. And that's why in good economic times, no one ever gets fired. We can pretend we have the best associates, the best training, the best whatever-- but it doesn't matter even if we do. We just need bodies. Bodies to bill out to clients, bodies to do document review, bodies to burn out and throw away when we're done with them.

So if the associates don't matter-- and, sorry to say, they don't-- why not dump them when we don't need them, save the money, and hire some new ones back later?

The alternative is a fair bit worse. Jones Day may be proud of lowering partners' incomes to save associates, but how happy are the partners about it? How many wouldn't be just as happy keeping their old salaries, or even getting bigger ones after we cut expenses by 30% by firing the idiots we don't need anymore? Truth is, not everyone is so giving. For a lot of us, there's a number we're waiting for-- a number in the bank account that tells us we can finally leave and not worry about our future. The faster you can get me to that number, the more I'm willing to stick around. So why not move over to a firm that's willing to fire people to protect my partner income?

And as far as clients? What do they care? We're service providers. We provide good service, what difference does it make whether or not we're laying off staff and cutting summer programs? In fact, we lower our overhead enough to trim 10% off the bill, and I think they'd be mighty happy with that trade-off.

Associates felt no loyalty to us when times were good. They left in the middle of projects, they went in-house, they switched firms at will. Why do we need to be loyal to them now? How about we reward the people who make the business run, who bring in clients, who actually add value through their own competence and hard work? Partner vs. associate, I choose the partner, every time.

Take that, Jones Day.

2009-07-07T12:08:00.000-07:00

I wish Sarah Palin were a lawyer, because I'd hire her in an instant, despite the "hiring freeze" that's been keeping us from doing much hiring at all lately (as well as the "salary freeze," the "bagel freeze," and the "no more air conditioning non-freeze"). I know she's been getting battered in the media lately, since her surprise resignation announcement, but she's shown exactly the kinds of skill we like to see in our associates: she's chasing the money. To hell with reputation, to hell with honor, to hell even with sanity. To be a good lawyer, you have to smell the money and get it no matter what it takes, no matter the tortured excuses you have to give, no matter the discomfort and tortured awkwardness of the public statements you have to make. Sarah Palin could see the future: two more years as governor and she would have run her reputation far enough into the ground that the $11 million book deal wasn't going to be there anymore. The offers to host a show on Fox News would be replaced with offers to host a show on Alaska Public Access Television. The speaking opportunities would have moved on to the next obscure public official thrust into the spotlight. No, to capitalize, and to really cash in, she had to act now, not in 2011. She had to jump on the money while it was still there. That's what we did, when we signed forty-six securitization deals in the days before the deals were made illegal. That's what we do, when we secretly slaughter terminated associates before they get a chance to deposit their severance checks. Sarah Palin can smell money. And she's not afraid to come out publicly looking like a fool when privately she can clean up. I'd even give her a couple days of maternity leave next time she has a secret baby. (So what if she doesn't have a law degree? It's not like anyone here has any work left to do anyway.)

2009-06-26T06:51:00.001-07:00

We at the firm are mourning Michael Jackson's death this morning. We were one of his many creditors, and are hoping for a speedy liquidation so that we can get our money back. Michael's songs inspired a generation of associates at this firm and others. We've often used his music in corporate presentations to inspire and motivate our attorneys. The messages were, in many cases, quite appropriate to the work we do. Like "Smooth Criminal," which describes many of our corporate clients. And "Beat It," which served as an anthem for partners throughout the firm, when associates would knock on our doors. It's impossible to ignore the relevant words of P.Y.T. (Pay Your Taxes) and Jackson's huge hit concerning the importance of document review ("Black or White"). And finally, of course, the lyrics to his hit song "Billie Jean" inspired countless associates to stay in their offices working for as long as six and a half weeks without a break: "For forty days and for forty nights. The law was on her side." Who could argue with that message?

Of course, it was some of his less-renowned album tracks that were the hidden gems in the Michael Jackson oeuvre. Songs like "Working Day and Night" from his Off The Wall album: "You got me workin' day and night / And I'll be workin' / From sun up to midnight."

And "Lady in my Life" off the Thriller album -- it was obvious to any careful listener that "Lady" was a metaphor for an appellate brief: "While the world goes spinnin' by / And in the glow of candlelight / I will show you you're the lady in my life."

Of course, my very favorite Michael Jackson song was from his later years. "Is It Scary" off his Blood on the Dance Floor album, which described my job as hiring partner with almost savant-like precision:

There's a ghost down in the hall
There's a ghoul beneath the bed
Now it's coming through the walls
Now it's coming up the stairs

There's a spirit in the dark
Hear the beating of his heart
Can you feel it in the air
Ghosts be hiding everywhere

I'm gonna be
Exactly what you wanna see
It's you who's taunting me

>>> Yes, it's me who's been taunting you, worthless associate. It's me. Now get back to work and stop listening to your iTunes.

2009-06-24T13:47:00.001-07:00

I have been meaning to explain this past month-long disappearance. I was hiking the Appalachian Trail. I mean, I was visiting a South American country. I mean, I am having an affair. With another law firm. I know it probably doesn't look good for the hiring partner of one firm to be dancing in the arms of a competitor, but I couldn't resist. It started out, as these things often do, with a casual e-mail back and forth about places to hide associates' bodies when you don't want them to be found. But it soon escalated into more than that. Much more than that. And in the end, I hurt my firm, I hurt my readers, and I hurt as many as 40% more associates than I usually hurt in the normal course of business.

I apologize on behalf of all hiring partners, who seem to be particularly prone recently to bizarre behavior. Like my colleague in our New York office, "Partner #9," as the expense reports like to call him, who was busted as part of a ring of attorneys doing unauthorized pro bono work on the firm's time. And my colleague in Illinois, who tried to sell a junior partner promotion to the highest bidder. It's a bad time to be a hiring partner, and I apologize for this indiscretion, along with my other indiscretions which have yet to come to light.

Back to work.

2009-05-22T21:55:00.000-07:00

I'm out of town this weekend at an associate's wedding. I hate when my associates get married, but I hate it more when they're engaged. At least once they're married it's all done and they can turn their attention back where it belongs. When they're engaged, they're worrying about planning a wedding (and fake-planning a honeymoon they're never going to get to take) and for months nothing important gets done. Like any of it matters anyway. I understand a big party to celebrate a new job. You spend most of your waking life at the office. But what's the difference who you're married to? It's not like you really even see them. I once went two years without seeing my wife (awake) for more than ten minutes in a row. Sure, part of that was because of her own issues, but a lot of it was because of my work schedule. She was seven months pregnant before I knew we were having a kid. That's what happens when you automatically direct all of her e-mail to the spam folder and all of her voice mail to the garbage.

I really don't know why this associate invited me to the wedding. You would think he sees enough of me at work. You would think I'd be the last person his wife would want there. I'm the guy who takes him away from her. Although maybe she likes it that way. Maybe she's only marrying him for the money. What she doesn't know is that the moment he's back from the honeymoon I keep telling him he shouldn't take, we're going to lay him off. He thinks he's got a pretty sweet deal: lucrative job, new wife, brand new house he just closed the deal on. But just give it a month and see where he is. No job, a foreclosed house, and I'm pretty sure there's not going to be a wife anymore.

He should thank me, honestly. We're doing this for his own good. This way he'll really know: does she love me for my money, or is she really this desperate (because he's not much of a catch)? If she stays, he'll know it's not about the money. And that lesson will stick with him for the six unemployed months he's got left before he decides it's better to end it all, ashamed of the shell of a man he will have become. He'll know she really loves him, even if he can't love himself. Even if his whole identity is so wrapped up in the job that he can't recognize he has something most guys at the firm would trade their entire stock portfolios for.

It's hard to find love when you're working 90 hours a week. Of course, it's not like most of these folks would find anyone even if they were working half that amount. The law doesn't attract the kinds of people who are the marrying types. The kind who can compromise and sacrifice and remember to leave the toilet seat down. Lawyers have to win every time. And in a marriage, you can't. At least not in a happy one. I can count the people here in successful marriages on the number of fingers the plaintiff in the suit against the chainsaw company we're defending has left. That's zero. No successful marriages. I can count the number of unsuccessful marriages by the number of surgeries the plaintiff has had. Nineteen. And that's just in my department.

I know it's traditional to give a gift when you go to a wedding, but I always figure my presence is good enough. Besides, my gift is on its way. Two weeks severance. Heck, it's a lot more money than anyone else is going to give them.

2009-05-14T18:19:00.000-07:00

It's extraordinarily frustrating when things don't work out the way you hope they will. I thought swine flu was going to be a real issue, something that was going to become an actual epidemic, and potentially solve some of our problems here, but apparently no such luck. I thought it could wipe out some associates, keep us from having to pay severance, keep the profits per partner from falling the estimated 2% they're going to fall this year, keep everything status quo, keep the good life in the hands of those of us with the skills and talents to make ourselves successful. But, no, no one here has the swine flu, no one here seems like they're going to get the swine flu, and we're stuck with all of them, earning their bloated salaries until we finally pull the trigger and then they'll be earning their bloated severance for a mind-boggling seven more days. Why we need to give one week of severance, I'll never understand. It's one thing to pay them for the rest of the day, after we fire them. That's just the humane thing to do. But if I were laid off, I'd have a new job by the next morning, so I really don't understand the business justification for an entire week of severance.

Swine flu was going to fix things. Weed out the weak. And, incidentally, cancel out all the life insurance we provided our associates, since we were forward-thinking enough to list "diseases of animal origin" in the exceptions clause (along with suicide, cancer, accidental death, heart disease, and other medical-related causes). We need epidemics every once in a while. Plagues, famines, droughts. Things to test us, and give us an excuse to thin the ranks. How else can we do it without being subject to criticism on the Internet? How else can we do it without hurting our future recruiting prospects? How else can we do it without having to actually write that impossible e-mail telling someone he no longer has a job? I needed swine flu to do my dirty work for me. I needed it to make the hard decisions, and help me pick whose sick kids don't get medical coverage anymore.

But now it's over and no one here died and I'm stuck in exactly the same place I've been for months. This world is a screwed-up place.

2009-05-12T19:03:00.000-07:00

New plan. We don't want to lose out on young legal servants should the economy turn around and clients actually decide they want to waste money on our fancied-up busy work that they could do in-house for a tenth of the cost. So instead of paying our first years to go away, we're merely going to slash salaries and turn the first-year associate job into a comprehensive curriculum to train them to be good associates once everything gets better.

So we're cutting the salaries from $165K to $16,500 and instituting a set of modules through which our associates will rotate, be trained, and become experts.

Four weeks of Google searching
Four weeks of coffee making
Four weeks of comma finding
Four weeks of bill padding
Four weeks of conference call scheduling
Four weeks of smiling in the corner of a meeting room and never saying a word
Four weeks of handshakes
Four weeks of lunch-fetching
Four weeks of stapling
Four weeks of making excuses for why we need to delay the proceedings
Eight weeks of lying
Two weeks of intense lunch
And two weeks when we tell them they have vacation time but we actually call them into the office every day for "emergencies" that will really just involve them sitting in a bathroom stall counting the number of times the toilet flushes, for a comprehensive study on our water usage tracked by hour, day of the week, and outside temperature.

This will prepare them well for life as an associate once we again need associates, and will also keep us from getting the bad publicity layoffs provide. See, it just takes some outside-the-box thinking. Which of course, being lawyers, we're terrific at. How else can we explain record-setting profits per partner even in this economic climate?

2009-05-08T08:00:00.000-07:00

To: All Associates
Re: Summer Lunch Policy

Please note the following changes to our summer lunch policy. Be aware that these changes are unrelated to the firm's current economic situation, which, as we discussed during everyone's "salary realignment meetings" last week, is quite excellent, and our unwillingness to back that up with any sort of documentation is entirely due to our new environmentally-motivated "paper(and printer)less office" policy and not due to the numbers on our balance sheets, or the fact that we can no longer afford toner. Instead, we are amending the lunch policy to reflect that in today's health-conscious society, it doesn't make sense to eat lunch more than once a month. Also, in today's overpopulated society, it doesn't make sense not to take advantage of our laid-off associates in a new "alumni lunch" program, details at #6 below. We appreciate your attention to these important matters.

1. The per person lunch cap will be revised from $80/person to $.80/person.

2. Summers will share entrees at a rate of 40 summers: 1 entree.

3. Each summer is entitled to one lunch credit per month. Additional lunch credits can be purchased at a rate of $100/credit, cash only, from my office.

4. Each associate is entitled to take any particular summer associate to lunch no more than zero times.

5. Approved restaurants include the following: [end of list]

6. Our new "alumni lunch" program will consist of former associates returning to the firm during the lunch hour, under the false pretense of getting their jobs back. They will be slaughtered and served to summer associates in conference room 23B. Please direct all summer associates who ask about summer lunches to this conference room. Advise them that they should provide their own flatware.

7. Partners are exempt from the new rules and will continue to spend an unlimited amount of money on food they won't even enjoy.

Thank you,
The Partnership

2009-05-06T05:09:00.000-07:00

The New York Times wrote an article yesterday about high-functioning alcoholics. As if it's a problem to be a high-functioning anything. I wish the alcoholics at the firm were high-functioning. The difficulty is that they're low-functioning, sober or not, and the fact that they also happen to be alcoholics is just icing on the cake.

I don't know what the point of labeling is. If someone's high-functioning, why is it anyone's business what they're doing in the six hours a week they're not in the office? I think we've become an overly paternalistic society. It's the end result that matters, not the process. Being a lawyer -- or a doctor, or an astronaut, or a parent, or anything else mentioned in the article -- isn't a test of moral goodness or purity. If someone needs a bottle of gin to get through the day, good for them -- as long as the work doesn't suffer. When the work suffers, then of course it's a problem. But it's a problem whether they're an alcoholic or not. And that's when we stop calling them high-functioning. High-functioning alcoholic is a nonsense term. No one's writing about high-functioning diabetics and how we need to get them help before they eat too many cookies.

I actually wish we had more alcoholics at the firm, if I'm being really honest. Alcohol dulls the senses, dulls the pain. More alcohol and they won't realize what we're doing to them, they won't care that the document review is taking eighteen months and that they're spending years of their lives in basements reading lease agreements. More alcohol and they won't notice when we cut their salaries 10% without telling them, or when we cut health benefits. More alcohol and they'll think they're having a grand old time at our partner-associate cocktail parties while everyone who's sober realizes they're actually torture. More alcohol and they'll sleep in the office, just like we want them to. And it's not like we don't have custodial staff to clean up vomit and incorrectly-placed urine. So I say bring on the high-functioning alcoholics, the more the better, and we'll not only tolerate them but embrace them. In fact, I'll trade the low-functioning pregnant women for them, any day of the week.

2009-05-01T19:08:00.000-07:00

Happier news today, at least for incoming associates at one competitor. Stroock is offering $75,000 to incoming associates, as long as they don't show up. Ever. That's a lot of free money for doing nothing. Not that the associates who do show up make us much money anyway. Beats our new "Defer Until 2250" option, where we offer to cryogenically freeze any willing incoming associate for the next 240 years, in the hope that the economy will have turned around by then, and there'll be work to do. Also in the hope we will still be in business. We have a handful of associates I've been trying to push this program on, explaining how much it will help their careers, etc etc. Obviously because I hate them and wish they would go away until I'm long gone.

On Monday we're actually going to start offering the same opportunity to our clients. Let us freeze you for two and a half centuries, and then when you're back, your industry will be in much better shape and there'll be so much more that we can provide as far as legal services. Of course for the clients it isn't free like for the associates. No, for the clients we charge a maintenance fee for every hour we keep them frozen. We're trying to think outside the box here -- new products and services, new ways to add value to our clients, new revenue streams. I hear our point man at Chrysler is seriously thinking of taking us up on the offer.

2009-04-30T21:06:00.000-07:00

Sad day at a firm much like mine. We've had some layoff-related suicides as well, but at least we're competent enough not to let the news get out. Good grief, if you can't even keep secret a suicide in your building, how can a client ever trust that you won't let his dirty laundry out as well? I would never do business with a firm that couldn't keep its own mishaps out of the press. Even when a former associate came in and shot the entire 32nd floor to death, no one knew. Not even their families -- at least not for about a week, since it's not like they were getting home more often than that anyway. That's actually one of the (endless) benefits of working the associates to the bone: no one realizes when they go missing. No friends, no families, no nothing. They can just fall right off the grid, and besides the 2800 hours a year that we've billed for them, it's like they never even existed.

The ones who kill themselves in the office are always the selfish ones, only thinking about themselves. Do you know how much it costs to get blood out of the carpet? And the casebooks are pretty much unusable once guts have been splattered on their spines. We lost about thirteen hours of document work after the most recent suicide -- he had the gall to leave his latest markup on the desk, right within the splash zone. Couldn't tell what was marked red with the pen and what was red with blood. At least the guy at Kilpatrick Stockton updated his e-mail auto-reply. Be thankful for the little things.

2009-04-27T20:12:00.000-07:00

The firm's Board of Directors met this evening to discuss the recent layoffs and additional possible actions we might take to stem the recent economic losses and put ourselves in a strong position should the recovery take longer than expected. No surprise, the Chairman seems to have turned to the bottle to get him through this crisis, and by twelve minutes into the meeting he was already on his fifth glass of wine and slurring his words. By twenty-two minutes in, he was kissing the man next to him after a particularly excellent suggestion about lowering the water pressure in the sinks and the wattage in the hallway lamps so we save on utility costs. By forty-five minutes in, he had taken a prone position on top of the table, and had started undoing his pants. By an hour and four minutes in, he was in the middle of an obscenity-filled rant about "woman lawyers" and how we should just let them the run the whole place since "everyone likes to do business with someone they want to f***." In other words, it was a typical meeting of the Board of Directors.

Being on the Board, sadly, has taken all the majesty out of law firm work. You start out and you imagine the folks in charge must be, in a way, better than you. Smarter than you, wiser than you, somehow more responsible and more important and more worthy of respect. And then you discover they're mostly just the worst examples of everyone else you work with, their flaws magnified by their desire for power and lack of any self-awareness at all that would keep them from spouting off ridiculous solutions for problems that don't even exist. "Why do we even need computers," one director emeritus said tonight. "When I was an associate, we didn't have them, and we did just fine. They're a distraction, they're expensive, and everyone spends all day figuring out how to make them work. What if we just got rid of the computers, went back to paper, and then we could get rid of the entire TI staff too." I think he meant IT staff, but that isn't really the point.

And that suggestion, like every other suggestion at these meetings, is taken completely seriously and put up for discussion and a vote. "I think computers do more than you realize," one guy said. "What if we assigned a subcommittee to put together a report about how computers benefit the firm," one guy offered. "I don't know if computers are the entire issue, but we definitely need to do something about all the beeping and buzzing that goes on in the hallways," added one guy. "I've even heard there are some people with these big screens that plug into their little computers -- is that fair to everyone else?" asked one moron. We eventually voted, 16-5, in favor of keeping the computers.

When Old Man Real Estate went to the bathroom, Baldy piped up asking for an emergency vote declaring him to be the new head of real estate once Old Man Real Estate dies. It passed, but just barely. Old Man Real Estate returned without a hint that his death had been contemplated during his absence, but later I saw Baldy hold out his foot to trip the Old Man. That's a situation that bears watching, it seems.

We adjourned after a seventy-three minute discussion about pencil sharpeners and whether it was appropriate to spend the extra twenty-two cents per box to buy pre-sharpened pencils. We deadlocked at 9-9, with 3 abstainers, so it's been tabled until next time.

2009-04-26T07:52:00.000-07:00

Anonymous Daughter just forced me to watch a video on YouTube of an unattractive British woman singing very loudly. Apparently this Susan Boyle video has been seen by tens of millions of people and is captivating the world. This is why we ban YouTube in the office. I don't know what the big surprise is that a 47-year-old unemployed, unattractive woman can sing well. What else can she possibly have to do with her time other than practice? She has no job, no family... if I had no job and no family, I could be a terrific singer too.

What bothers me is all the attention she's getting. It's giving failures hope. I'm sure I have associates watching this video and thinking: "Things could work out for me, too. I could leave this job and follow my dreams and even though I'm very unattractive and have few friends and no family, I could find success doing something I love instead of being stuck in the office 90 hours a week doing mindless document searches and redrafting agreements that exist in virtually identical form on pretty much everyone's hard drive in the entire firm."

I can't have people thinking like that, especially in this economy. More than ever, now that we only have what seems like seventeen associates and half a staff member firm-wide, we need their eyes on the real prize: imaginary partnership. We need them focused on feeling like they could somehow do enough to impress me and my colleagues and force our hands into making them junior partners. Obviously that won't happen, especially in this economy, but we need them to feel like it could, and be hungry for it, and not just watching unattractive people sing loudly and get applause. I know they miss applause. I miss applause. But adulthood isn't about applause. It's about fear and worry and economic insecurity motivating all your decisions. Not passions and dreams. That's for the unemployed.

2009-04-24T20:17:00.000-07:00

I received an invitation today to an associate's wedding. I don't know why any of my associates would think I would want to see them socially, or be part of their lives. I don't know why any of them would think I even approve of a wedding when all it will mean is they have less time to spend focused on their work. And now, even though of course I'm not going to attend, I have to give a gift. I feel like it's a shakedown for a present. He knows I'm not going to come to his wedding. He knows there's nothing I'd less like to do than come to his wedding, yet still he invited me. I'm not going to take the bait. I'm not only not going to give a gift -- I'm going to call his bluff and actually go to the wedding -- and still not give a gift. Hopefully he'll spread the word around and no one else will ever invite me to their weddings. Who would be marrying this guy anyway? His fiancee must be a real winner... he's one of my worst associates.

2009-04-23T13:09:00.000-07:00

An e-mail from one of our offer-rescinded summer associates somehow made it through my spam filter and ended up in the pile of e-mail printouts my assistant prepares for each morning for me to read in the bathroom. The unemployed 3L wanted to draw my attention to a recent post on the Volokh Conspiracy and the discussion in an Above The Law post and its comments.

Apparently there's some rumblings that despite at-will employment, there might be a breach of contract claim if we never hire, as opposed to hiring and then immediately firing. Something about health insurance, as if an unemployed law student's health is actually worth any money to insure. What's the difference if he gets sick, it's not like he's adding anything to society. Anyway, I took the e-mail printout to the one guy left in our internal legal department, and he laughed and threw it in the trash.

Nonetheless, I thought it could provide for a little bit of fun this afternoon. So I called the unemployed 3L and told him I received his e-mail, had considered it carefully, and wanted to invite him down to the office to chat. Three hours later, after he bought a last-minute ticket to fly down from the Bay Area, hustled to the airport, and took a cab straight here, I sat him down on my office couch and handed him a key card and a stack of paperwork.

"You're hired," I said. He beamed. "We don't want to get sued, and I want to thank you for pointing out the error of our ways. You will make a fine associate here at the firm."

"Thank you, sir," he said.

"Wait, can I see your key card for a second?" He handed it over. "Thanks. You're fired."

"Excuse me?"

"At-will employment. We hired you, lived up to our employment agreement, no questions there... and now you're fired. And, by the way, if you'd like to pay $775 a month for our crappy health insurance plan, you're welcome to take those COBRA documents with you and file the paperwork."

"But you just hired me."

"And then we fired you." I reached into my pocket and pulled out a $50 bill. "Oh, here's your salary for the twenty seconds you were employed. I even threw in a bonus for a job well done. You billed as many hours in those twenty seconds as some of our associates have billed all month -- good for you."

"But I just paid six hundred dollars to fly here."

"Doesn't seem like a very smart thing to do in this economy...."

"But---"

"Oh, I'm sorry. I have a client meeting. Gotta run."

Sometimes it's just too easy.

2009-04-22T20:40:00.000-07:00

None of our peer firms are admitting this -- and we're not admitting it publicly either -- but we're absolutely rescinding some of our full-time offers to last year's summer associates. That's been the one thing people think none of the top firms are doing yet. Sure, we're delaying start dates, and laying off associates, and paying people to leave the firm for a year... but rescinding offers is that last flood wall that's keeping back the crush of bad press and point-of-no-return recruiting issues and really hamstringing our future attempts to reload once the economy turns around. People think it's not happening, but, secretly, it is. We're just desperate for word not to get out. So we're paying people off and making them sign airtight non-disclosure agreements.

(Sidenote: You want to keep associates without any work occupied for a couple of weeks, and scared out of their skulls? Have them write non-disclosure agreements people would have to sign to get their severance, and make them include all sorts of terrible, evil clauses, like about how they're giving up their right to sue for wrongful death in case someone from the firm follows them home the day they get fired and kills them... and then fire all the associates who worked on the documents. They won't sleep for a week.)

Through some independent testing, we've discovered that $12,000 is the right amount to keep those with rescinded offers from talking. Less than that, and we're worried they'll leak it. More than that, and we're just throwing money away. There are no jobs in this economy. They need the $12K to tide them over for a couple weeks. No one wants to risk having to miss a payment on the BMW they foolishly leased back when they thought they had a $160K/year job.

One of the people whose offer we rescinded was Number Two. I don't even remember his real name. No one does. This is one of the few nicknames that wasn't just in my head, but throughout pretty much the entire firm. I was in another summer's office last year, yelling at him for stapling a set of documents at the wrong angle (I like my staples vertical), when I noticed he had been Google-chatting with one of his colleagues down the hall. I heard the computer beep, and looked over to see the message. "Gotta sign off for a bit. I have to go #2." To his credit, the guy whose office I was in quickly clicked the window closed, hoping he could cover for his friend and I wouldn't see. (Have to admit, that showed me a lot about that guy -- didn't have the killer instinct, automatically wanted to protect his friend without considering any potential benefit to his own career... we didn't give him an offer at the end of the summer.)

But I did see, and almost forgot about the staple for a moment and started to laugh. Of course I didn't actually laugh. But I felt the urge for a split second. And then, once I was sufficiently convinced this guy would never staple incorrectly again, I stopped off at The Tax Guy's office and told him the #2 story. And soon enough, it spread throughout the firm. Killed the guy's reputation, was terribly embarrassing for him the rest of the summer. But he took the full-time offer anyway, since what else could he do... and last week, we rescinded it. Didn't even offer him the full $12,000. Offered him $8,000 and the promise that if another firm ever comes calling for a reference, we won't mention the incident. As soon as he heard that, he signed immediately. Good luck to him. In the job search, and in the bathroom.

2009-04-21T21:11:00.000-07:00

I caught someone this afternoon writing Twitter posts during a meeting. I took a peek at her BlackBerry screen and read what she was writing. "In a meeting." "Still in the meeting." "This meeting is really dull." "I wish this meeting were over." "Will this meeting ever end?" Come on, law firm work is dull enough. Even someone like me is able to admit that. The last thing anyone needs is meta-commentary on the moment-to-moment business of being an attorney. Who could possibly want to read any of this? But here's the thing -- when I got back to the office, I tracked down her Twitter page and took a look. She has 47 followers. And three of them are clients. So she can bill this. And that makes it all worthwhile. In fact, I almost understand why clients would want their attorneys to have Twitter feeds. It's reassuring to know what you're paying for. If I can monitor someone moment to moment, I know if they're lying when the bill claims three hours of meetings on Tuesday. Or at least I'd know if they're lying if I could trust their Twitter feeds.

Which is why starting tomorrow, all of my associates will be required to join Twitter and post all day about all sorts of billable work they may or may not be doing. Just like with our billable hour reports, we're going to require shadow Twitter feeds to reflect what we want our clients to believe we're actually doing. This way, in case anyone wants to check up on us, we're completely covered. I have found the Twitter value proposition: faking it. This is a huge potential moneymaker for the firm. We can now back up our claims of 12-hour meetings, with fake documentation that our clients won't even realize isn't true. How many clients are going to doubt an associate's Twitter feed? "How much foresight would it take to fake one's entire existence just for the paper trail?" they will ask themselves, before concluding that no firm could be so genius as to do this deliberately. Except that's why they hire us. We go above and beyond.

"The meeting's still going," the associate just wrote, as she gets ready to feed the four cats she keeps in her house and treats as substitute children, making up for the fact she never met a husband, and won't have the family she always dreamed about.

2009-04-20T20:58:00.000-07:00

To: ALL
Re: More Layoffs

Just kidding. See, it doesn't always have to be bad news. I assure you, we are doing everything possible to avoid further layoffs. Our recent associate survey confirmed that you would like us to do everything possible to avoid further layoffs. We are listening. We assure you, we are listening. (We even shut off the water in all non-partner bathrooms.)

That's why, retroactive to January of 2004, we are imposing a 20% salary reduction on all associates and staff. This is the best way to avoid further layoffs, while at the same time preserving the integrity of the firm's partnership, which was the top concern according to our survey of the firm's partnership.

Salary reduction invoices will be placed in your mailboxes by Friday. We recognize that covering the back salary owed since 2004 may be an overwhelming burden. We are therefore allowing the amount to be paid back in installments over the next six months for an additional 10% processing fee.

The partnership recognizes that there may be associates and staff uncomfortable with the idea that salary previously earned can be taken away. For those who feel this way, we invite you to read section 14.2 of your original employment agreement: "Salary previously earned may be recalled at any time."

However, because of these tough economic times, we would like to extend an offer to all associates and staff who would prefer not to have to return the back salary: if you decide to leave the firm by the end of the week, we will reduce your payment burden by 90%. Thus, you will be allowed to leave the firm, and only pay back 2% of your salary since 2004, rather than the 20% standard.

We hope our generosity does not go unnoticed.

All the best to you,
The Partnership of The Firm

2009-04-17T19:59:00.000-07:00

The New York Times is reporting that a man is suing the New York Yankees and the City of New York, saying his civil rights were violated when he was not allowed to go to the bathroom during the playing of "God Bless America" after the seventh inning stretch.

Obviously, I think this lawsuit is ridiculous. Is someone going to sue us next for not letting our associates go to the bathroom during business hours? It's not that I'm a fan of patriotism or music. I believe our loyalties should be to our employers over our country. How can we expect employees of multinational corporations to choose? How can we ask them to divide their loyalties between the German parent company and the Dutch subsidiary? But I also don't think it's right to tell the Yankees how they should be able to treat their fans. If they don't want people to go the bathroom during the song, that's their right. It's not like they're restricting BlackBerry use, or something truly unjust like that.

Frankly, even if the rule that people can't leave to use the bathroom doesn't make any sense, I think it's still okay. We need rules, even stupid ones. Rules teach compliance and obedience. And that's what we need to be training young people in. Listening to authority without questioning it. Blind adherence to directives. Following the herd. It's how we get law students here, of course, so why shouldn't it work for the Yankees? We tell students law firms are the place to be, we make it seem selective and prestigious, and they flock to us. They listen. Yankee fans need to listen when the team says that God Bless America is important enough that no one should be urinating. If I owned a baseball team, I wouldn't have any free bathrooms in the stadium. There'd be a charge -- maybe even a big one. The beer would be free. The bathrooms would cost a hundred dollars. This way, everyone would get drunk, lose their sense of judgment, need to go to the bathroom, and pony up the money. I think it's a great plan. And if someone went to the bathroom in their pants because they didn't want to pay? I'd turn the camera on them and humiliate them by showing their accident on the JumboTron. That'd show everyone else we mean business.

So that's what the Yankees should be doing. Price gouging and humiliating their fan base. Not letting them go to the bathroom during God Bless America is baby stuff. Not even worth the energy. They could be doing so much more.

2009-04-16T20:13:00.000-07:00

Oh, Passover, why did you have to end so quickly? Usually I'm the first one to speak out against holidays, for the way they guilt us into letting people go home for a few hours, or the way they remind us that for some people there are things in their lives besides the job, but Passover's one of the few I like. First of all, no one's allowed to use it as an excuse to miss work, because the celebrating happens after sundown. Which, I hate to admit, is usually the time of day when things slow down a little bit, and if an associate must leave the office for an hour to have dinner with his family, two nights out of the year, it's not the end of the world. But second, and here's the great part: we get eight days of significant savings to the firm as far as bagel and muffin costs, doughnut costs, sandwiches, cookies. For years now, I've made it part of the official schedule to celebrate all spring birthdays during Passover so as to save on the birthday cake costs.

There's also something about the story of Passover that's always spoken to me. The Jews had no time to let their loaves rise before leaving the desert, so they just took the unleavened bread and ran. It's about sacrifice and knowing what's important. The bread wasn't important. The good meal, the time to linger, the socializing, the hobbies, the fun -- all of that wasn't important at all. What was important was the job at hand, no matter the sacrifices. And that's really all we ask of our attorneys here. To put the job first. And if that means running out of your house in the morning with a frozen waffle you don't have time to throw in the toaster, so be it. If that means darting out of your son's Little League game the instant after he gets beaned in the head, because you know you don't have time to take him to the hospital and you just can't take the risk that if you rush over to see how he's doing, it's going to end up being a three-hour adventure in the emergency room and so it's better to just sneak out and pretend you were never there, then that's the price you have to pay. Being a professional success has its costs.

Sure, some of you are probably thinking that I'm completely missing the point of the Passover story, and that in reality the Jews were rushing to escape slavery -- to escape the same kind of slavery conditions with which we treat our associates. But I don't think that's the right interpretation. Poverty is slavery. Laziness, lack of ambition, wasted time -- all of that is slavery. Wealth, power, modified and highly-restricted expense accounts -- that's the kind of freedom the Jews were running toward, and that's the kind of freedom working at a place like this provides.

At least it's a better lesson than Easter, which mistakenly teaches associates that things can come back from the dead. They can't. Reputations, careers, the deal that you spent three years working on only to see it fall apart at the very last minute over a technicality -- they're all gone. Once they die, they die. Nothing comes back, no one gets a second chance, no one gets resurrected once an opinion is formed. You're either partner material or you're not. You're either a worthwhile human being, or you're not. Jesus clearly was not. He was dead. He should have stayed that way. A firm would have never let Jesus return to work if he misses three days being crucified. Crucifixion is no excuse for staying home. If he rose three days later, and was an employee of this law firm, he would have found that his office had already been assigned to one of the lawyers who'd been working in a bathroom stall due to lack of space, his chair already stolen by some idiot from trusts and estates, and his life insurance policy voided due to a technicality we invented. No one would be celebrating his return, we'd just be calling security.

I am, however, okay with Maundy Thursday, because they're exactly right -- the Last Supper should definitely be on Thursday if you already know you're going to be working the weekend. Eat the rest of the meals at your desk. Finish up, gobble down the food, and get back to the office.

Incidentally, you know what I gave up for Lent? Granting vacation requests. It was so easy, I'm going to pretend it's Lent all year round.

2009-04-15T20:43:00.000-07:00

We'd been trying to avoid this, but we finally had to do some layoffs today at the firm. It's a sad day for the handful of attorneys and staff... who remain employed. I'm kidding. It's actually a sad day for the people we laid off, since we didn't give them any severance, and we didn't let them go back to their offices to collect any personal belongings, not even the family photos and personally-owned electronics we had asked them to bring in today for "Family Photos and Your Personally-Owned Electronics Sharing Day." It wasn't a real event, it was just a way to get people to bring those things to their offices so we could claim they're company property and not let them take them back home once we terminated them. I think next round we might try a "Bring A Delicious Baked Good To Work Day" and then the survivors can all have a potluck celebration after the unwanted ones leave the building. There was a suggestion at the last partner meeting about combining the layoffs with "Take Your Child To Work Day" and then claiming the children belong to us now -- and in a better economy we might have run with the idea -- but there really just isn't enough clerical work to do around the firm, and so I have no idea how we'd make use of all the children. Not to mention the concerns about lice.

In any case, before a disgruntled ex-paralegal leaks it to Above The Law, I thought I'd share a copy of our internal memo about the cuts:

ANONYMOUS LAW FIRM -- MEMO

To: All
Re: Impending Doom

I wanted to take a moment to address the current economic situation, in the world and at this firm in particular. Over the past months, there have been many rumors of layoffs floating around our halls, and in recent weeks, as a handful of partners have been seen tumbling from the roof, those rumors have only increased in force. We on the management committee have grown more and more frustrated by these rumors, and by the distraction they have become to the actual business of this firm. More and more attorneys are spending time worrying about layoffs, talking about layoffs, and searching the Internet for news about "stealth" layoffs than actually doing their assigned client work. We have struggled to come up with an appropriate response to this problem that would put the layoff rumors to bed once and for all. To that end, the continued behavior on the part of the associates and staff of this firm have forced our hand: in order to put an end to these inaccurate rumors of layoffs, we have decided to lay off 324 staff members and 18 associates.

These layoffs, which will be done in secrecy over the course of the next sixteen days, are not IN ANY WAY motivated by the firm's finances. Our balance sheet is strong, our billables are steady, and our firm is well-prepared to compete in this or any future economic climate. Nevertheless, to put an end to the rumors, we felt we had no choice. We reiterate: YOU caused these layoffs. You are your rumor-mongering, you and your Internet-searching, you and your failure to stay sufficiently focused on our clients and on the important business of this law firm.

People being laid off: this is the fault of your friends and colleagues, not the economy, and certainly not this firm. We have done everything we could possibly do to preserve your jobs. But your friends insisted on continuing to propagate the vicious rumors of impending layoffs. We had no choice but to act. Once again, the financials of this firm are strong. We could absolutely keep you employed if your colleagues hadn't done this to you. We could absolutely pay you severance if your colleagues hadn't told us not to. We could absolutely give you back your treasured family photos if your colleagues hadn't already burned them in a bonfire in Conference Room 25-D. It's them, not us, we promise. Blame them. They stink. We're great.

I want to express our collective appreciation and respect for those individuals affected by this decision. I also want to use this opportunity to wish them well on their journeys, wherever their lives end up leading them, since I will almost certainly never speak to any of them again, ever, and if any of those who remain do continue to speak to anyone affected by these layoffs, you will be affected too, in a most unpleasant way. Let us shun the rejected ones, for we will all grow stronger by removing their poisonous influences from our lives.

Best wishes,
Anonymous Lawyer

2009-04-14T15:00:00.000-07:00

Like a lot of firms, we've been trying to find a way to push the start date of our incoming class of new associates, since there isn't a great deal of work to go around, and the last thing we need is more people roaming the halls, making idle conversation. A bored associate isn't just a drain on the firm's financials, he's also a potential rabble-rouser and troublemaker. It's one thing to have a hundred miserable associates slaving away at their desks, feeling like they're alone in the world, their work doesn't matter, and they're wasting their lives. It's quite another thing when they have the time and freedom to wander the halls and discover they aren't so alone, and everyone else feels exactly the same way. It's never helpful to the firm for associates to have a chance to talk to each other. They start comparing notes and realizing whatever they're obsessing about isn't just in their own heads (yes, we really do hire someone to secretly follow them every time they go to the bathroom, and make sure they're not using more toilet paper than the designated allotment). And they go from merely paranoid to actually almost ready to do something about it. Of course, no associate ever really ends up putting up a fight over anything we do, but the realization that they should, and that we are in fact just as bad as they sometimes fear we might be, is not good for morale and does not lead to added productivity.

Thus, in order to avoid having idle feet roaming the halls, we're encouraging incoming associates to find public interest jobs, in exchange for significantly more money than the people currently in those jobs earn. The tremendous side benefit (and I don't know why we didn't come up with this plan sooner -- give credit to the economy for forcing us to come up with even more diabolical ways to ruin the world) is that our overqualified-but-now-super-cheap labor can displace the idiots who couldn't get a firm job and were forced to go into public interest to begin with, and leave them on the streets where they belong (and where most of them are probably thrilled to be living, so that they can better understand the kinds of people they're so desperate to "help"). Finally, students from third-tier law schools won't have the crutch of a public interest job to help them forget they got rejected by firms like us. Finally, there won't be a place for "lawyers" who are ruining the reputation of the profession by passing up good money in order to change the world and help those too lazy to help themselves. And, finally, we won't have to make up stories about our associates doing pro bono work -- because they actually will be.

Of course, even better is that once the economy turns around and we collect all of our people back from Lawyers For The Dumb, or wherever else they're going to be working, those organizations that were short-sighted enough to take our people and save themselves a little money now will have no one left and will be forced to close their doors. What will they do over at Legal Aid when they realize that all of their lawyers are actually discarded law firm associates, who, after a week of fighting for the government's very last paper clip, will realize just how good life is at a law firm and will vow to come back to us the very first chance they get -- and there's no one left to work there? We displace the public interest lawyers, then we pull our guys back and leave them with nothing. It'll take years for them to rebuild all the lost expertise, all that institutional knowledge -- okay, it'll actually take a week and a half, since no one's ever doing anything over there anyway. But still, that's a week and a half that they're gone, vanquished, missing from the legal landscape as they ought to be.

Now excuse me while I go participate in a deposition regarding a class action lawsuit filed by fifty law students who claim we offered them a spot in our summer program, but, magically, we have no record of their existence.

2009-04-13T14:55:00.000-07:00

The New York Times wrote an article today about one of our competitor firms paying associates one-third of their salary to take a year off. Obviously inspiring some negative reactions from people who don't make close to a third of a big firm lawyer's pay but still have to show up at work all year to get the checks. At my firm, we've actually decided to take it one step further. We're paying associates double their normal salaries to leave for a year, because, frankly, in this economy, who needs 'em? Without associates, we can lay off every member of the staff, get rid of the cafeteria, and earn some money renting out our luxurious and well-appointed offices. In fact, we're saving so much money by sending our associates home that we can afford to pay our clients to switch firms.

There's no work for anyone here to do, but why should that stop us from spending money like it's still 2007? Without the expenses of a summer program, of $60 lunches, of health insurance (don't tell our furloughed associates, but we're secretly cutting their health plans -- since there'll be no one to here to answer the phones when they call to complain, we figure it'll be pretty hard to hold us accountable... especially since without health care, whoever's calling will probably be dead pretty soon anyway), we give ourselves the flexibility to stake out new ground in the recruiting game for when the economy does eventually come back to life.

And that means doing more than just paying our old summer associates $50K to delay their start dates a year. That's just a baby step. Sure, some people say it's crazy to pay people thousands of dollars not to work for you when they've never even really worked for you, may not be any good at the job, and you may not have work for them a year from now when they come calling. And, sure, some people say it's insane, in a world of at-will employment, in a world where thousands of competent law students graduate every year without a job at all, in a world where the work an associate does isn't even work you need someone with half a brain to do, in a world where the buyers surely have more leverage than the sellers, to basically throw away money just to hold the rights to some kids who put in thirteen weeks last summer and didn't vomit in a partner's lap, or stab a client to death, or whatever it would take not to get a full-time offer at the end.

But we say why not take it one step further and use this economic downturn to really kill our competitors and make it impossible for them to get things back up and running once things turn around. That's why we're not only paying our own incoming associates thousands of dollars not to show up -- we're paying any lawyer we can find $25,000 just for the promise they won't go to work for anyone else who isn't offering them a job. $25,000 and all you need to do is exactly what you've already been doing -- not get a job at a law firm. In fact, we're extending the offer not just to lawyers, but aspiring lawyers too. If you're thinking about going to law school, and even have the possibility of ever being someone one of our competitors could hire to take business from us, we'll give you $25,000 to go become a banker instead. Or a teacher. Or a bus driver. Whatever you like, we don't care. All you owe us is a kidney. No, not really a kidney. In most cases. Check the fine print. We figure this way, we'll have cornered the market on potential employees once things turn around. We'll have the pick of the litter, and our competitors won't have anyone at all. Can't get back in the game without associates. It's not as if partners are able to make copies or proofread lease agreements, so, really, they're going to be screwed.

That's our recession plan over here. Double salary for associates, $25K for anyone else who wants it, paying our clients to go elsewhere... and we're still somehow raking in more money than when we were throwing it away on chocolate fountains and wine tastings. It sort of makes you wonder -- how much profit must we have been making in the good times that this plan makes any business sense at all? How much must our clients have been paying for virtually nothing? How awesome must it be to be someone like me? You know how I'm coping with the recession? I sold some used books on eBay, and sold my daughter into slavery. Those two simple transactions, and I'm back in the black. Easy.

2008-03-01T18:06:00.000-08:00

Hey, out of character for a minute here, I kind of want to respond to some of the comments on the last few posts (even though I know I probably shouldn't). I'm as frustrated as you are that I don't post more often. I'm not trying to screw around with my readers, obviously if people hadn't been reading this, I wouldn't have had the awesome opportunity to write the book, and I'd still be flailing around looking for something to hit the way Anonymous Lawyer somehow managed to. So I have nothing but appreciation for anyone who takes the time to read what I'm writing, and I'm humbled and flattered that there are people actually complaining there isn't more of it. (Although maybe humbled and flattered aren't always the first things I feel when I read some of the comments...)

I wish I had more to say as this guy right now, and I keep hoping I can force it, and throw posts up there hoping it'll spur me to get back into the groove and hit some well for this character that I haven't yet explored. Obviously the biggest part of it is that I'm not working at a law firm, and so I'm not being hit with the ideas and inspiration I'd get if I were really living in Anonymous Lawyer's world. That's not an excuse, it's just an explanation. There will be more that I have to say as this guy, I'm sure of it, and hopefully some of you will enjoy reading it. It just hasn't been there while I've been working on some other writing projects, and it's been long enough thinking in this character's voice that maybe I've needed a bit of a break from it.

This is all just to say: I'm trying. And hopefully when Anonymous Lawyer does return regularly, it'll strike a chord the same way it did when I started, or, I don't know, a different and better chord. That's a terribly inarticulate thought. I'm sorry.

This is not some way to trick anyone into coming back here. There's no ads on here, I don't get any money when you click. But I can't give you a date when there'll be regularly updated consistent new content on here, because I don't know. I do think it'll be sooner rather than later. Because it would be monstrously stupid for me to lose the audience I've built, and the good will of that audience. And the threat of losing the audience should probably be enough to kick the inspiration back into full gear. Or perhaps this post can give me a clean slate to start up again without worrying I've already squandered whatever momentum was here before.

Thanks for reading, honestly. It's very rewarding to have created something people read, even if I torture myself for not being able to keep it going forever.

--jeremy

2008-02-01T11:23:00.000-08:00

I've missed you.

But my absence was unavoidable. Part of the settlement.

The head of the firm discovered the blog -- more specifically, an associate, who obviously didn't have nearly enough work to do or he wouldn't have had time to be dicking around on the Internet, thought he could get some brownie points by passing it along -- and got the partnership to force me out because of it.

We negotiated a buyout, and I agreed to stop blogging for sixty days.

Today is my first day at a new firm, less prestigious than my old one, with stupider associates who come from less highly-ranked schools and who scored significantly lower on the LSAT.

Even the paralegals smell worse here.

I'm grateful to them for giving me the opportunity to start fresh, but, really, what's the point? I suppose this is how John Kerry must feel, or Joe Biden, or Bob Dole, or anyone else who's been on one track and suddenly finds himself having lost a battle and sees nothing ahead but more of the same. I'm sure Senate life is one thing when you feel like you can be President one day, but quite another when you know that chance has passed you by.

I don't mean to compare myself to a senator. My work has touched the lives of far more people, and usually in significantly more devastating ways. But I think my point holds true. There's a stretch of any intelligent person's career when you're striving for something. You have to be, or you couldn't possibly bring yourself to go to work every morning. The ambition has to be there, it has to drive you forward, or else I don't know how anything could ever get done. My biggest triumphs have been driven by ambition. The briefs I stayed up all night to write, as an associate. The clients I spent weeks wooing, as a partner. The underlings I pushed to give me their best, regardless of the consequences.

You can't create fear in others without having that driving force inside of you. If you're just doing it for the paycheck, you can't ever quite summon yourself to care enough to torture people below you. The mistreatment has always come from something greater than the looks on their faces when they find out they have to cancel a vacation. It's always been motivated by something more than just wanting to see them suffer. It's about making a name for yourself. Getting to the top. Proving to yourself and to the world that you matter. That you're not just another lawyer. Or another suburban mom or dad, regardless of profession, with a job and a nice house and a stagnant life.

So many people just go to work, come home, withhold love from their spouses and kids, and then do it all over again the next day. An "exciting weekend" involves a trip to the mall, or burying your wife up to her neck in sand at the beach, or telling the nanny she can go to the doctor and you'll babysit your kids for a couple of hours. And then maybe a vacation every five or six years to really spice things up. But that's never the life I wanted. I wanted more than that. I wanted power. Not necessarily the power to control others, although that's always fun, but the power to control my own destiny. To know that I was special. To know that I was different. To know that there was nothing I couldn't achieve.

And for a while, my life was just as I planned. There WAS nothing I couldn't achieve. Partnership. A seat on the executive board. Speaking slots at top legal conferences. Students begging me for interviews. I had it all planned out: run the firm by age 50, then turn my head toward politics, spend a few years as Attorney General, and then take a consulting job in the private sector so I could turn my three houses into twelve.

But all it takes is one fall from grace for the vision to change completely. I've always said, to my kids and to anyone who'll listen, that the key to happiness is fooling yourself into thinking that what you do matters. But once you go from the top of a prestigious law firm, with a view of the ocean and an entire team of recent immigrant custodial workers who think it's perfectly normal for the men in suits to throw food at them and laugh, to a place like this, with a view of a warehouse out my window, three partners to a secretary, and a vending machine instead of a cafeteria... well, the illusion is over. I'm nobody. I'm just one of a million people exactly like me, doing the same work, for the same Fortune 1000 companies, and earning the same seven-figure salary. I'm not that special.

And it hurts. It hurts to know that it's probably all downhill from here. I can't recreate the glory, I can't repeat the miracle that was my previous existence. I lucked into my life -- it wasn't all luck, of course, but I'd be a fool not to admit that luck played a part in about 4% of it -- and the odds of hitting the jackpot twice... well, it's not going to happen. I've reached my peak, and that hunger is gone. Partly satisfied by my former heights, but partly just beaten into submission.

So now what? Do I fake the rage and the passion to hurl office supplies at associates? Do I pretend to be someone I'm not, just to keep up appearances? Or do I settle into this life, show up late and leave early, act distant but cordial to my colleagues, and do mediocre work that will let me stay here for the foreseeable future but leave me unfulfilled and empty inside? Or do I use all of this as a challenge? As a challenge to be even better than before, despite the almost-certain lack of positive outcomes that will result. As a challenge to make those under me work for their future in a way I never really had to work for mine. As a challenge to find power where none really exists, and exert this imaginary power over anyone foolish enough to believe it's there. As a challenge to be a better man than ever before, as measured by the amount of tears other will shed in my presence.

I don't know. I don't know if I still have it in me to look quite as critically on those around me and make them feel so bad about themselves. I suppose I will have to see how it goes.

2007-11-20T17:57:00.000-08:00

I've been burning to post these past couple of weeks, but the secretary who usually transcribes my words (from my state-of-the-art personal voice recording device to the computer) has been on strike, along with the rest of the support staff at the firm. It's been a frustrating situation, for sure. It's long been our practice at the firm to pay secretaries only for the time they spend performing certain tasks for us: answering the phone, making photocopies, sharpening our pencils, cutting our meat. As a matter of philosophy, we've felt it unnecessary to pay them for being idle, when they can be sitting at their desks doing other income-producing work if they like. (One secretary, for instance, earns almost $400 a year selling magazine subscriptions to recruiting candidates she pressures into buying while they wait for her boss to be ready for their interviews.) So, just like attorneys, they're required to clock every minute of their time, and we determine, at the end of every two-week period, how much time they've spent on productive work, and therefore how much they should get paid.

And now they've gotten greedy.

We've always maintained, as a matter of philosophy, that we can only pay for the kind of work that we're absolutely certain provides value, because otherwise there is room left for abuse. The secretaries are insisting that we pay them for the time they spend on the Internet. And since we're not yet able to distinguish productive Internet time from wasteful and unproductive Internet time, we've maintained that time spent on the computer counts as unproductive time and we will not pay for it. Three weeks ago, they decided they cared enough about this issue that they all banded together and struck. In response, we assigned our associates to do double duty, and have dug in our heels. We can afford a long strike more than they can, and, as a matter of philosophy, we refuse to cave in to their ridiculous demands.

After all, who hasn't passed by a secretary and seen her on MySpace? Or playing solitaire? Or online shopping? Why should we pay them for that? They can be using eBay to sell their possessions, or Craigslist to make extra money on the side for what the young people are calling "casual encounters." It's not our duty to double-pay them. Just like we can't double-bill our clients except in certain circumstances.

As more and more of them lose their homes, I feel confident they will come to their senses and return to work. In the meantime, although it's a strain on our associates, they're certainly paid well enough to handle it, and it's not like us partners aren't feeling the strain as well. Many of us have started working part of the day from home, putting our spouses to work as support staff. Of course, many of our spouses are less than entirely competent. So we're definitely feeling the brunt of this. When the Internet is proven to actually add value to the business process, perhaps we will consider paying the secretaries for their time spent using it, if we're feeling generous and can make up for it by trimming their health insurance benefits. But for now, we fight the good fight, and hope for a just and proper outcome.

2007-11-01T10:46:00.000-07:00

Some of my associates are just arriving after last night's firm-wide Halloween party. As it got late, I told a few of them they didn't have to come in until 11 this morning. That's the 'treat'. The 'trick' is that it's going to count as a vacation day. Of course, the disappointment is that they probably won't even notice they've lost a day of vacation, since anyone who uses more than 30% of their days gets flagged in the system and is automatically assigned extra work to prevent any more abuses of our generous vacation policy.

The Halloween party is a relatively new tradition at the firm. For a number of years, we all dressed up and visited a local hospital, cheering up the patients with promises of potential malpractice suits against their doctors. But four years ago, in a bizarre coincidence, the majority of us dressed up as the Grim Reaper and the hospital had to ask us to leave. Fortunately not before we got through the pediatrics ward and the surgical recovery room.

I pulled out the Grim Reaper costume again yesterday. Not so much for the Halloween party at the firm, but because I promised my wife I'd visit her great-uncle in hospice care before heading to the office, and I thought he'd get a kick out of it.

The firm party went as well as could be expected. The annual trick-or-treating event involved the associates coming to each of the partners' offices to receive either a piece of candy (provided by our secretaries) or a bit of document review due by midnight. Some of the secretaries unfortunately ignored the directive to bring candy into work and we had to use paper clips as a proxy in place of chocolate. I forced my associates to eat the paper clips. Luckily, only three of them choked.

A few associates asked if they could leave early to go trick-or-treating with their kids. It amazes me that people still ask to leave early. Even the sign I insisted we post in the attorney lounge ("No, You May Not Leave Early, For Any Reason, Ever!") doesn't seem to deter them from marching into my office, adorable picture of a toddler wearing an Italian suit ("He's dressed up as YOU for Halloween!"), offering to work late nights and weekends (as if they won't be here anyway), begging to get off work just a few hours earlier than usual, maybe 6:30, 7:00, 7:30, anything to be able to help their kids steal food from the neighbors. "It's his first Halloween!" He won't even remember it. "My wife is eight and a half months pregnant and can't take the kids out by herself!" Maybe you should have thought of that when you got married. "She loves candy!" Well, you shouldn't be encouraging it. We did that with Anonymous Daughter and look where it got us. 12 years old, a hundred and sixty pounds, and a borderline case of juvenile diabetes. My wife has no self-control. We can't give her cupcakes whenever she asks for them. We can't dip her vegetables in sugar. No matter what these idiotic cookbooks tell us.

My wife bought that ridiculous Jessica Seinfeld cookbook about hiding vegetables in brownies, cookies, and ice cream sandwiches. I think she feels an affinity toward Jessica Seinfeld as a similarly situated accomplishment-free wife of a successful genius. Not that my wife ever cooks. But she gave the book to our housekeeper and told her to make some of the recipes. Not for the kids, but for her. My wife hates vegetables, she always has. Anonymous Son loves them. Cauliflower, brussels sprouts, lima beans, he'll eat anything. My wife eats chicken nuggets and Chef Boyardee Spaghetti-O's. So now the housekeeper has to sneak swiss chard into the chicken nuggets and endive into the Spaghetti-O's or my wife says she'll fire her. It's all because the doctor told her she wasn't getting enough Vitamin A.

Anonymous Daughter dressed up as a pumpkin for Halloween. Anonymous Son dressed up as Fred Thompson. My wife paraded them around the neighborhood for 15 minutes, they got three bags full of candy, and then gorged themselves until they both threw up. Luckily, I missed it all and didn't get home until they were fast asleep. I'll see them during the weekend sometime, ask them how it went, see how their October was, catch up over a quick breakfast before heading to the office. They're both late with their invoices for the October allowance, so at least that'll save me the 10% I penalize them for tardy filing.

2007-10-23T14:03:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the long delay between posts. I was trying to paper-train this new dog Ellen DeGeneres gave me. And then the media got involved, took the dog away, my kids were in tears, it's been a rough past few weeks. Ellen's dog controversy makes sense to me. I side with the animal shelter. You can't just give important things away without making sure the recipients meet certain standards. It's the same way with assignments. Associates can't give assignments to their colleagues without getting permission first. Every associate brings a certain set of liabilities to the table, and when I assign someone a project, there's a reason. It's not like all of the associates are interchangeable parts who could all do the monkey-work we give them. It's not like all the associate assignments are garbage that any moron could do if only they put in enough mindless hours staring into their computer screens.

Oh, wait, no, I'm getting assignments mixed up with something else. Suits. They can't trade suits because not everyone is the same size, and some associates are men and some are women and some are neither. So we can't have them trading clothing without permission. But assignments? Who cares, it's all just to keep them busy and ratchet up the client bills, so if someone wants to take someone else's task, I don't care as long as it gets done. And if someone wants to take everyone else's task, great, SuperAssociate can do all the work and still make the same salary and get the same bonus as everyone else, and still have no idea whether or not he's going to make partner until it's too late and he's poured his entire soul into this place.

I overheard two associates talking about how they feel like they have to put their personalities in a box when they come to work every morning. I challenge that on two counts. One, it's a waste of boxes. We need boxes for documents. There will never be enough boxes. The number of documents associates need to sort through is infinite. We need an infinite number of boxes to hold them. Despite the "computer age," everything still goes in boxes. Even computers come in boxes. Two, they should not be coming to work "every morning." There should be nights they never leave. So there should be mornings they are already here and thus do not need to arrive. If there are associates coming to work every morning and leaving every night, we need to give them more assignments, or demand more from the assignments they do have.

The only reason I have time to post today is because a deal I've been working on for the past six and a half years just fell through. A senior associate who's been with the case since the start, and has put almost twenty thousand hours on it, started crying. "So my entire time at the firm has been for nothing, it's a waste," he said. Crybaby. It's not a waste. The client still paid. It's not like anything monumental was going to happen in this guy's life once the deal closed. For him it shouldn't matter. It's a problem when associates get too invested in the work. They're drones. If they care whether or not the deal closes, they know too much. I don't like to even tell my associates the big picture. They don't need to know what they're working toward. Most of them would quit if they knew the secrets our clients have, if they knew the ends we were the means to help our clients achieve. We cash checks from some evil people. But I want to protect my associates. They don't need to know the truth. Partners are the only ones who need to know, because we make enough money that we can drown the truth in expensive luxury goods. It's amazing how much you can forget when you spend your six hour annual vacation on your yacht. It's amazing how much you can forget when you buy black-market sleeping pills and develop a crippling dependency.

My daughter had a birthday last week. I forgot. My wife thought it would be fun to see how long it would take me to remember. It took four days. I walked in on her birthday sleepover party and it still didn't hit me. I threw down my briefcase on top of the half-eaten birthday cake, walked upstairs, swatted aside the balloons, shoved the wrapping paper down in the trash can (or maybe I just told our housekeeper to do it, I can't remember), and collapsed on the fold-out couch (my wife and I have been sleeping separately for a while now), without ever realizing. It was only when I saw she updated her Facebook profile with pictures from the party that I realized what I'd missed. So I put a message on her Wall and hopefully that'll take care of it. I'm going to text her later just to see if she'd logged in yet to read it.

2007-09-20T21:08:00.001-07:00

Today was our first annual Volunteer Day at the firm, orchestrated by the new Outreach Committee, organized as part of a settlement after a few of our neighbors sued us for some bogus charges they couldn't prove. But instead of dragging it out and fighting them in court, we decided to pay a little bit of money and commit to being a "nicer corporate citizen" and "giving back" to the community. The term "giving back" doesn't make any sense to me. They didn't give us anything to begin with. So there's no "giving back." It's just "giving." And when you've worked hard enough to charge $700/hour for your services, it doesn't feel very good to just "give" hours away.

I don't understand successful people doing things for free. If someone offers you a free pair of shoes, you wouldn't take it. You would think something's wrong with the shoes, that if they were any good they would cost money, that someone's trying to pull a fast one on you. It's the same way with people's time. Someone offers me something for free, I have no choice but to assume it has no value. Someone says they'll help me for free, they must not be very good at what they're offering to help me do. I wouldn't send a child to a free school, I wouldn't rely on the free police to protect my family, and I certainly wouldn't want someone building a house for me if they weren't good enough at it that they could charge some money.

Nevertheless, as part of the settlement we agreed to spend a day helping some organization build a house for poor people. As if building them a house will really solve the underlying problem of why they're poor. Anyway, we assigned each partner 3 associates, and we took our associates down to the construction site and spent the day supervising as they did the work. It was a ridiculous waste of my time to have to sit in a chair, answering e-mails on my BlackBerry, while my three associates carried wood and hammered some stuff into the ground. The chair they set up for me wasn't very comfortable, and they ran out of water bottles before lunch.

I had a side bet with one of the other partners that I could get my associates to do more work than he could, but my associates were lazy and I lost. Even the threat of weekend work didn't get them moving any faster. Toward the end of the day I realized a loophole in my side bet, and so I had my associates undo some of the work my colleague's associates did, unscrewing some bolts and knocking over some support beams, but my associates weren't even skilled enough to undo enough work to put us into the lead. The organizers were a little confused about why they were taking things apart that they should have been putting together, but I slipped one of them a $20 bill and she kept quiet.

Luckily, we were all back in the office by 6:00, so everyone was able to work a half-day anyway. It's not like clients put all their problems on hold just because we want to waste a day helping the community. It'll take two days just to catch up on the missed phone calls.

2007-09-05T17:45:00.000-07:00

I just sent an e-mail to the firm's associates regarding the recent removal of the water cooler from the 17th floor. I haven't been a member of the water committee since '96, but since I'm seen as one of the more approachable and reasonable partners here, they asked if I would send the note:

"Recently there has been an outcry regarding the removal of the water cooler from the 17th floor. The firm removed the water cooler because it appeared to be a drain on productivity. Despite rumors to the contrary, this decision was unrelated to the memo sent out during the April heat wave regarding excessive water consumption leading to unnecessary trips to the bathroom, costing the firm approximately 400 potentially billable hours per month. We have been pleased with the response to the Water Memo and want to thank those associates who have taken it to heart and kept their personal hydration to a minimum.

"Instead, the water cooler was removed because of a number of associates who were often seen congregating in the water cooler area, in violation of the October '01 memo regarding associate congregation in the wake of the September 11th attacks. We are still on high alert, and therefore need to ask that associates continue not to congregate in the hallways. In these dangerous times, it is unfortunately a security risk.

"Nevertheless, the management committee has read your e-mail conversations and listened to your personal phone calls, and has been convinced to reconsider. Therefore, effective September 30, it is our intent to restore the water cooler to the 17th floor. In doing so, we hope to end the disturbances and provide our clients with lawyers who can devote 100 percent of their time and effort to the critical issues our clients face.

"We have little control over what you choose to believe about the water cooler, and why we removed it. But continuing to withhold water from the 17th floor would be an unwanted and unfair distraction. These are serious times of war and of conflict -- times that deserve everyone's full attention. Thank you."

Will there be a water cooler on September 30th? Of course not. Will anyone complain? Maybe. Will we care? Not really. It's been our "intent" to give the assistants health care since 1986, but that's not happening either. Short attention spans. Just like with the clients. Write up a memo, people forget about it, and when it doesn't happen, no one bats an eyelash, taps a foot, or even swipes a hand under the stall.

2007-08-28T16:55:00.000-07:00

I was in the restroom today and I saw an associate in the stall next to me wiggle his fingers under the partition between stalls. I ignored it, like I do whenever associates do anything besides work. He did it again. I thought maybe he was holding his hand out for an assignment, thinking perhaps I'd brought one with me to the bathroom. It turns out I had. I took the papers from my pocket and put them in his wiggling fingers. Then his foot crept under the stall and rubbed against mine. He wanted more. So I reached into my other pocket and pulled out a credit agreement. I scrawled at the top, "Proofread this," and slipped it under the partition. He took it. Forty minutes later, the completed assignment and proofread credit agreement arrived on my desk. Well done. Associates bold enough to ask for assignments in the bathroom are acceptable in my book.

But not everyone sees it that way. See, this associate was already working for another partner. And it's not entirely within the normal protocol for an associate committed to one partner to be looking to engage with other partners, especially in the bathroom. And especially from a completely different practice group. There are rumors he's done this before. There are a number of different bathrooms in the office designated as "work bathrooms," where there are outlets in each stall for laptop computers, fully functioning wireless, a printer, and a secretary on duty at all times. While these bathrooms function as normal bathrooms throughout the day, everyone is aware that work does go on there, especially in the corner stall. So an especially eager associate can cruise these bathrooms throughout the day and, if he's lucky, find an extra assignment or two. These may not be the best assignments the firm has to offer, but they allow some exposure to new partners and perhaps enable connections that will help the associates down the line. Most associates don't talk about their secret bathroom rendezvous. Somehow the bathroom assignments are considered dirty, illegitimate, cheating. And some associates, over time, get a reputation.

What ends up complicating matters is that most associates don't like it when one of their own is begging too hard for these bathroom opportunities. They don't like to see someone stand out, meet new partners, and put themselves in a position to move ahead. So once an associate gets a reputation for cruising the bathrooms, he puts himself at risk for vigilante justice. Associates who aren't into the bathroom scene corner their colleagues, rough them up a little bit, steal their copies of the tax code. It can be an ugly scene. But it's not my job to police the associates. In a way, I like to see associates take matters into their own hands. And I like that it means that associates who want the bathroom assignments know they're taking a risk, but they do it anyway. Their impulse to do as much work as they can, their impulse to impress as many partners as possible, their raw biological impulses are so strong that they're willing to put their bodies (and tax codes) at risk for it. That's the kind of dedication I like to see. The kind of commitment that makes me proud to work at a place like this, and proud to see an associate's fingers wiggling under the bathroom partition and give him exactly what he deserves. To put that thick, hot-off-the-printer lease agreement right in his hands. Makes me proud to be a lawyer.

2007-08-20T12:54:00.000-07:00

An associate invited me to his wedding this past weekend. I assume he was hoping that actually being at the wedding would make me more willing to give him a half-day off for his honeymoon, but no such luck. I made up for it by giving him a fairly substantial gift certificate to the firm cafeteria as a wedding present. I don't think I've seen his wife come by the office too often to join him for a quick dinner down there, so hopefully this will give them the opportunity to get a little more time together. I felt uncomfortable the whole time I was there. It bothers me that this associate has friends, and family that's still speaking to him. It means we're not working him hard enough. I fear I've failed him. I'll have to work harder at getting him some time-consuming assignments this next quarter. Part of me felt like I didn't need to give him a gift at all. After all, the cost of the firm health insurance his wife will now qualify for dwarfs the gift I gave him. Isn't health insurance the best present anyone can receive anyway?

I looked at his wedding website before I went to the affair, so I could remember his name and what he looked like. I laughed when I scrolled through his wedding registry. When does he think he'll have time to use a serving plate or a toothbrush holder? He should be brushing his teeth at work. If he only brushes his teeth when he's at home, they'll all fall out. No one at the firm is home often enough to restrict his dental care to the bathroom in his house. And when will he ever be home for a dinner party where he'll need service for 8? I was tempted to give him 7 of those 8 plates, 7 forks, 7 knives, to symbolize those dinner parties he's sure to have where everyone shows up but him, still stuck at the office working. That's the life he has to look forward to. Dinner parties he doesn't get to attend.

In between salad and the main course I e-mailed him an assignment from my BlackBerry, hoping he'd ignore it, hoping he'd give me reason to put him on probation, deny him his bonus. But sure enough, I saw him sneak out for a few minutes during the first dance, and fifteen minutes later I had an e-mail back from him. I looked out at him, cutting the wedding cake, and gave him a wink. Job well done. Maybe he's a keeper. Or at least until he has kids.

2007-08-01T22:07:00.000-07:00

I've been asked by multiple readers to post about the Michael Vick dogfighting situation. And I've been reluctant to do so thus far because Vick is actually one of my clients. I've strayed from my usual practice and taken his case pro bono because I want to make a difference in the world, and stand up for people like Vick, people who hold other people (and animals) accountable for their actions and discipline them appropriately when they don't meet the standard. We've become too weak in this country, too tolerant of laziness, of people (and animals) who don't work hard, who don't have the will to compete, who don't constantly try to better themselves. Vick merely held the dogs accountable for their performances. I aspire to do the same with associates, but "political correctness" gets in the way. Those dogs signed up for the fights, they signed consent forms, they knew the risks. Or at least that's my argument. We have paw prints.

Vick has been a victim of the same kinds of reactions we received when our underground associate-fighting ring was exposed by a rejected summer associate. It used to be the highlight of my Thursday nights. Take two young associates, put them in a ring, give them each a stainless steel letter opener, and let them battle for who would get to work all weekend for the meanest partner at the firm. (Obviously that was the prize for the winner, not the loser. Face time is important, above just about anything else.) And, yes, sometimes we got carried away. Perhaps leaving the loser in the middle of the woods to fend for himself, with only a copy of the bankruptcy code to protect him, was a bit of an overreaction. But we did count those hours as billable, so I think it all ended up fair for all sides.

See, I do a lot of pro bono work. It's not just Vick. That basketball referee who was betting on the games he officiated, he's a client too. I don't see the conflict of interest. We advise clients all the time on all sorts of matters that ultimately affect how much we get paid. We tell clients not to settle, regardless of whether it's in their interest to do so, if we know we'll receive more money merely by dragging the case out for fifteen more years until they finally do end up settling, for half the money they could have gotten before, and with legal costs that eat up most of the settlement anyway.

2007-07-18T17:38:00.000-07:00

A reader pointed me to a Slate article about one of our competitor firms and its program, "Chow For Charity." Under the program, if a lawyer takes a summer associate for a $15 lunch instead of a $60 one, the $45 difference gets donated to Legal Aid. The Slate piece takes the attitude that it's absurd for the firm to have the attitude that a $15 lunch is a sacrifice, and pathetic for the firm to trumpet a program that will end up donating practically nothing to charity, as compared to the profits the firm makes.

Obviously, I have a somewhat different take on the whole thing. First, I'm sick and tired of law firms feeling like we have to apologize for what we do and the money we make. No one forces our clients to choose us, and if we were charging more money than the market could bear we would go bankrupt. There's no shame in being good at what you do, and there's certainly no shame in getting paid for it. Donating our money to Legal Aid organizations just perpetuates the stigma that's unfairly been attached to making money. Law students have been brainwashed into viewing their ultimate employment decision as an either/or choice between money/evil/capitalism and poverty/goodness/sacrifice. Having summer associates make a "sacrifice" at their evil law firm jobs only adds to the false guilt the Public Interest Mafia imposes on them.

Every school has these people, the "good" law students who would never think of "selling out" and working for a firm. And who make everyone who just wants to pay off their loans and live a comfortable life in a gated suburban community feel like they're subhuman. When in reality, 90% of the public interest-minded students end up picking a firm anyway, and the other 10% can't get hired. Doing public interest work isn't a "choice" that any rational law student makes, it's the last resort, the place they go when a firm won't hire them.

Or they're irrational. Because "public interest" is no less "evil" than we are, they just have a better propaganda machine. We put our propaganda money into $60 lunches instead.

But when a firm announces they're letting students make this "sacrifice" and donate money to the enemy, it just legitimizes their claim that they're "better" than we are. And it sickens me. $60 lunches are not something we should be ashamed of. They're a bonus. A selling point. Something we should stand up and cheer, something we should be proud of. We can afford $60 lunches for our useless summer associates, who get paid absurd amounts of money in the first place, for doing busy-work and going to parties. It's lavish and wasteful and decadent... and I'm proud of it because it shows the world we are good at what we do and we have money to burn. But we've earned it. And screw whoever wants to try and take away the money we've rightfully earned and give it to the people who spend all their energy trying to bring us down and make us feel guilty for the lives we lead.

I'm starting a new program here. For every dollar someone goes over the $60 lunch limit, we take that money out of our yearly charitable contribution fund. It's called "Eat The Poor." See how they like that one. We can fight fire with fire here. I won't lie down for Legal Aid. Not in this lifetime.

2007-06-25T13:14:00.000-07:00

I received an e-mail asking me to comment on age discrimination in law firm hiring:

"A few weeks ago, there was a terrible article in the National Law Journal about how 'older' or second-career lawyers most often end up as solos, prompted by some NALP statistics about the paucity of grads 36 and older in BigLaw. The article went on to say ... that nontrads don’t want to work hard and that they don’t like taking orders from people younger than them, so they don’t seek jobs in BigLaw. ... Right. I quit a job I was excellent at, went into debt, spent three years in law school, because I don’t want to work hard. Huh?"

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. You want to blame someone for this? Blame your law school for accepting you. No one forced you into this game. No one pretended you would be employable. And don't think law is the only industry where this is an issue. Ask a 40-year-old TV writer. If you can find one. Or a 40-year-old exotic dancer. Don't see too many of those either, at least not at the summer associate strip club events. Maybe we just pick our venue carefully, but I've got to believe there's some pretty big age discrimination going on there too.

And it makes sense for largely the same reasons. No wants to see a 40-year-old doing document review, or taking off their clothes. It's just the way the world works.

2007-06-15T23:50:00.000-07:00

I'm feeling a little guilty today. Not too guilty, but a little bit. It's not really my fault, but an associate died in a train mishap this afternoon. She was trying to make it back to the office with a box of documents we sent her across town to pick up, and she drove through the railroad crossing right as the bar was coming down, and got plowed down by a train. The other part of the tragedy is that one of our partners was on that train, heading down for a court date in another city, and ended up delayed for an hour while they dealt with the deceased associate and her car. So both clients are upset, and I'm feeling the brunt of it.

The reason I'm feeling guilty at all is that I was the one who told the associate to hurry back to the office. I may have yelled. I didn't tell her to get hit by a train. I may have told her to exceed the speed limit. I may have told her, when she called from a red light, that this was more important than traffic signals and that the firm would reimburse her if she got a ticket. I did not mention railroad crossings specifically, but I did tell her that if she got stuck at a drawbridge, she should just swim the documents across if it would save her time. But I didn't mention railroad crossings specifically, so I'm not feeling specifically accountable.

But, frankly, even if I had mentioned railroad crossings specifically (and, like I said, I'm almost entirely positive that I didn't, or if I did then I was probably kidding and she should have known that), it's her fault for needing to rush at all. We sent her to the document warehouse last Thursday with plenty of time. No one told her she needed to sleep a full night's sleep every other night. That was a decision she made on her own, and it cost her valuable time. Time she could have spent waiting for the train to cross, if she hadn't wasted that time earlier. Time she would have had to wait for the train to cross, if she hadn't attended to other, more "important" needs. She knew there would be a time crunch at the end. She chose to use her time in a way that ended up proving unwise.

And we're paying her husband for the hours she spent in the document warehouse, even though she never had a chance to enter them into the billing system, so how guilty can we really feel?

2007-06-05T07:56:00.000-07:00

I'm very excited for this afternoon. We've set up our first-ever summer associate "afternoon movie break" to go see "Knocked Up." In my e-mail to the summers, I set it up as a cautionary tale of what can happen if any of them have sex. A career is too important to risk. They should neither want to be the girl who has to take a week off for maternity leave in order to give birth and interview nannies, or the guy who's going to have to start feeling pressure to leave the office before it gets too late in order to have a quick glimpse of his newborn on the way to sleep. It ruins the forward momentum. It makes them soft. And any chance we get to impart that message in a humorous way makes it more likely it'll stick. Hence, the movie trip.

So we've rented out a theater, and I had the recruiters track down an artisanal popcorn supplier from the midwest. He grows his own corn, shucks it himself, and then flavors it using only the highest-quality butter and cheddar cheese from his own dairy farm. We've flown him in, along with one of his cows, and we'll set them up in the back of the theater to provide the refreshments. I can't stand ordinary movie popcorn. It always tastes a little stale to me. I didn't want to risk it. I want this to be an event they'll remember when they're deciding whether or not to take their offers.

We also paid one of the co-stars of the movie (contractually I'm not allowed to say which one) to come and sign autographs, and do a question-and-answer session after the film. And we'll be giving out the actual placenta used in the movie to one of the lucky summer associates (it's going to whichever summer billed the most hours last week). So it's a whole big movie extravaganza. Much more memorable than merely buying tickets and having the summers sit with all the riffraff and watch the movie like a homeless person, 2:00 in the afternoon on a Tuesday, in a theater filled with unemployed drunks. We've hired a security detail to make sure no unemployed drunks get into our screening.

I'm excited to see the film. I haven't seen a movie since Bridge to Terabithia with Anonymous Son. Same reason why I showed it to the summer associates a couple of weeks ago when they started. Isn't just a movie for lawyers. I wanted to show him that even if your real life is boring, and your best friend dies, you can make up a fantasy world and live there instead.

2007-05-31T17:23:00.000-07:00

We lost another associate today. Apparently he's annoyed that I ran him over with my car last month. I was late to a deposition. He was in my way. I had to get out of the parking garage as quickly as I could. It's not that I didn't see him. I just didn't think the firm needed him as much as it needed me to be at that deposition, and even if he'd be on medical leave for a few weeks, he wasn't getting much done anyway and me being there a few minutes earlier was going to end up being much more beneficial to the firm. I did what they taught me to do in my law and economics class too many years ago. I did a cost-benefit analysis, a quick calculation, spur of the moment, in my head, and decided it made sense to hit the gas instead of the brake and deal with the consequences later.

And it turned out the consequences were even better because he's leaving. He wasn't even good enough to hear from headhunters, apparently he did it all himself, found some website that tries to place lawyers in new jobs. I hate the Internet. It's made it all too easy. If this guy is unhappy, he should have had to do what we had to do years ago: walk the streets, knock on doors, and hustle. You wanted a new job before the Internet, you had to do some real work. It wasn't as easy as looking at some job listings and clicking a few buttons and sending your resume. You had to sneak around, put in some real effort.

Now, for the subset of people good enough to be who everyone wants, graduates from top schools, employees at top firms, escaping is just too easy. We coddle them. Sites like this one coddle these people. They have a database of jobs that aren't even just sweatshop jobs like the ones here. They have in-house jobs, hedge fund jobs, all sorts of things most lawyers here would kill for, but just don't know how to find. We benefit when they don't know how to find these jobs. We benefit when it's too hard for them to leave. They're stuck here, as our indentured servants, forever. Or at least until they don't make partner and have to leave out of embarrassment. But if they're shown a light at the end of the tunnel, if they're shown that there are other things out there, if they're shown that they don't really have to be here, and that changing jobs doesn't have to be some huge upheaval involving months of financial insecurity, then we're screwed. And I worry about our future.

On the other hand, it gives unhappy lawyers no right to complain. You don't like your job? Go away. Go click on Lateral Link or wherever and look at the job listings. Get tempted. Sign up, shoot a resume out, leave us. You can't hack it here, we don't want you. You're not man (or woman) enough to stick it out until you have a heart attack at your desk, we don't want you. Take the easy way out. I'll find you. I'll run you over. I have liability insurance, that's what it's for.

2007-05-22T22:21:00.000-07:00

Our new crop of summers started yesterday. I added a couple of recent movie clips to my orientation speech. Thank You For Smoking, to show it's okay to defend people who, at first glance, seem to be doing bad things. Bridge to Terabithia, to show the summer associates that sometimes even when life seems dreadful, you can always invent a fantasy world where you get to go home sometimes and see your family. Borat, to illustrate what we have to go through whenever we deal with attorneys overseas. Friends With Money, to remind the summer associates they'll be rich if they stay here. And, finally, Lady in the Water, to put them to sleep.

I just got back from the paintball event. Partners versus summers. I thought it was a good way to start off the season. Let us shoot them before we even really know them. This way they're still all nameless, faceless enemies and we could really get into it without feeling too much sympathy. The partners won, obviously. The summers were too scared to shoot. Who'd shoot a hiring partner on his second day? Only one of the summers had the nerve. And he won't be getting an offer. Ruined my suit. (We made everyone wear business attire just to make it more fun.)

2007-05-06T13:10:00.000-07:00

Roger Clemens reminds me what's right about the world. In case you missed it, this afternoon he announced that he's signed with the Yankees. Most players sign with teams during the offseason, go to spring training, and then try and play the whole season. Not Roger. Roger's better than that. And a terrific demonstration of why people who are better than everyone else should get to play by different rules. If Randy Wolf had told the Dodgers he wanted to wait until May to decide who he wanted to play for, they would have said, "Okay, Randy, that's fine, but we can't wait for you. We probably won't have a spot for you, or the budget flexibility to sign you at top dollar." That's because Randy is merely a run-of-the-mill major league starting pitcher. He's good, but he's no Clemens. Clemens, on the other hand, gets to wait until the entire Yankees rotation is on the disabled list, and they're desperate for pitching help. And then he can swoop right in and volunteer to help them out, in exchange for just a couple dozen million dollars.

I'm not intending any sarcasm here. I applaud Clemens. I applaud him for being able to tailor the system to his needs, and I celebrate the ability of the free market to adjust to a player like Clemens, who only wants to pitch part of the season, and who wants to keep all of the cards in his hand for the longest time possible. I'm just glad the law firm recruiting market doesn't work the same way. It would make my job a lot harder. Imagine the normal recruiting season. The run-of-the-mill Ivy League law students interview and get offers. But what if the standouts got to bypass the system? What if they were able to call us the day after we signed Big Client X to a headline-making deal, and offer their services for 50% above the normal rate? Well, we'd laugh at them. We'd say they should have gone through the normal recruiting process. We'd send paralegals over to their houses to throw eggs at their windows.

But that's only because there are no standouts. Associates are all the same. They're all equally capable of doing the mindless work we assign, and the "standouts" are just the ones who never go home. They're all fungible parts, easy to swap in and out when they leave for the hospital after their nervous breakdowns. That's just the way the system works.

And the way it works here makes me forget that there are other places in the world where skill and talent actually make a different, and standout performers deserve special treatment. Not here. But on the Yankees. And that's what Clemens reminds me. Good for Roger. I wouldn't hire him to do document review outside of the normal recruiting calendar (although he'd probably do just fine at it), but I'm glad he gets to pitch for the Yankees and get $30 million for half a season's work. Congratulations, Roger.

2007-04-21T13:31:00.000-07:00

I just left a message on an associate's cell phone. He was supposed to meet me in the office this morning to work on some document review, but he didn't show up. He sent me an e-mail that his wife is in the hospital, but apparently she's still alive. So he should be here. That's no excuse. As long as she hangs on, he should be here. I called to tell him he needed to report to the office right away, but it went right to voicemail. I'm pretty upset about it. I left a message:

"Hey, I want to tell you something, OK? I want to leave a message for you right now. Because it's 10:30 here in the office, and once again you've demonstrated a complete lack of regard for me, for the firm, and for your once-promising and now-destroyed career. When the time comes for me to go to work, I stop whatever I'm doing and I go and I come into the office. But you? You're not here, and you don't even have your damn phone turned on. So I want you to know something, OK?"

"I'm tired of playing this game with you. I'm leaving this message with you to tell you you have insulted me for the last time. You have insulted me. You don't have the brains or the decency as a human being. I don't give a damn that you've been at the firm 12 years, or 2 years, or you don't even work here, or your wife is in the hospital, or your seventeen children are all dead. Or that your secretary is a thoughtless pain in the ass. You have humiliated me for the last time."

"I'm going to come and find you, just to straighten you out on this issue. I'm going to let you know just how disappointed in you I am and how angry I am with you that you've done this to me again. You've made me feel like a mere associate over and over and over again, instead of a hiring partner, which I am, and which you will never be. And this crap you pull on me with this situation that you would never dream of doing if you cared about your job and you do it to me constantly and over and over again. I am going to come out there and I am going to straighten your ass out when I see you."

"Do you understand me? I'm going to really make sure you get it. Then I'm going to turn around and come back to the office and burn all of your stuff. So you'd better be ready to meet with me, and the entire executive committee. We're all going to let you know just how we feel about what a rude little pig you really are. You are a rude, thoughtless little pig."

2007-04-16T08:29:00.000-07:00

Another quick post, not in character: I'm going to be out in LA for the next couple of weeks, for some TV-writer staffing meetings my agent is setting up. I had an Anonymous Lawyer sitcom pilot script in development at a network earlier in the year, but they decided not to go forward with it... still a chance it lands somewhere, but at this point I'm hoping to get a job writing on something else. If anyone who reads this is in that world and wouldn't mind letting me buy you a cup of coffee and pick your brain about it for a few minutes, shoot me an e-mail, I'd be thrilled to meet up. Also anyone with good LA lunch tips -- stuff I can't get in New York -- I'm all ears. Thanks.

2007-04-14T10:54:00.000-07:00

A reader alerted me to an article in today's New York Daily News about a lawyer who leaped to his death from an office on the 69th floor of the Empire State Building. "He was interviewing a client," said a man who works in the suite. "He just got up, opened the window and jumped."

Our clients hate when that happens. There's almost nothing they hate more, aside from the pastries not being fresh or the coffee not being hot enough. Or the temperature in the conference room not being quite right, or the lawyers wearing the wrong color ties, or the artwork on the wall not being quite the style they prefer. But besides those things, there's nothing our clients hate more than when the lawyers who are interviewing them open the window and leap out. We've taken proactive steps to limit the frequency of in-meeting suicides by bolting the windows shut and removing all sharp objects from client areas. We have designated non-client sections of the building where windows open, ropes are available, and there's a full selection of pills and anesthetics. But in front of clients we like to keep things professional, dignified, and alive.

2007-04-05T12:46:00.000-07:00

I'm sorry. I received enough negative responses to my April Fools Day post that I've been persuaded to remove it from the site. In retrospect, I should not have named names, even in jest. The attorneys I called out for their behavior in the recruiting process, as litigators, and as representatives of the profession are not necessarily bad people, and the accusations I made were based mostly on speculation and rumor, not fact. The firms I discussed, and the specific people I mentioned, were meant as examples of larger trends in the profession, but I did not intend the post to be taken literally, or those specific individuals and firms to feel wronged by it. I also did not intend to encourage associates at those firms to take the actions they did. I apologize for that.

It was also probably a mistake to discuss actual resumes on the site, and mention the rejected candidates by name. Even if someone is not a good fit for my firm does not mean that there is not a firm out there that would embrace them. I apologize for speculating about what firms those might be, and discussing their hiring standards. I should not have assumed that I was qualified to discuss the hiring standards of other firms and speculate about which of my competitors would feel comfortable hiring felons and other unsavories. While I had reason to believe the information I was working with was accurate, I have since been informed that it may have been outdated. If I gave any readers the impression that there are specific firms that are not bothered by hiring sex offenders and/or other repeat offenders awaiting sentencing, those impressions may be inaccurate. It is possible that some of the firms I mentioned by name used to have more liberal hiring policies than they currently do.

If the April Fools Day post led any current law students to believe that they can be hired without graduating or taking (and passing) a U.S. bar exam, that was a misunderstanding and I did not intend to leave that impression. If any paralegals were offended by the photo illustration that accompanied the post, again, I apologize. If you are a personal acquaintance of the hiring partner mentioned in paragraph three, who I may have insinuated was cheating on his wife, please disregard that paragraph entirely. I did not realize he and his wife are currently separated. And for the readers who took issue with my discussion of clerkships, and the judges I specifically listed, I was unaware that two of those judges are currently in prison.

Normal posting will resume as planned. I hope the offending April Fools Day post did not cause any long-term repercussions.

2007-03-26T22:03:00.000-07:00

I've received a number of e-mails asking for my thoughts on Aaron Charney's sexual orientation discrimination suit against Sullivan & Cromwell, an undistinguished law firm with only seven graduates of Ivy League law schools in their Los Angeles branch office. I've avoided commenting until now, because of the seventy-one sexual harassment suits my firm is currently fighting, but I was just dropped as a defendant in a couple of them (if only there was a surveillance camera in my office, it wouldn't have been so easy), so I figured I could celebrate by sharing my thoughts on the Charney case.

The most comprehensive article on the case is over at New York Magazine, in case you need to get up to speed. But the article I want to focus on first is from the New York Observer, where it's said that Charney "boiled his home computer’s hard drive in hot water, attacked it with a hammer, boiled it again and then discarded the remains."

Kudos to Charney for that, and to the New York Observer for printing it. I've been looking for a new way to destroy associate hard drives (just for fun, in the midst of an important deadline, if I think they haven't been working hard enough) and my usual tactics (coffee spills, electromagnets, termites in the floppy disk slot) have occasionally been thwarted by some unusually resourceful experts in data recovery. But if repeated boiling is the key, then repeated boiling I can do. It's funny I never thought of boiling the hard drives, since I've done away with at least one insubordinate associate through a similar method. Something about how raising the temperature gradually doesn't ever alarm the associate enough to leap out of the pot, and eventually he just succumbs.

But back to Charney's lawsuit. I find myself strangely unmoved. If Sullivan & Cromwell is anything like this firm (and -- only *seven* Ivy League graduates in their Los Angeles office -- I have reason to believe it isn't), it's completely unsurprising that a partner might say something offensive, or that two partners might independently say offensive things, or that the impression might be made that anyone deviating from the norm won't be a good fit at the partnership level. Despite the token attempts to demonstrate otherwise. The thing is, I don't expect it's necessarily got much to do with sexual orientation at all. Charney is just lucky his discrimination involved a protected class. But we discriminate against all sorts of people in the minority. People who have hobbies, people who leave the office, people who care about their families, people who let their guard down, people who cry, people who laugh, people who are friendly, people who have gastrointestinal issues that make their presence known during a long conference call, people with speech impediments, people with integrity, fat people, ugly people, thin people, large-breasted women and men, bald people, bearded people, creative types, immigrants, religious believers, graduates from non-elite schools, those who fail the Bar Exam, vegetarians, loud talkers, and the unfortunately clumsy.

Is it right? No. Is it nice? No. Would it pass muster in a business that doesn't involve $160,000 starting salaries? Of course not. But what do you think the money's for? It's not just for the long hours. It's for the willingness to be subjected to obnoxious partners making inappropriate comments about personal aspects of your life and controlling your destiny at the firm in a manner consistent with their own personal whims and preferences. You drink decaf? Then you're not much of a man, and you're never making partner. And if you don't like it, sue me, but you'll lose, and you'll never get another job again. At least not with a big law firm. Well, maybe a place like Sullivan & Cromwell, looking to boost that pathetic number of Ivy League law school graduates in their Los Angeles office. And please don't leave any comments about the denominator problem. Raw numbers are what counts, not fractions. Fractions are for idiots and anyone who pays attention to fractions isn't making partner. Or if they do, their share is going to be a very, very, very small fraction. If it's fractions you love, you'll just have to deal with the consequences of that.

Perhaps you can tell that I'm conflicted about the case. On the one hand, I can absolutely believe that Charney's complaint is true. On the other hand, if you take away our ability to make rude comments about anything we want, what do we have left? Have some sympathy for the partners here. It's sad how society has lost respect for its elders to such an extent that we're suing them just for being cantakerous and discriminatory. Next thing you know, they'll be making us pay taxes. That'll be the day.

2007-03-21T22:47:00.000-07:00

A reader sent me a link to a Washington Post article from a couple of weeks ago about a law student who's finding it hard to get a job and thinks it might be because of some negative things written about her on a message board. Apparently, the student interviewed with 16 firms, got only 4 callbacks, and no offers. She assumes the lack of offers is because she was Googled, they found some negative message board threads about her, and decided not to give her an offer. "She was stunned when she had zero offers," according to the article.

I can't speak with any particular knowledge about this student, the message board threads, or how any firm but mine makes its hiring decisions, but those would have to be some awfully interesting message board threads to get me to make dispositive judgments about candidates. Perhaps photos of them playing sports, or reading, or sleeping, or doing anything besides work. Maybe some proof that they write poetry. Short of that, I'm a little skeptical. The article mentions that the message board contains threads about "sexual activity and diseases." No serious firm is going to pay attention to that. We do our own battery of tests before they get hired, and the initiation process will take care of any problems going on down there. Lawyers at firms like these don't need genitals. It's all a moot point.

I was bothered by the "stunned" quote. Obviously I'm wrong if these message board threads did in fact stop this girl from getting a job, but it seems a bit presumptuous to assume you're entitled to one. I like to steer clear of anyone who seems too entitled during the interview process. Feeling entitled to anything is definitely a negative, whether it's vacation time, weekends, or food. There's a box on our internal evaluation form we use during the interview process: "Did they ask to use the bathroom?" If so, it's an automatic no. Recruits are not allowed to use the bathroom, and if they ask, they almost always assume we're going to say yes, and give us a look when we tell them it's against the rules. That's entitlement. And I can't deal with it.

Also, maybe this girl just looked pregnant or something. That's always a reason not to give an offer. I don't know why she's assuming it's because she was Googled. I gave up on Googling after I started finding information about other people with the same name that didn't correlate at all. I Googled one candidate when he sent in his resume and called him in for an interview thinking I was getting the shortstop for the Texas Rangers. Turned out he just had the same name. This guy was five-foot-three, thick glasses, terrible breath. He's in the tax department now, doing a terrific job. But he's no shortstop. I thought we could plug him into our softball team and win the division. But he's our third-string statistician now. It's all a mess. We have a 70-year-old retired trusts partner playing left field and a woman playing second base. There are grade school teams that could beat us. We lost 21-3 last week to a boutique entertainment firm. Not even a good boutique entertainment firm. I think their biggest client is that gecko from the Geico commercials. He gets his own trailer.

We reject people for all sorts of reasons. Frankly, it's a badge of honor to have message boards writing about your diseases. One time the Greedy Associates board said I had lupus and I got gift baskets from a half-dozen of my colleagues around the city. Excellent stuff, fresh fruit, great pears. My kids loved it, we had a feast. I was flattered they even cared. Turned out it was just some screwy blood work, I'd eaten too soon before the appointment, it screwed up all the enzyme levels. There's an associate here who complained once that there was a message board thread accusing him of having ambiguous genitalia. Eh, what do I care? Clients aren't reading this stuff, it doesn't affect the firm. I've toyed with the idea of setting up an anonymous message board in the office where people could post rumors about their colleagues. It would give people a place to vent without having to go outside the firm, and it would ensure we were up to speed about everyone's lives, but the proposal didn't get out of committee. Partners with too much to hide.

I do read people's MySpace pages though. I listen to their music. Makes me feel young again. I've got over 350 MySpace friends. Too bad I only have 3 or 4 actual friends. Maybe this girl who got rejected from all these firms would want to be my friend. Not if she has diseases though.

2007-03-18T09:17:00.000-07:00

I received an e-mail this week from a real go-getter. I'll reprint the e-mail below. I wish I could help him, but ever since an incident with the Labor Department a few years ago, we've been unable to secure work permits for anyone under 16 years of age. There was a whole problem with working conditions and language used around the office and the lack of a real system for making sure people don't impale themselves on sharp objects installed around the office for disciplinary purposes. We could have corrected some of the issues and made the building more child-friendly, but there's just something about a working guillotine in the corner of the big conference room that makes people pay just a little bit more attention when you're talking to them. And the invisible spikes coming up from the toilets are a lot of fun too.

You'll see why I wanted to post this once you read what's pasted below, but I do want to stress that I do think this kid's impulse is absolutely right. 14- and 15- year-olds should absolutely be looking for work experience at any big law firm that will hire them, and this kid is right to be proactive about paving his road toward indentured servitude at a young age. I really do feel bad that I have no ability to help him. I also want to stress that this is an actual e-mail.

Dear Jeremy
I am a 14 , 15 year old to be student.
I have always been interested in becoming a lawyer or barrister.
I am writhing to request work experience in your law firm during the easter holidays, i want to see if this is what i really want beacause i dont want to study something that im not too sure about.
after this experience i will be pretty sure about whether i want to study
law futher or not.
please contact me on this email address as soon as possible. i will be really happy if you could possibly get me work experinece
thank for your time
your sincerely,
[Name Withheld]

A couple more like this and maybe it'll be worth it to try and start that youth camp again. We secretly tried a few years ago, floated the idea internally and externally, but apparently calling it a "work camp" was a turnoff, and there was some negative reaction to the possibility of turning one of the attorney break rooms into a bunk where the campers could sleep.

2007-03-14T14:15:00.000-07:00

There's a blood drive going on in the lobby of our building today. One of my colleagues e-mailed the firm offering to buy dinner for whoever gives the most blood. Predictably, it's started a string of e-mails among the associates (I'm only getting a chance to read them because I make it a habit of tapping into some of my associates' e-mails to keep up-to-date on firm gossip and stop complaints before they escalate into rebellions) about how they already give enough blood to the firm, and they shouldn't be asked to give any more. They overestimate themselves. In most cases, we're just squeezing blood from a stone. They hardly produce any work worth noting. In any case, I expect my colleague's offer will lead to a decrease in the amount of blood donated, not an increase. He's not someone I would want to have dinner with, and I expect most of the associates feel the same way. Except, of course, the ones in his department, looking for his approval and willing to do anything to get it. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if the two suck-ups who work directly under him end up donating more blood than they should and wind up in the hospital. If I was in need of blood, I wouldn't want a lawyer's blood. Probably woefully low on white blood cells from lack of sleep, and loaded down with cholesterol and other unhealthiness. Plus the cancer-causing chemicals in the printer room, and the asbestos still in the walls of all associate offices. We did some asbestos remediation work in the partner suites, but decided to skip the associate offices and the secretary cubicles. It's not worth it. They're hardly here for long enough to make it count anyway. A few years of exposure, no big deal. But partners are here forever, so it made sense. Same reason we don't give the associates chairs. They're only passing through. They can stand.

One of my associates told me today that he's heading to Africa to work with a business development organization over there. Law firm life got to be too much for him. I told him he'll be back. Life here may be bad but at least there's air conditioning and electricity. And despite the limited amount of time he gets to sleep in his bed, at least it's comfortable. Down blanket, 350-thread-count sheets, feather pillows. Too bad he has no one to share it with.

A summer associate e-mailed to ask if she can have a weekend in July off so she can attend a wedding. Good form for e-mailing months in advance. Of course I told her she can't. They won't be working weekends normally, but I'll schedule something special just for her that weekend. Can't let them get too comfortable. If they start being able to keep outside plans now, it'll just be that much harder once they're working here full time. Let them figure out the hard way that they need to do it the way smart associates do. Don't tell anyone you're leaving, take your BlackBerry, and no one will notice or care. It's astonishing how long it takes most of these people to figure it out. We demand they're always here, but no one's taking attendance. Get the work done, respond to e-mails and voice mails, and it doesn't really matter. Sure, I'll hold it against you if I see you sneaking out early, but out of sight, out of mind. Not only won't I notice if you're not here, I also won't think of you when I'm giving out work. It's a win-win situation. Also, you can falsify your billing records so you don't get caught. Again, it takes these people forever to figure these things out. This doesn't have to be so hard.

2007-03-10T09:24:00.000-08:00

I just set up an Anonymous Lawyer fantasy baseball league on Yahoo.

Similar to last year, but a couple fewer teams, since the free agent pool became pretty dire. Also, this year I'll win.

The Yahoo Fantasy Baseball link is here. Click to get a team > Join League > Join Custom. The League ID is 196853, and the password is anonymous (all lowercase -- it's case-sensitive).

There's room for 15 teams besides mine. So the first 15 to sign up....

The live draft on Yahoo is scheduled for next Sunday, the 18th, at 10AM Pacific (1PM Eastern). Please don't sign up if you can't make the live draft.

2007-03-09T12:56:00.000-08:00

Slate has an article about the $200,000 bonuses that most firms offer to lure former Supreme Court clerks to their offices, and how that's a lot much more money that those folks would make if they go teach or become a special prosecutor or a public defender. Added onto the $160,000 salary, and a bonus, that's a lot of money for someone who's probably not even 30 at the time.

A lot of whining in this article. Whining about how these former clerks don't even do all that much work at the firm, since their goal is to bank the money and then go teach, so they're spending all their time polishing their job talks for professor interviews. Whining about how there are lots and lots of rejected Supreme Court clerks just as capable of doing the work, but not getting the $200,000 bonus. Whining about how Supreme Court clerks end up making more than the justices they worked for. Whining about how the clerks are really just trophies to let the firm say they have a former Supreme Court clerk working for them.

Funny enough, the only people not whining in the article: former Supreme Court clerks, and the firms that are hiring them. Both sides seem happy enough. No one's forcing the firms to pay, and no one's forcing the clerks to accept it. It's a free market.

And, how about this argument: For the clerks, it's actually a real free market, as opposed to the "free market" that forces their non-clerk colleagues to take firm jobs. See, the clerks have tons of other options. They can get hired anywhere they want, law firm or not. They can go work in government, public interest, teach, anything. So when they go to a firm, they're making a real choice, and none of them can reasonably claim to be forced into it. Their classmates without the clerkships? It might be a firm or temp work. A firm or living with their parents. Public interest jobs are hard to get. Government jobs are hard to get. And the ones that aren't hard to get pay $25,000 a year. The run-of-the-mill elite law school graduate has far fewer choices than the big firm life, and it's a lot harder to pass up the $160,000 salary and a productive way to fill the day than it is for the Supreme Court clerk to decide to do something else.

Not that I'm saying we should be lamenting the plight of elite law school graduates forced to take jobs with firms like mine, but we certainly shouldn't be whining about the Supreme Court clerks. They're smart enough and have enough choices that they can make their own decisions and aren't being bullied into it. And if they're not complaining, and we're not complaining, why is Slate complaining?

I say "we" but I don't mean "we." My firm doesn't pay Supreme Court clerkship bonuses. We've discovered that former Supreme Court clerks tend to bristle at the idea of getting a partner's coffee for him, spending 80 hours a week putting "sign here" stickers on documents, doing mindless legal research, and showering in the communal facility we installed in the basement. They also tend to bring morale down in the office, by telling the run-of-the-mill associates about their glamorous lives getting coffee for Supreme Court Justices, making their more ordinary coffee runs seem a lot less appealing. Every time we've had a former clerk here, the first-year class has come perilously close to revolt. And we can't have that. So we don't hire former clerks. Or individuals with any sort of unique achievement or history of special recognition. We hire robots instead. And it's working out just fine.

2007-02-28T18:47:00.000-08:00

I got home early from the office yesterday and happened to catch the last half of the new game show on Fox, "Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?" I should watch more television, since it helps remind me why so many of my associates are idiots. If this is the standard people in the rest of the country are held to, then of course my associates are going to be idiots, because even two standard deviations above the IQ of someone who can succeed on this show is still going to be somewhere around 60. I don't know if my associates are smarter than fifth graders. Most of them certainly are not smarter than I was a fifth grader, or even as a preschooler, but that's probably not an appropriate standard to hold them to. It doesn't actually matter if they're smarter than a fifth grader, because most of the work we make them do is work a fifth grader could do pretty easily. And that's part of the problem. We've dumbed down our standards so much that expectations even at an elite law firm are frighteningly low. And so what does that say about the rest of the population, who are working at places not nearly as challenging as this? It says that they can be even dumber, perhaps unable to count to ten, or read street signs. Like the contestants on this game show, who somehow managed to dress themselves but still can't remember whether the United States is a country or a planet. Next we're just going to eliminate language altogether and have people grunt at each other to win a million dollars. Or a thousand pennies, because the contestants will be just as excited with that prize and it won't cost the network as much money. A thousand pennies! Imagine, all those pennies! And they're so shiny! Oooh, shiny pieces of metal. I mean wood. I mean paper. I mean food. Oh, I don't know, I'm too stupid to remember to breathe.

Meanwhile, I'm wading through resumes from 1Ls looking for the remaining three spots in our summer program and some of them have the nerve to send me LSAT score reports revealing they got less than 170. They should just be sterilized. Actually, all of them should be sterilized, no matter what they got on the LSAT. Anyone who takes the LSAT should be sterilized. Anyone who really thinks that being a lawyer is going to lead to happiness and fulfillment clearly has a screw loose and shouldn't be reproducing. They could put a chemical in the test booklets that would just make people's genitals shrivel up and fall off. Lawyers don't need them anyway. None of the associates have time to do anything with those parts except pleasure themselves in the law firm bathroom. (I saw you, Young Guy Badly Hiding Your Impending Baldness. I saw you.) And by the time you're a partner, whoever you're with is certainly no longer appealing. Anonymous Wife hasn't looked desirable to me ever since she spent my entire fifth-year-associate bonus on permanent eyeliner tattoos back in '93. There's nothing that's less of an aphrodisiac than someone spending money she didn't earn on permanent blue lines drawn into her eyelids. On bad days now she looks like one of those baseball players, with the eye block grease under their eyes to block reflections from the sun. This is what she spends money on when she isn't controlled. That's why I make her sign a new contingency agreement every year regarding the fate of my money for when the inevitable occurs and she cons a younger man into bed with her. I saw you, Young Guy Badly Hiding Your Impending Baldness. I saw the way she looked at you at the Christmas Party, and I saw you move that strand of hair over the top of your head and wink back at her. I have my eye on both of you. That's why you're getting transferred to Chicago. Your head's going to be cold, but you can buy a hat.

I wish we could get fifth graders in the office instead of law school graduates. Less ambition. More malleability. They'll do the work, I know they will. Damn these child labor laws. Damn these child labor laws to hell.

I wish I lived in the 1800s. No Internet to distract everyone, and everyone was a lot more lenient about the kinds of personal services you could pay children to do for you. I mean, I guess I kind of get decent service from everyone under me at the firm, but it would be so much better if they didn't think of themselves as adults.

2007-02-21T08:31:00.000-08:00

I've been meaning to write about Matthew Courtney, the London associate at Freshfields who died a couple of weeks ago after falling from a stairwell at the Tate Modern museum (news articles here, here, and here). I've probably received more e-mail about this story than about anything for as long as I've been blogging here.

All the stories hint at a possible suicide, caused by the stress of his job, but none of the articles make that seem certain. Apparently he'd recently complained to his firm about his workload, and people at the museum saw him go into the stairwell to take a BlackBerry call. It seems like it's completely possible the whole thing was an accident, but it's causing a series of articles in the British papers concerning the workload of young associates.

And perhaps it's about time.

I've resisted blogging about this incident for the past couple of weeks -- and to some degree resisted blogging here at all -- because it's hard to write over-the-top satire when the reality is that the work might be causing people to leap off stairwells. A number of the e-mails I received pointed to the "minute of silence" observed by the firm after Courtney's death, and how it's predictable that they couldn't spare more than a minute.

The practice of law certainly isn't alone as far as jobs that eat up more hours of the day than desirable, and cause undue amounts of stress, but there seems to be something about the law firm culture -- the billing of hours, the nature of the work, the lack of connection to the client and the overall picture of the case -- that makes a blog like this resonate with people more than if I was writing about the long hours put in by neurosurgeons. Perhaps that's not really the case.

Regardless, if Courtney's death can spark a real discussion of working conditions at firms -- based in reality, and not just the satire written here -- at least it will have done some good.

2007-02-14T10:04:00.000-08:00

I was attacked by an associate again, hence the delay in posting. I wrote a series of posts on pad and paper while I was recuperating, and I will have my secretary backfill those in later this week. So there will be new content for five or six of the past ten days to catch up on, don't worry. This associate (we'll call him Chadwick, though that's not his real name) was upset about a recent assignment that would take him out of the country over the week he had requested off for his wedding in addition to the birth of his child. He had put in the request six months ago, when he simultaneously proposed to his girlfriend and learned that a different woman was pregnant with his child. He asked us to keep his situation private, since his girlfriend was unaware of the pregnancy, and the pregnant woman was unaware of the girlfriend. Unfortunately, due to a clerical error, the information about the reason for his week off ended up printed in the firm's newsletter.

It's not as strange as that sounds. We have a policy of listing in the newsletter each month every day that an associate was absent from work and the stated (or unstated) reason. We find that it discourages frivolous vacation-taking. Last month, for example, there were three associates who took time off. So in the newsletter, we listed [name redacted], one day off due to giving birth; [name redacted], one day off due to brother's funeral; [name redacted], one day off due to hysterectomy. And this month, Chadwick was listed in the newsletter: "one week scheduled off due to wedding to one woman and birth of child by another." The newsletters are sent to the home addresses, and Chadwick's fiancee read the newsletter one night when Chadwick was at the office, was understandably surprised, and came to the office to confront him. When she did, he stormed into my office, upset the information had been revealed. I was pleased to see him, because I had been looking for him earlier in the day to tell him that in fact he would be unable to take that week off, because we needed to send him to Peru for some document discovery. That's when he grabbed my letter opener off my desk and stabbed it into my arm.

Obviously the brutal attack did not go unpunished. Chadwick is awaiting a court date, and I'll have the only person at the firm who's ever actually tried a case in court handling the whole affair for me. I expect some punitive damages, of course, although the unfortunate part of the story is that because Chadwick was editor-in-chief of his law school's Law Review, and clerked for a prominent circuit court judge, he will have no difficulty finding employment at a competitor firm despite the criminal record. The good news (for Chadwick) is that the baby turned out just fine, and his fiancee is still going through with the wedding, despite the infidelity and the criminal charges, undoubtedly because Chadwick stands to earn a fair bit of money at whichever competitor firm does decide to hire him after this whole ordeal.

I thought this would make for a happy Valentine's Day story to warm everyone's heart. Have a terrific Valentine's Day, and try to be responsible and cancel your restaurant reservations as soon as you realize you're going to have to work through the night instead of waiting until it's too late for the restaurant to fill the table with someone off the waiting list. All the best for the holiday.

2007-02-02T20:09:00.000-08:00

The big talk in the office today is about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change releasing its report that there's over 90% certainty that global warming is being caused by humans. To which I say: so what? They still don't know for sure what the temperature rise is going to lead to, how the weather patterns will be affected, and whether it's really anything we have to worry about. And we can't make decisions based on uncertainty and fear. For example: we're 90% certain that there's some sort of chemical in our office that's causing our employees to fall ill. Over the past few years, there's practically been an epidemic of allergies and flus and fourteen cases of cholera. But we don't know for sure. So it would be silly to do much about it. We did redo the ventilation system in all the partners' offices, and that's led to the epidemic being mostly limited to associates ever since, but that could just be a coincidence, and it would be silly to spend the money renovating associate offices until we're sure. Surer than 90%, at least. Besides, there's so much associate turnover that much of the benefit of the renovation would accrue to people who wouldn't even be at the firm much longer. So we'd be wasting our money, and could better spend it on free cake. I don't know why everyone's getting so worked up about global warming anyway. I don't know why anyone would ever need to go outdoors.

2007-01-31T20:21:00.000-08:00

I read an article yesterday about a guy who's suing his law school for discriminating against slow typists. He claims that exams are skewed in favor of people who type fast. We fired someone for typing too slowly a few weeks ago. She's still in her office typing out her letter of termination. We thought it was appropriate, given the reason for her firing, for her to have to type out the letter herself. We told her the letter should consist of the entire text of the Bankruptcy Code. She might be in there a while. Like I said, she's a slow typist. Law school grades ought to reward good typing. After all, it's more important for law firm success than anything else that goes on in law school.

Okay, maybe typing isn't skill #1. Skill #1 is learning to read the professors' minds, just like they'll have to read partners' minds at the firm. Skill #2 is the busy-work that comes with journal work. Skill #3 is learning to tolerate the arbitrary relationship between effort, talent, and rewards. Grades are pretty close to random at law school, and praise at the firm is similarly pretty close to random. Skill #4 is the typing. So, still important, but not quite #1.

I don't think this kid who's suing his law school is going to have much luck finding a job. Not even so much because of the lawsuit, but because he's admitting he's a lousy typist. What else is a first year associate good for anyway?

2007-01-30T21:26:00.000-08:00

The Wall Street Journal has a new blog about juggling home and work. That's the kind of phrase people who are committed to their careers don't use. They're not like balls in the air. There's no juggling involved. I think of it more like fishing. The job is the river. The family are the fish. You stand in the river. And sometimes you catch a fish. Sometimes you're too busy swimming to put the rod in the water. Sometimes you put the rod in, but it's two in the morning and all the fish are sleeping. Sometimes you catch a fish but he starts crying so you throw him back. Sometimes you and the fish spend a lovely day together, but after too much time with you, the fish starts to suffocate, so you have to throw him back for his own good and go back to what you were doing before, just wading in the river, without the fish. Sometimes there's an oil spill, and the fish get all messed up, and you feel bad about it, but there really isn't anything you can do. They're just the fish. What's really important is saving the river. Sometimes the river overflows and destroys the houses on the banks. That's a tragedy, but sometimes it happens. The river gets bigger. You have more water you have to manage. And sometimes, if you're not really capable enough, you drown. And the fish eat your bones. The analogy falls apart at the end, but you get my point.

One recent post on their blog discusses whether it's a benefit or a burden to have a pet. I think that's a silly question. Anonymous Wife is more work than a pet and still I keep her. At least with a pet you can leave it locked in the house all day and the worst that will happen is it'll go to the bathroom (and someone else will have to clean it up). With a wife or a kid, you leave them locked in the house all day and they get upset and you have to apologize, and it becomes a whole mess. You don't have to apologize to pets. That's what's great about them. We had a dog once and it ran away and we couldn't find it and no one came to the house from social services to say we had done something wrong, no police, no problems at all. If that happened with one of the kids, I can't imagine the mess we'd have on our hands.

2007-01-29T12:00:00.000-08:00

Any readers in the UK can get the Anonymous Lawyer novel (paperback from Vintage Originals, a division of Random House) over at Amazon UK for just under 4 pounds (50% off list price) at this link. That's less than one billable minute. Treat yourself. And spread the word.

2007-01-26T21:02:00.000-08:00

A reader e-mailed to ask what I thought about the summer associates being beneficiaries of the recent law firm salary bumps. Frankly, if we're going to raise anyone's salaries, it's the summer associates who should come first. Everyone else we've already reeled in. We still have to sell the firm to the summers. They're the ones who deserve the money, for spending 13 weeks doing hardly any work and getting 4 social activities a week. $3,008 a week isn't too much to pay inexperienced law students, in exchange for their souls, right? Three thousand and eight dollars a week. When I was in law school, $3,008 could have almost bought me someone to take the Bar Exam for me. Ridiculous.

2007-01-25T21:29:00.000-08:00

I'm sorry I was unable to post yesterday. The firm decided to shut down the Internet for a while, in order to stop associates from e-mailing their colleagues complaining that we haven't yet raised our salaries. I know the list of firms keeps growing, but we're trying to stay on the cutting edge of law firms who don't think associates need to make quite as much money as these new raises will give them. We will probably match at some point in the next week, but I've been lobbying to make everyone sweat for a few days, wonder if we'll match, resign themselves to thinking we won't, and then surprise everyone with an announcement after everyone else has already done it. This way we surprise the associates and get some more goodwill out of the whole thing. If you're just a copycat, your people expect it and no one's that excited. But if you make them worry for a little while, the psychic benefits in the end are that much sweeter.

We like to do something similar with the milk at the coffee stations. Keep it out until it's right on the verge of souring, so that people start to get a little bit frustrated and disappointed when they pour it into their coffee and it curdles... but then when we replace it with a fresh container, everyone is jubilant. We wouldn't get those moments of jubilation if we just kept it fresh all the time. It's all part of a firm-wide strategy to keep the associates on edge and make sure they recognize every decision we make for their benefit, instead of taking things for granted. Like toilet paper. A few years ago we hired a "toilet paper fairy." Really she's just an old woman making the minimum wage, but we liked the title. She goes around to all of the bathrooms and hands out toilet paper while people are doing what they have to do in there. If there was toilet paper there for everyone, all the time, no one would even think about it. But if there's never toilet paper, and you have to wait for the toilet paper fairy to get to you, you have no choice but to think about it, and you're grateful each and every time it happens.

Same thing with the air conditioning -- it doesn't turn on until it hits 83 degrees, but when it does start blowing, you can hear the cheers down the hall. And the parking garage. There's no attendant, and the bar only lifts every three minutes, so you usually have to wait to exit. But what a thrill, each and every time. And travel expenses. Sure, we pay them, but usually we reject them first and make people resubmit with more explanation. They get all ready to fight the system... and then it goes through, and they're grateful.

Little moments of joy, anywhere we can manufacture them. That's all we're hoping to do. And I think our associates appreciate it. At least more than at Sullivan and Cromwell, where I read today there's been more than 30% associate attrition each of the last two years. Of course, I think the industry average is 92%, so they're actually doing okay. No, wait, I read that wrong. 21%. Oh, that sounds more reasonable. We lost 420 out of 423 last year, so we were at... right about the average.

2007-01-23T23:00:00.000-08:00

We're feeling pressure to match the salary increases announced over the past few days at some New York-based law firms. So far, as far as I'm aware, Simpson Thacher started the ball rolling (probably after the managing partner lost a bet) and was quickly matched by Cadwalader, Cleary, Milbank, Paul Weiss, and Sullivan & Cromwell. First years are up to $160K, with more senior associates getting bumps to 170 / 185 / 210 / 230 / 250 / 265 / 280 (I think Simpson and Sullivan are even higher at the top end). It's a lot of money. That doesn't even include the bonuses, which ranged from 30K-70K in 2006 at most of these places.

The argument for matching: we want the best associates we can get, and since every firm is pretty much the same, the work is the same, and the hours are the same, if our salaries are lower, we won't get the top people.

The argument against matching: associates are all interchangeable and if we can save some money and still get decent ones, what's the difference? We're going to burn them all out in a couple of years anyway.

I don't know anyone who's happy at their firms, at least not any of these firms where first year associates are getting paid $160K. What's the price for a lifetime of unhappiness? What's the price for a year of unhappiness? Frankly, if your price is higher than $160K, first year out of law school, you're crazy. That's too much money to turn down. Even if we never let you out of here. That's why I don't like these salary increases. They take all the fun out of the torture. At $100K, you can still make the argument that it's not worth it, and I get to watch the associates wrestle with their inner voices and struggle to decide whether they should stay. At $160K no one wrestles with anything except the danish guy in the lobby. It's a no-brainer. No one in their right mind could say no to $160K plus a bonus to spend a year doing mindless work. They'd have to be crazy. And we don't want crazy associates, so it all works out. I don't know what to make of it. For that kind of money, who cares if your life has meaning or not? Who cares if you ever get to go home? You can afford to not worry about things. It's financial safety and security for a long time if you can tough it out for 5 or 6 years at the firm. And it's easy to dismiss that, but, really, how easy is it to find financial security like that?

I imagine if there's anyone out there who could have gotten a job at one of these places but passed it up to do something more "fulfilling," they're kicking themselves right now, because even principles have limits. If $160K the first year out of law school can't satisfy you, nothing's ever going to satisfy you and your problem isn't the law firm, it's that crazy voice inside of you telling you that you deserve more, that you're destined for greatness beyond that which a law firm can provide. But no one is destined for greatness. Greatness happens by accident, and the road to greatness is littered with the broken dreams of an awful lot of people who never became great. Why not just take the $160K, put it in the bank, forget the greatness and be satisfied with security? There are worse things than security. Even when greatness happens, there's a lot of heartache along the way. Who needs heartache when you can have the magic of compound interest?

2007-01-22T22:57:00.000-08:00

A historic day at the firm today. The partnership held elections this afternoon for a handful of leadership positions that recently opened up with some departures and deaths. For the first time in the firm's history, a woman was elected to a leadership position. I'm very pleased that we've finally taken this long-overdue step. Women have worked hard to establish their equality here, and largely foregone the opportunity to have spouses and children just to show everyone how dedicated to the firm they can be. And now, finally, after more than four years of having female partners, a woman has been named Head of Female Issues at the firm. I think I heard a cheer reverberating through the halls just a few seconds after the e-mail was sent out announcing the election results. (It might have just been because they were refilling the vending machine at the same time, I'm not sure... we'd been out of Salt & Vinegar chips for about a week and people were starting to get desperate.) It was a hard-fought contest between the woman who won and three very well-qualified men, with a combined 9 wives and 7 daughters, so they definitely have experience dealing with women. And I'm sure they would have done an excellent job in the role but that isn't the point. I know this is a controversial position, but I think we should be choosing women for leadership roles when they are 25% more qualified than the men, or more. I'm fighting a battle to get that language added to the firm's constitution, but right now all it says it that women are not prohibited from having leadership positions and that a woman's vote at the partnership meeting counts for 2/5ths of a man's vote, with a similar calculation used to determine partnership profits. I've argued we should bump that up to 65%, on the grounds that the women are a lot more masculine nowadays than they used to be, but I was voted down. Because I exhibit some feminine qualities (I've only been married once, my office is relatively clean), my votes only count 87.5%, so sometimes it's hard for me to carry a resolution through. But I will continue to try.

We almost had two women elected to leadership positions, but the woman running for Chair of the Coffee Committee lost by a hundred and three votes. Okay, it wasn't close, but at least she had the courage to run. We should have more plucky women like her at the firm. She's a sparkplug. I see great things in her future. Maybe even her own office someday, and a secretary. I'm working on getting her a desk chair next time someone quits. I keep promising it, but new men keep getting hired, so they get first priority.

2007-01-19T21:14:00.000-08:00

I caught a review today of a new book by Dinesh D'Souza called "The Enemy At Home." In it, he blames the cultural left for September 11th, saying that liberals and their depraved viewpoints and forms of entertainment enraged Osama Bin Laden and gave him no choice but to attack. Obviously I think D'Souza is thoroughly mistaken. The real cause of September 11th was lazy associates, public interest attorneys, and law students from second-tier schools. I haven't yet figured out the details of my argument, but give me the weekend and I'll come up with something. Obviously they're the cause of every other problem in society, so why should 9/11 be any different? They're the cause of global warming (hardworking associates don't have any time to pollute), rampant disease (hardworking associates don't interact with anyone, so they can't spread illnesses), poverty (hardworking associates have all the money they need, building up lots of interest since they have no time to spend it), divorce (hardworking associates don't have time to date and get married in the first place), overpopulation (hardworking associates die young), the social security crisis (hardworking associates die young), the Medicare shortfall (hardworking associates have private insurance, and die young), food shortages (hardworking associates don't have time to eat, and die young), and more. So why shouldn't they be the cause of terrorism as well. I'll figure out the link. It'll just take a few days.

2007-01-18T22:36:00.000-08:00

One of my associates marched into my office today to tell me his wife is pregnant, he wants to be present at the baby's birth, and he wants the two of us to work together to figure out a way to make that happen. The birth is in July. He doesn't have a date yet, but he's working on it. He said he'll work weekends all June, he'll set up a chain of command of associates underneath him to cover for him while he's gone, and he'll make sure to keep his laptop with him so he can stay in touch at the hospital. He's already checked the wireless connectivity at the hospital and put in a request for his wife to have a room on the hall where the signal is strongest, even though the obstetrician who works that hallway is somewhat less adept. He's working on some exercises with his wife so that she'll be able to hold the baby in a little longer in case he's slow getting out of the office when the day comes. And he's promised to name the baby after the firm. So I'm hopeful we'll be able to work something out and let him be there, at least for part of the birth, if not the entire thing. Kudos to this associate for being proactive about his life instead of doing nothing and then whining afterwards. That's what too many associates do in these situations. Births, funerals, accidents, etc. They don't plan ahead, they aren't willing to make any sacrifices, and then they end up blaming the firm when they can't leave when they want to. It's not always our fault. Sometimes you just need to work things out in advance, and manage your schedule better, and you can make it all happen. You can have it all. A child, and a career. Of course, if he comes to me in three years and says he wants to go through this again for child #2, it might be a different story. We're flexible to some extent, but we can't start going overboard.

2007-01-17T21:21:00.000-08:00

I think I need to apologize for yesterday's post. I get a little caught up in the law firm world every once in a while and lose touch with reality. I don't really think I'd really be able to get elected president, even if I believe I would be awfully good at it. In fact, that's one of the frustrations of this job: the scope is limited. Outside the revolving doors in the lobby, I'm just another guy with a nice car. Corporate lawyers don't make the headlines. Through any view that looks beyond this firm, I don't matter much at all. I'd like to think I provide good service to my clients, but I'm not naive enough to believe there aren't a hundred people just like me who could provide the same. And I'd like to think that my work as hiring partner has somehow led to this firm having better people than our competitors, but even on that measure my impact is limited. We're all dealing with the same pool of applicants, and we're all offering pretty much the same experience. It's less a matter of deciding who to give offers to as closing the deal. And closing the deal depends on a lot more factors than just a hiring partner and what we say. It depends on a firm's location, reputation, clients, the individual attorneys the students met with on their visit, the practice areas the students are pretending to be most interested in.... I wish I was in a position where I could find those needles in a haystack, but that's simply not the applicant pool I'm dealing with. There are no needles in a haystack at Harvard, Yale, and Stanford. They're all getting offers from tons of firms and it's just a matter of weeding out the bottom tier. Anyone can tell when a kid is a little retarded. Anyone can tell when a kid isn't smart enough to do the work. (I call them kids even though some of them are thirty years old. That's stupid, but they're all kids to me, or at least that's how we treat them.) So my added value is harder to measure. It's in the way I treat my associates, to get as many billable hours out of them as I can. It's in the way I treat my clients, to get more and more of their business. And it's in my ability to convey a positive message about the firm to whoever I meet. Obviously I don't do that very effectively in my writing here, but this isn't the face I present to the public. And maybe the ability to present different faces to different audiences is something that would serve me well if I ever did decide to run for higher office. But for now I'm here, and no one knows about me except for the attorneys who work under me and the recruits I interview each fall.

I read somewhere today that Barack Obama is a smoker. It surprised me. If we weren't hemorrhaging associates as it is, I'd fire anyone I caught smoking. Addictions are a sign of weakness, and smoking's a disgusting one anyway. And especially if we're looking for someone to make important decisions with life-changing consequences, if someone can't even do that for his own self, I don't know how he could do it for the whole country. I may expose my associates to all sorts of negative health outcomes by overworking them and causing them untold amounts of stress, but even I draw the line somewhere. I'd fire the overeaters and the oversleepers too if it were up to me. Self-discipline. Self-control. Self-deprivation. These are healthy characteristics, in a lawyer and in a person. I want to work with people whose only excesses are the job. And at least a father's addiction to work doesn't put his children's health in danger.

2007-01-16T23:43:00.000-08:00

As the 2008 Presidential candidates begin to declare themselves, I've started thinking about whether I might want to enter the race. After all, I'm a high-powered attorney at a top firm, with 18 years of experience managing people, solving problems, helping to grow a business, dealing with client issues both domestically and overseas... I'm well-liked, charismatic, wealthy... I don't know if it would be such a terrible idea. But then I start to think about my wife, and how I'm not sure she would really shine on a national stage. And about my kids and whether I really want to open them up to that kind of scrutiny. And I usually end up coming down on the negative side, and deciding that the time just isn't right. Maybe when I have a different wife, and when my kids are older, it'll be a different story. But for now I'm forced to decline the calls to make myself a candidate. It's a shame, because I know I could do good for this country, get people back in shape, get rid of some of the laziness that pervades the culture. Scale back on some of the holidays. I haven't really thought through my positions on a lot of the major issues, but I have time. That's not what really counts anyway.

2007-01-15T21:23:00.000-08:00

I'm a little late with this, but I've been asked by some readers what I think about the ongoing feud between Donald Trump and Rosie O'Donnell. Personally, I'm happy about it. I think the more incidences of public name-calling we have in this country, the better. I'm consistently frustrated by the social norms that prohibit me from going public with a lot of my grievances. I wish it would be okay for me to name names on this blog, and tell you that Janet from Trusts and Estates (not her actual department) looks like she was the victim of some botched plastic surgery, or that Jeffrey G. from Bankruptcy (not the actual initial of his last name) doesn't wash his hands after he uses the bathroom. But it's considered impolite, at least right now, in 2007. But if Rosie and Donald continue to fight in public, and others follow, eventually the social norms may change, and that would be a wonderful thing. Too much of our yelling happens in private, where others are unable to appreciate it. Too many of my thoughts about my colleagues can't be said out loud, and so they lose the power they would otherwise have to modify behavior and influence people for the better. If I could feel comfortable announcing each day, in front of the entire firm, a list of the ten worst associates and why they're so terrible, I think we'd see some changes. We'd see people trying harder to do better. Public shaming is a powerful tool that society simply doesn't let us take fullest advantage of. Sure, we try, but it's hard to buck the norms and open yourself up to criticism. It's hard not to feel bad after you've sent out a memo to everyone naming the five associates whose children you think ought to be taken away because they're too much of a distraction to the work getting done. It's hard not to feel bad after you've posted a note on your office door listing the names of all of the lawyers who've taken advantage of the employee assistance program over the past twelve months to address their alcohol dependencies. But Rosie and Donald are making it easier, little by little. Every time he calls her a failure or she calls him a lowlife. Every time he calls her fat and she insults his hair. We're getting closer to a world where that kind of behavior is acceptable, and I can't wait. We have associates who remind me of Rosie, and of Donald, and one who reminds me of them both. It's not pretty.

2007-01-12T19:57:00.000-08:00

An associate ran into my office this morning with urgent news: Justin Timberlake and Cameron Diaz broke up. Personally, I've never liked either one. Justin's voice is way too nasal, and Cameron's acting is wooden. On the other hand... wait, what am I talking about? I barely even know who these two people are and certainly don't have opinions about them. Who cares? And why is this all my associates have been talking about all day? Actually, I think it means we're doing something right here at the firm. Because if my associates had the time to have real lives of their own, they wouldn't have the need to obsess over two celebrities they're only going to meet if we get to defend Justin in the inevitable paternity suits he'll end up facing if he continues to be in the public eye. So I'm glad my associates are obsessed with these two clowns. It means we're doing something right.

2007-01-11T22:57:00.000-08:00

Late night in the office. I just woke up a candidate on the East Coast who we decided to make an offer to. He interviewed off-cycle, because of some personal issue that kept him from taking a job right out of law school. He talked about it a bunch during the interviews, but I can't remember if it was an illness, a family thing, something job-related, something with his Visa, I tuned him out for most of the interview so I'm really not sure. But his resume is spotless and we've had some associates leave in the past few weeks (end of year attrition is always a problem... we should take back their bonuses if they leave within a full year of getting the checks) and so there's extra work to go around and we could use another pair of never-sleeping eyes. I suppose I could have waited until the morning to let him know he has the job, but it's only 2 in the morning back East and he's going to have to be awake at this hour anyway once he's working here so why not get him started now. He was excited to get the offer although he sounded a little tired on the phone. I don't know how he could sleep, to be honest. When I was waiting to hear from the firm about my offer, almost twenty years ago, I couldn't sleep for weeks. It was good practice.

It's always enjoyable to have new blood in the middle of the cycle. New faces, new victims, new people trying to impress me. By now, four months in for most of these first-years, they've given up trying to impress me. They're used to me, they're used to the job, they get a little complacent and realize that we're probably not going to fire them and that we need them as much as they need us, if not more. But with new blood it's not like that. They still expect something more than we deliver. They still expect this will be life-changing in more ways than health-related. They still expect the work will be interesting. It's extraordinarily rewarding to watch them mature from eager, idealistic first-years to tired, jaded, depressed second-years, to wealthy, unfulfilled, soulless partners like me. The cycle starts again every fall. Except for these bonus off-cycle hires. I can't wait. I think I'll take him out to lunch on his first day but have him called back to the office during the appetizer.

2007-01-10T21:17:00.000-08:00

An associate came by my office about an hour ago and said he watched the President's speech tonight on streaming video over the Internet and it struck a chord in him. He thinks he's wasting his life at the firm, and needs more meaning in his day-to-day existence. He wants to go to Iraq. At the very least, he thinks it'll extend his lifespan a little, since law firm associates tend to drop dead after a couple of years of hundred-hour work weeks. He said he's tired of sitting at his desk and he wants to do something more active, something outdoors. And he wants to work directly with people instead of having everything mediated by layers of partners and associates above him blocking him from ever even seeing the client, or seeing the effect his work has on the outside world. He wants to see results first-hand, instead of reading about them in the annual report. And he wants to go somewhere where his BlackBerry won't work.

Obviously if this becomes a trend, we'll see a New York Times piece on the subject, or maybe the Washington Post. Life in Iraq better than life as a law firm associate. Look, it's all overdramatized. Obviously life on the ground in Iraq is not better than life at the firm, even if you get to see the true results of your work, even if you're on duty for fewer hours a week, even if you sometimes get a vacation. It's just that people today are soft. They expect everything out of work, and work can't provide it. That's why it's work. My grandparents worked so they wouldn't starve. But kids today have a safety net. They have parents with the means to make sure they have a place to live and food to eat. Even if they're supporting themselves, they have the knowledge in the back of their minds that they're safe, that they'll be okay, that they're not a month away from being homeless. And it makes them lazy and entitled. It makes them think they deserve more than just a job, and that work needs to be fun and satisfying and fulfilling. Why? That's a luxury that very few people have. Very few jobs are enjoyable. No one's selling the law firm job as enjoyable. It's lucrative and secure and isn't that enough?

Iraq is neither lucrative nor secure, although I suppose maybe it is secure, since it doesn't look like we're leaving anytime soon. Although most of our engagements run longer than even the war is going to. Why drop a paying client, even when there's no more work to be done? There's always more work to be done. We're establishing democracy at one of the largest banks in the country. It's a hard job but someone's got to do it.

2007-01-09T22:02:00.000-08:00

I took a few minutes out of my afternoon to check on the Baseball Hall of Fame election results. I can't quibble with the two selections the voters made (Cal Ripken and Tony Gwynn... with Cal Ripken and his consecutive-games-played streak being something associates should try and emulate to when deciding whether they should come into work on a given day, no matter how sick they feel or what the doctor tells them to do) but I'm disappointed that Mark McGwire received such little support (23% of the votes, with 75% necessary for election). McGwire's statistics qualify him pretty undeniably. The problem is that, despite a lack of solid proof, apparently a lot of voters are presuming those numbers were achieved with the use of performance-enhancing drugs, and denying McGwire entry to the Hall of Fame because of it. This is ridiculous.

Even assuming McGwire took steroids, no one ever caught him, and shouldn't that be the standard? He was just doing what he felt he needed to do to help his teams win, and if everyone was willing to look the other way while he was playing, they certainly shouldn't hold it against him now. It's the same way we look at our associates. Whatever they need to do to get the work done, whether it's illegal drugs or outsourcing some of their assignments to legal staffing firms in sweatshops overseas, it doesn't matter as long as the work gets done. It's our own Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy. You get the work done and we're happy, whether you've put your long-term health at risk or not. All of that is up to you, it's entirely your call, we're not going to hook you up to an IV filled with amphetamines unless you give us your consent, and we're not going to force you to use the employee discount that we negotiated with the drug pushers down the street. Anything you want to do to help the firm is entirely up to you, and while we're certainly appreciative of the efforts, and will of course look favorably upon those associates who go above and beyond the call of duty to give their all to the firm, we're not going to fire you (immediately) if you don't drink a gallon of Red Bull for breakfast.

It should be the same way with McGwire. He did what he had to do, and if his teams were willing to accept the results at the time, why should he be held responsible now? We don't prosecute our former associates for crimes they committed while they worked here, unless we have to. Baseball shouldn't either. I think it's a travesty that McGwire won't be at Cooperstown this August, all hopped up on pills and ready to give his induction speech. Maybe next year, if we're lucky. And if he's not dead by then from the after-effects of all that junk. Personally, I've never touched any of it. Back in my day, we didn't need pills and creams and artificial stimulants to get through the day. The hours requirements were lower and the demands were less. I'm just glad I don't have to be an associate now, because it's much tougher. Lucky for me, I'm not forced to think about it too much, and I can just pretend the associates today have it easy, make unreasonable demands on them, and get angry when they can't meet those demands. It's easy to bury your head in the sand. And relieves you of the burden of caring about other people's well-being. That's their parents' job, not mine.

2007-01-08T20:31:00.000-08:00

My colleagues in New York have been e-mailing all day telling us about a rotten smell permeating the city today. I assumed it was the stench of non-profit work, but they're saying it smells more like a gas leak. Subway lines were halted, and a few buildings closed, but work at the firm's New York office was unimpeded, despite the odor apparently causing a handful of paralegals to faint. Well, the odor or twenty-four straight hours of work. Doesn't really matter. The firm's blaming the odor. We had some odor problems here last week, but it was just a new secretary who we've since terminated. She didn't read the personal hygiene memo very carefully. "Shower daily, even if you have to do it in the office." We've had associates who forget to bring backup business suits and end up having to wear the same thing for days at a time if they're stuck here working on something that consumes them for a while. We hired an outside concierge firm to serve as "personal shoppers" and pick up new clothes for associates in a pinch, at just a 33% markup over cost. It's not a bad deal. It's how I buy all my holiday gifts.

The one benefit of the New York odor issue was that it kept anyone from leaving the office for a while. No trips to Starbucks, no smoke breaks, no walks around the block just to escape the overwhelming stress of the office. That's one thing the warmer-than-usual weather out there has been screwing around with. Usually the New York office bills some extra hours in the winter because no one wants to step outside into the cold. But when it's 70 degrees in January, people want to be outside. At least they have BlackBerries so the partners can coerce them back in. I e-mailed the people who make the BlackBerry to suggest a new feature for the next version: a buzzer that emits a small electric shock, so that whenever someone gets a new message, they really feel it in their veins and we can condition them to stay in the office instead of trying to work remotely. Keep 'em at their desks, that's the goal.

As if there weren't enough reasons to be out here instead of in Manhattan, this odor should get us a few more applications for transfer. The transfer program is terrific. People are so grateful for a change of scenery that they're willing to do pretty much whatever we say. Not that they aren't anyway. Really it's just a cornucopia of riches. Everyone's been beaten down so much that they listen to whatever we say. Too bad they're all incompetent.

2007-01-05T15:48:00.000-08:00

There's a rat in the office. Well, there's two. There's the ingrate female associate down the hall who keeps filing sexual harassment complaints when the older tax partners innocently look down her blouse and show her their genitals. But there's also an actual rat running through the halls, gray and furry like my secretary. I hate when we see pests in the office (again, more pests than usual, since there are tons of pests in the office every day, asking for their salary checks on time and clearer instructions on their assignments and bathroom breaks). We called the exterminator, but his schedule was booked until this evening, so we're still waiting. I've stationed an associate outside my office to catch the rat if he tries to come in. The associate's getting bored, but like I told him, it's better than document review and if he doesn't do it he's getting sent to the Bangkok office. So he's diligently doing his job. We had a rat in the house once. I think it was there looking to mate with its close relative, my wife. It showed up right when her parents did one Christmas, which I don't think was a mere coincidence.

I'm picking up Anonymous Son from school today and we're going to drive up the coast, play some catch on the beach, grab some dinner, and have some father-son bonding time. My daughter's resigned to the fact that he's my favorite, which shows some smarts on her part, because he is. She can play Home Shopping Network with her mother, or whatever it is my wife does to amuse herself all day.

So I'm heading out of the office in just a bit, but the associate guarding me from the rat is sticking around for a while. I think the rat might be able to squeeze under the closed door, so I need him stationed there all weekend until I get back. I've given him a plate of cheese he can share with the rat in case he gets hungry.

Have a good weekend, and on Monday I'll share some details about the case I'm currently working on.

2007-01-04T12:00:00.000-08:00

I overheard someone in the office talking about Harriet Miers resigning from her job as White House Counsel. What a quitter. She's like the associates here who leave after six years just because they want to start families or finally have time to go to the bathroom. You'll have time to go to the bathroom after you retire. For now, be a man and hold it in. They make products that can help you deal with it. We don't need people wasting valuable time on the toilet when they don't have to. Medical science. It's helped the firm a lot. Calorie restrictive diets not only help people live longer but also minimize meal breaks. Caffeine helps reduce the need for sleep. Imodium can prevent the necessity of trips to the bathroom. People who insist on breaks are weak and deserve the same fate as Ms. Miers. They should be nominated to the Supreme Court and forced to withdraw in disgrace. The quotes I've seen about Ms. Miers's service have been pathetic. Six years, it's a hard job, stop whining. Six years is nothing. I haven't even seen my brother in six years. And lots of jobs are hard. If Harriet Miers ever sent me a resume, I would shred it, then make an associate gather all the shreddings and tape them back together, then shred it again, and then have another associate gather those shreddings and tape them back together, and then have a third associate shred the first two associates and hide their bodies. That's what I think of Harriet Miers. I sent my resume in to the White House Recruitment Office in case they're still considering replacements.

2007-01-03T18:22:00.000-08:00

I got an e-mail this afternoon from an associate who I'd put to work over the holiday with an assignment, asking if I wanted to meet to discuss now that we're all back in the office. Honestly, until she sent the e-mail, I'd forgotten all about the thing I told her to do. I'm still not entirely sure what she's working on. In a moment of frustration about something unrelated at home (Anonymous Wife wants a new bathroom... she's decided the toilet is too high off the ground and the shower knobs aren't delicate enough to get the temperature exactly where she likes it... but that's a post for another day), I called into my office the first associate I could think of and just started rattling off demands and claiming it all needed to be done over the holidays.

Basically I picked a deal off my list of open matters and told her I thought there might be a problem with some clause in the contract and she should do some research and make sure we were in the clear, but I didn't write down anything about what I told her, which clause it was, what I told her the problem was, and where I told her to look. You do this long enough and you internalize a set of generic assignment commands that can apply to pretty much anything and make the associates think you need something real when actually you're just inventing it on the spot. That's part of the magic more generally when you're a lawyer. We have this vocabulary of legal terminology and specific words that only we understand and can use to shut down and intimidate the common man. Clients can't fight you if they don't know what you're talking about. And associates assume we're all infallible gods, so when we tell them something and they aren't following, the great thing is that they assume it's their fault and beat themselves up until they think they can make sense of it. They're afraid to challenge us, afraid to ask for clarification, afraid to seem dumb.

So this associate spent much of the holiday week here, working on something I'll have to cross off the bill anyway because it's unnecessary busy work, and when we meet tomorrow I'll pretend what she did was fine and ask some probing questions and file it away with all the other stuff I've gotten from associates that I didn't really need, and she'll feel okay about it and I'll feel okay about it and the world will go on.

Of course, when she asked if an informal memo would be fine, I couldn't resist throwing an additional wrinkle into the whole thing. "I'd rather see it in PowerPoint, thanks." So she'll probably be up all night doing whatever it is you do with PowerPoint. I'm fortunate enough that by the time we started concentrating too heavily on slides I was senior enough that there were people to do it all for me. I love the animations. I need to get my son to teach me how to work it.

The toilet's too high? Is she shrinking? If anything, she's growing. I got her a necklace for Christmas and she says it's too tight. I don't know what's happening to make her neck grow. Maybe it's the Botox. She's seeing an astrologist tomorrow to see if she can figure it out.

2007-01-02T14:44:00.000-08:00

People have been straggling back in here all day, after as many as three full days away from the office for some of them. Ridiculous, obviously. Christmas right on top of New Years means it ends up being a couple of weeks when hardly any work gets done and everyone is unfortunately cheerful. The big news here is the cell phone video of the weekend's hanging that's being passed around the firm and shared over e-mail. We tried to keep the hanging a secret, because we didn't want word to get out that we're executing our lowest-performing associate of the year, but someone snuck in and taped it and now it's a real mess. I was on the Rope Subcommittee and ended up giving an associate about 40 hours of work researching how much slack we had to leave in the rope and how far we needed to let the associate drop such that he wouldn't slowly strangle to death but also wouldn't get decapitated. We did the decapitation thing last year but it ends up being a real mess, even more than you'd imagine. We've all seen medical textbooks but until you have to clean up after a decapitation (and of course I didn't -- but my secretary told me all about it) you don't know what it's really like inside a person's neck.

The other news, of course, is President Ford's death at the age of 93. Another data point that being President isn't nearly as taxing as a job like this, where no one really tends to live past 70 or 72. I was in junior high and high school when Ford was in office, and I remember agreeing very much with his pardon of Nixon at the time. Nixon's "crimes" just didn't seem so terrible. We've done worse. In fact, I'm doing worse right now. I can't really share any more details about it.

All kidding aside, I do want to wish you all a happy new year, filled with inattentive clients and easily-misled judges. In celebration of a brand new year, I'm planning to return to a 5-posts-per-week schedule. Your long blog-reading nightmare is finally over. I hope to make amends for the relative neglect over here for the past few months. So tell your friends, colleagues, and clients: new posts every day. Now get back to work: the billable counter's back at zero and you have a lot of ground to make up from yesterday.

2006-12-21T20:55:00.000-08:00

My stocking's not filled entirely with coal this Christmas: I just set up a free holiday e-card over at the Anonymous Law Firm site. A perfect gift for people who deserve nothing more than a free holiday e-card.

2006-12-21T15:02:00.000-08:00

Unfortunately, it's holiday gift time. I've hated this practice ever since I started here. I didn't give my secretary anything my first year as an associate. I didn't know we were supposed to. She quit the day after Christmas. So then I knew. Since becoming a member of the senior leadership team, I've put together a memo every December listing all of the support staff people and some characteristics people can use to identify them, since it's not like we can be expected to remember their names. I happen to be good at names, but most of my associates are instead good at other things, like wasting my time and the firm's money. So I put together this "Mandatory Holiday Wealth Transfer Program" memo and send it around so everyone gets what's coming to them and all of us who are fortunate enough to be smart enough to be important in life can give a little back to the sad folks who answer our phones and type our documents. I thought it might be helpful for any readers at firms that don't distribute a document like this to take a look at mine for guidance this holiday season, so I've cut and pasted it below.

MANDATORY HOLIDAY WEALTH TRANSFER PROGRAM 2006

To: Attorneys

Once again, we're all forced by social custom to help the less fortunate among us afford food and shelter for the holiday season. Below are some guidelines for holiday tipping. Just as we do regarding your bonuses, feel free to adjust based on your subjective evaluation of people's performance, whether or not it bears any resemblance to reality.

As previously explained in the memo titled SALARY SHARE CALCULATION FOR HOLIDAY BONUS PURPOSES (12/18/06), one "share" as listed below is equivalent to 0.01% of your salary plus bonus, before taxes. Thus, if your salary+bonus is $200K, one "share" for purposes of these guidelines would be $20.

Your personal secretary: 10 shares

Each secretary (up to 4) in your local secretary pool: 2-3 shares

Secretary coordinator (the woman with the funny looking hats): 3-5 shares, if you have changed secretaries multiple times this calendar year and required her assistance.

Any paralegals you work closely with: 10 shares

Document pool workers you can identify by sight: 5 shares

The pastry guy with the narrow eyes: 1 share

The hirsute woman who cleans the offices: 2 shares or some leftover food

The copy machine repairman with the bad breath: 1 share if he has been of service to you in the past year, otherwise you are better served avoiding him

Creepy security guard: 3 shares

Hiring partner: 10 shares, or a nice bottle of wine

You should try and refrain from handing your gifts out before Christmas Day, since we want to encourage attendance at work by you and also by the people in line to receive the gifts. If they stay home, they deserve whatever gift penalties they end up receiving. In addition, please give them checks instead of cash -- most of them do not have the self-control to save their cash until they get home and will spend it on drugs and beer instead. We want to try and avoid a repeat of last year's Secretary Rave on the 38th floor conference room.

Best wishes for a billable holiday season.

2006-12-16T12:58:00.000-08:00

[I just discovered my book is on the Rocky Mountain News "favorite books of 2006" list (link here). I'm quite flattered. Perhaps Colorado's not a second-tier state after all.]

2006-12-15T11:34:00.000-08:00

Just got back upstairs after a fire drill. The guy in the office next to me weighs about 300 pounds, from a life of junk food and never getting up from his chair. When he started at the firm 7 years ago he weighed about 160 pounds, played basketball every weekend, and wouldn't even touch the free cookies in the attorney lounge. But he's put on about 20 pounds every year since and now he's a monster. Hasn't really bought any new clothing either, so everything's unbearably tight on him. It's embarrassing to even look at him, so we try to make sure his door stays closed, and we've certainly stopped letting him meet with clients or recruits. The cleaning staff got upset when we made them go into his office and sweep up the crumbs so we've left him to fend for himself in that department too. He hasn't done a very good job, because he really can't reach the floor anymore. In sum, he's a disaster. Why his story is relevant to today's fire drill: clearly he can't get down the stairs, and even more important, he knows it. We send out e-mails in advance of the fire drills, so people know not to schedule conference calls or associate time-outs in the janitor's closet during that time. The drill was supposed to be at 11AM. At 10:50, I see Fat Man leaving his office, for the first time since '03 or so. He told me he'd see me downstairs. And then I watched him get into the elevator. We got downstairs and there he was, an ice cream sandwich in each hand. I don't even know where you get an ice cream sandwich in the building at 11AM. I think he might have taken them with him from his office, in case he got winded riding the elevator. In a real fire, he's obviously not going to make it. I'm not sure that's a terrible thing.

Someone e-mailed me about the new same-sex marriage law in New Jersey, allowing civil unions. My e-mailer wanted my thoughts. I think she assumes I have some opinion about this. I don't know why I would. I don't care who gets married. Same gender, opposite gender, it doesn't matter, no one's ever home anyway. Marriage is meaningless. No one here sees his or her spouse for more than a couple of hours a week anyway, so why should it matter who or what they're married to. Even if I had a problem with the idea of same-sex marriage, and I don't know why I would, it certainly wouldn't matter in practice. Let them ban all marriage, let them force arranged marriage, let them change the whole marriage regime, it simply doesn't matter for anyone I know or work with. Marriage is a fiction designed to enable someone to stop dating. There are people here who got married in 1993 and still haven't taken a honeymoon.

2006-11-28T08:27:00.000-08:00

As I suspected she might, the associate I invited over for Thanksgiving ended up calling to cancel a few hours before dinner. She wasn't feeling well, or so she said. I think she just got cold feet about having to spend the evening at a partner's house, without any other associates to share the experience with and deflect some of the attention away from her. It could also have to do with the phone call I made to one of my colleagues earlier in the day, asking him to spring some "urgent" work on the associate, just to give her a little bit of added stress and tension in case she did end up deciding to show up. My spies in the office tell me she was at work for about 9 hours on Thanksgiving Day, and then 12 more on Friday. So at least she got a small vacation from the usual 16-hour days.

I happened to catch a segment on ABC's World News Tonight last evening. The piece was about professionals working longer hours today than ever before. They interviewed an attorney in Orlando, Florida who is trying to make partner at his firm and said he gets into work early in the morning and sometimes will work straight through until 9 PM, then go home for a short nap, and come back in at 1 AM and work through the next day. Only in a third-tier city like Orlando can someone go home at 9 PM for a nap. How ridiculous. The correspondent asked his wife if he's ever home for dinner or to tuck the kids into bed, and she laughed. The correspondent asked the attorney if he thinks he could keep this lifestyle up forever. He said hopefully he can. Well of course he can, with that nap every night! Naps are for the office, not for home. Home is for working remotely.

If I ever saw one of my associates on World News Tonight, I'd be pretty upset. They shouldn't be talking to the media. I bet his firm was not so thrilled to see him on TV. He might have to give up those naps for a few weeks if he wants to maintain a chance for partnership.

Without the associate interloper, Thanksgiving turned out to be excellent. I do an annual cranberry hunt with my kids. I hide a hundred cranberries around the house. Under rugs, inside the laundry hamper, in the pockets of dress shirts, behind the couch cushions, places like that. It's then a contest between my son and daughter to see who can find the most cranberries. The winner gets twenty dollars. But the real fun is watching the housekeeper's horror for the next two weeks as she finds crushed cranberries staining everything in the house and she has to clean it all up or she gets replaced. We also do a sweet potato fight with the leftovers. It's a lot of fun.

-----------------

One of my associates e-mailed me this morning that she's leaving the firm to become a writer. Ha. She told me she's going to a free panel discussion in New York tomorrow evening, Wednesday the 29th, about lawyers-turned-writers (information here). Three people are on the panel, including the one who wrote my Anonymous Lawyer novel. I hear you can buy a copy for $5 off the cover price and get it signed by the author. Exciting. Hope to see a few of you there.

2006-11-21T08:39:00.000-08:00

I'm in the office early today, trying to catch up on some work. I've been busy for the past few days finishing up a proposal for a non-fiction book I'm hoping to write. It's about a pair of associates the firm hired a few years back. They started out promising, but we soon realized they couldn't handle the workload and they ended up tragically collapsing in a conference room. It was 3 A.M., and even though normally the firm would still be pretty busy at that hour, it was Christmas Eve, they were the only ones left on their side of the hallway, no one heard anything, and we weren't able to get them medical attention until two days later. So they died. I've long maintained that the firm was not at fault, despite what their families think. But I figured it was finally time to set the record straight in print, so I've put together my proposal for the book: "If We Killed Them, Here's What Their Billable Records Would Look Like." Judith Regan has shown some interest. I expect it to be a pretty quick sale on the open market, and I can probably squirrel the money away somewhere so the families can't collect on the civil judgment they earned a few years back.

The book proposal hasn't been the only thing taking up my time. We decided to do a recruiting event on Friday night for some of the 2Ls who have just decided to take their offers. We took them to the Laugh Factory in West Hollywood and everyone was thrilled that one of the performers that night was Kramer from a program called "Seinfeld." I've never seen the "Seinfeld" program. I'm always at the office when it airs. I wish they would air the reruns more often, at some more convenient times, so I could eventually catch an episode or two, but it's never worked out that way. In any case, the associates all seemed to enjoy the show, although it ended earlier than I expected it would. I was distracted by some BlackBerry messages I needed to answer, so I didn't actually hear any of the performance. I'm able to tune things out when I work, even in a noisy comedy club.

I'm starting to put together plans for the firm's annual holiday party. It falls under my domain because we only have the party as a recruitment vehicle. If it was up to the partners, we'd skip it entirely, but recruits like to see some evidence of fun at the office, so we do it, invite the incoming associate class if they're in the area, get a chocolate fountain or two, and let the support staff take a twenty-minute break to enjoy some complimentary hot cocoa and half a biscotti. I've sent out an e-mail trying to form a "Spirit Subcommittee" to choose where in the office we should hang the blue streamer someone found on the street the morning after Halloween and brought into the office to be a holiday decoration. It should be a fun time for everyone.

I got to the office this morning and there was an e-mail from one of my associates, volunteering to work over the Thanksgiving holiday because she's no longer in touch with her family and has nowhere to go to celebrate. I e-mailed her back with some assignments to work on, but then I had somewhat of a change of heart and invited her to spend Thanksgiving with my family if she finishes the work in time. I've never had a second-year associate inside my house before. I'm still contemplating whether I should actually let her eat at the table or if I should set up some sort of satellite Thanksgiving station on the porch and she can eat out there with Anonymous Dog. I'll keep you posted. Best wishes for a good holiday.

2006-11-08T18:51:00.000-08:00

I've been hearing something about an election yesterday, but with a big client deadline it was crunch day at the office and so I don't think anyone's left the building since Monday. I guess I got some e-mails from associates asking if they could take 10 or 15 minutes to go down and vote, but I didn't really know what they were talking about and so I ignored them and had my secretary deactivate their keycards for the day just so they couldn't get out into the elevator bank and escape. I used to think it was my civic duty to vote, but I lost those ideals a long time ago, around when I realized the laws don't apply to people like me anyway, so what's the difference. All the candidates are the same anyway. They're all lawyers who couldn't get a job at a firm and had to go into "public service" just to save face. I don't for one moment think Eliot Spitzer wouldn't rather be a litigation partner at Fried Frank than governor of New York. Well, I guess he wouldn't rather be this litigation partner. But speaking more generally, why wouldn't he? More money, more power, and just as many interns to boss around.

Forget the House and Senate, the one recent election that was actually important around these halls was for 20th Floor Fire Captain. State law requires that we elect a fire captain for every floor, to run a fire drill once every quarter and stay behind in case of a fire. Go down with the ship, and all of that. On most floors, someone has to be cajoled into doing it, threatened with loss of privileges if they don't, maybe allowed an extra hour of pro bono work. But in an unusual turn of events, it turned out that three people on the 20th floor wanted the job, and were willing to fight for it. My incompetent secretary suggested we put the three names in a hat and choose one, but we don't allow associates to wear hats in the building, and that wouldn't be a particularly fun way to do it anyway. I proposed an election. The contestants agreed, under duress. The Whore From Real Estate immediately put up some signs in the hall asking people to vote for her. Stinky brought in doughnuts. The third candidate, The Volunteer Fireman, didn't do much of anything. I suppose he assumed his semi-relevant extracurricular pursuit would sway the voters. As the election neared, I thought I would add a bit of excitement to the process, and I started a small fire with the unsaved memos that an associate had handed me that morning. The associate was upset he'd have to redo all of his work, but I thought it was worth it for the sake of the firm. As soon as I heard the smoke alarm start to ring, I expected the three candidates to leap from their offices and show their leadership skills. But nothing happened. I'd forgotten that we only installed smoke detectors in partner offices, so no one else even knew what was happening. I met up with my fellow partners at the elevators and went outside to wait and see what would happen. An hour later, I returned to my office to find that my secretary had put out the blaze, but no one else had even gotten up to see where the smoke was coming from. They all passed my test. Associates should never leave their desks during a fire until they are actually engulfed in flames. That's for their protection, of course. Keep working until the fire reaches your person. Number one rule of fire safety.

Because of her bold performance, my secretary won the election as a write-in candidate. She only received one vote, but I was the one counting the ballots, and so I declared her the winner. Despite burns to 20% of her body from her efforts in saving my office from the blaze I started, she will do fine in the role when she returns to work.

2006-11-02T08:22:00.000-08:00

I received an e-mail the other day: "My firm just removed the vending machines stocked with sodas, water and fruit juices. In their place, there are new vending machines stocked with red bull (regular and sugar free), coffee drinks and coke (diet and regular). No juice. No water. What's wrong with juice and water? I like juice. When I'm in the office, which is all the time, it was my only source of vitamin C. I'm not happy."

His firm should be ashamed of itself. Why has it taken them so long to make this obvious change? Of course you want your employees hyped up on caffeine (or worse) whenever possible. Red Bull, coffee, bowls of amphetamines in the supply closets, it's all part of what makes a firm function as well as possible. This past season, major league baseball banned the use of amphetamines, leading to a whole series of articles in the mainstream press about how players relied on the pills to get them going -- especially for day games that followed night games the day before -- and how players were going to have to learn to adjust. At the firm, we don't have the luxury of letting our associates "adjust," and pretty much every day at work is a "day game" after a "night game," with an early-morning scrimmage and maybe a 3AM conference call in between. So of course we want to provide every means possible to make sure our employees are awake, alert, and drugged to a point where they can't think straight about what we're doing to them and what their lives have turned into.

Of course, my e-mail correspondent does have a point regarding the Vitamin C. It's not in our financial interest to have employees sick with scurvy, and it's certainly not in our interest to make employees have to leave the building to find juice or other standard vitamins and minerals they need to remain healthy and productive. That's why we started delivering our associates nutrient-rich fluids intravenously throughout the day, in a pilot program we began last spring. We selected two dozen test cases, based on a battery of medical and psychological tests we administered to the entire firm one Sunday morning at an off-site conference, implanted catheters in their arms, and installed the necessary medical equipment in their offices. Whenever they are at their desks, they just plug in and are "fed" everything they need to stay alive. During meetings, when they're forced to leave their desks, we supply them with a cracker, or a few slices of fruit, in order for them to keep their strength up. The unavoidable downside for them is that because of the around-the-clock requirements of the IV feeding, they are no longer allowed to go home. Early results from the pilot program are mixed: while the associates are billing more hours than ever before, more than 40% of them have died. We are constantly looking for ways to refine the program before rolling it out to the entire firm this Christmas.

Incidentally, we've found vending machines can be great moneymakers for the firm, since our employees are a captive audience and have few other options. We've been raising prices slowly but consistently over the past decade, and a 20-ounce bottle of soda is now up to $42.00. We've brought in the companies that stock hotel mini-bars to consult on this initiative.

2006-10-29T23:20:00.000-08:00

I've kept silent for too long regarding my thoughts about Congressman Mark Foley. I'm normally eager to write about items in the news, but I thought this situation demanded at least a few weeks to reflect and make sure I didn't say anything that could come back to haunt me in the event I use the leadership experience I've gained at the law firm to move into politics and make a run for office later in life. Certainly the time I've spent convincing law students that this firm is the right choice would serve as terrific practice for convincing voters that I'm the right candidate, or convincing a country that this is the right war, regardless of the truth of either of those statements. And there'd be none of those two-week vacations at the ranch with President Anonymous Lawyer. The government would run more efficiently than ever before with the hours extended by a handful on each end of the day, and all vacation time completely eliminated. I'd also eliminate the Department of Education, since anyone who's bright enough to succeed in this world should be self-motivated enough to teach himself everything he needs to know.

But on to the subject I intended to write about. Mark Foley. People say some terrible things about law firms. They write some awful things about how we treat our paralegals, our support staff, our associates. They complain about the hours, and the make-work. About the stress, and the lack of ownership. We're accused of lots of terrible things. But we're never accused of *that* terrible thing. Well, except for my colleague at Cravath, who I guess was accused of exactly that terrible thing. But he's an exception. As far as the rest of us, or at least a strong majority of us, we may do some bad things, but we don't do *that*. Even if any of us wanted to, it would be difficult. With the hours people spend here, they don't really get enough sleep to look their best, or enough exercise to stay in shape. There's nothing appealing about a puffy-eyed, pale, soft-in-the-middle, tired young intern. So even if we were tempted, why bother? It's not worth it.

Before I wrote this post, I wanted to make sure I wasn't speaking inaccurately. So I went into the computer system and harvested all of the instant message conversations over the past three years at the firm. I had a few of my associates comb through them for anything questionable. I thought I'd reproduce a few of the exchanges the associates found:

LuvTax59: what r u wearing?
179LSAT: blue shirt, khaki pants
LuvTax59: me 2
179LSAT: yah, everyone is
LuvTax59: i have the latest tax code in my office. want it?
179LSAT: no thanx, it's online
LuvTax59: ok, no problem

...

1944SecAct: wish u were here
LawStud1989: why?
1944SecAct: i need to fax something and my secretary went home
LawStud1989: do u need help with the fax?
1944SecAct: i do, it is v. confusing
LawStud1989: ok, i will come by l8r
1944SecAct: what r u wearing?
LawStud1989: blue shirt, khaki pants

...

ILikeBoies: how long is it?
YoungScaliaFan: u already know
ILikeBoies: tell me again
YoungScaliaFan: why?
ILikeBoies: i just want to hear you say it again
YoungScaliaFan: it's really long
ILikeBoies: how long?
YoungScaliaFan: so long
ILikeBoies: give me a number
YoungScaliaFan: guess
ILikeBoies: 9 and a half
YoungScaliaFan: no, longer
ILikeBoies: longer?
YoungScaliaFan: much longer
ILikeBoies: how long?
YoungScaliaFan: the brief is 36 pages -- i can send it to you as a pdf
ILikeBoies: ok, that would be great. i'll go through it and send you back any changes i have. hopefully we can get it off by 5.
YoungScaliaFan: yeah, we can definitely get it off
ILikeBoies: i hope so

2006-10-17T09:43:00.000-07:00

I'm still getting over my disappointment. Yesterday was National Boss Day and no one did a thing for me. I find most holidays -- Easter, Christmas, Thanksgiving -- pretty meaningless, but I thought at least I'd get a card. I went to Hallmark's web site and entered my e-mail address to make sure there wasn't an e-card waiting for me. I thought the notification might have gotten caught by my spam filter, which is set to reject any e-mails containing the words "love," "friend," "vacation," or "I need to leave early." Unfortunately, no such luck. I did, however, find a whole page devoted to National Boss Day, and it only added to my disappointment.

"National Boss Day offers employees an opportunity to recognize those in supervisory positions. Popular ways to say “thanks” include cards, a department lunch, a “goodie” break, flowers or gifts. Hallmark offers 47 Boss’s Day cards. Many express appreciation for the ways bosses manage people, respect for their handling tough workloads, and gratitude for the coaching they provide."

My slaves and underlings ought to appreciate the efforts I put in for them. The way I manage them. I manage every hour of every day for most of them. Surely that should be worth at least a "goodie" break.

"National Boss Day began in 1958 when Patricia Bays Haroski, then an employee at State Farm Insurance Company in Deerfield, Ill., registered the holiday with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Ms. Haroski wanted to designate a day to show her appreciation for her boss and others in that role. She also hoped to improve the relationship between employees and supervisors. She believed young employees often do not realize the challenges managers face."

Ms. Haroski is right. Young employees don't realize how hard it is to be in charge. I long for the days when I was just a young associate, with only the pressure to bill three thousand hours a year. I didn't have to worry about finding clients, finding recruits, keeping people motivated and happy, figuring out how to get the best out of my associates, paralegals, and the devoted support staff.

Okay, that probably went too far and ruined the joke. What kind of garbage holiday is National Boss Day? It's like Secretary's Day, Veterans Day, and Mother's Day. These aren't real holidays. These are fake occasions invented by the greeting card industry to manipulate idiots into buying cards and sending flowers. I don't understand our culture's obsession with flowers. Flowers die. Why do people want to put something on their desk that's going to die in a matter of days? If they want to watch something die, they should look deep inside themselves and notice their withering hearts and souls. Those are dead enough, why does anyone need flowers too? I went online once to buy my wife some roses. Getting flowers delivered is a ripoff. I ended up getting her a can of Raid instead. We'd been having problems with ants in the garden, and she kept forgetting to do anything about it. It was cheaper, and at least it did something useful.

If anyone had acknowledged National Boss Day to my face I would have given them some extra work to do. Anyone who has time to think about holidays like National Boss Day, New Year's Eve, or Yom Kippur clearly isn't busy enough. And anyone who expects to be able to take time out of their day to celebrate these things is crazy. Celebrations are for weddings and funerals, and maybe one birthday every four years. Everything else is excessive. Unless it's a recruiting-related celebration, in which case it's a necessary evil.

Recruiting season is rapidly coming to a close. The last few schools have their callback interviews in the next couple of weeks. I have three Harvard students flying in next week for callbacks, which is a handful fewer than usual. So I decided to add a bonus day of interviews for them and see if I can get a few more to come out. I'll be up at Harvard this Thursday night. It's a recruiting mission. I'm going to wander around campus looking for diligent students, studying quietly, perhaps checking footnotes or doing some other mindless task we know will help them fit in perfectly in our environment. I'll go up to them and slip them a business card, tell them to call me if they're interested. We'll do a quick first-round interview, and if any of them impress me, I'll hand them a voucher for a plane ticket to come down and see us next week. It's a new recruiting program. Catching them off guard. Hoping they don't realize where I'm from or what I'm doing or what I want from them. I hear the U.S. Army is recruiting in a similar way.

National Boss Day. Ha. I should have baked a cake for the chairman of the firm, to thank him for creating an atmosphere of doubt and uncertainty regarding whether I'm ever going to be named to the executive committee. I'd have filled the cake with poison. I think my secretary has some in her desk, just in case the yelling gets too loud one of these days.

2006-10-03T21:35:00.000-07:00

I haven't been able to post for the past two weeks because I was brutally attacked by one of my associates and am only now regaining the use of my hands. The details of the attack are too graphic to share, but it should suffice to say that I will no longer be keeping in my office any of the crystal trinkets my clients have given me over the years in recognition of the firm's service. I have also installed protective covers on the unused electrical outlets in the room, and my secretary will be doing all of my stapling for the foreseeable future. Obviously the perpetrators have been dealt with appropriately. While it would have caused irreparable harm to the firm and our clients to terminate the employment of all of my attackers at once, we have put together a plan to transition their outstanding assignments to others at the firm as well as new recruits over the next eighteen months, and by April of 2008, the firm will be purged of everyone who had a hand in this nonsense. I look forward to that day.

It has been rewarding to receive good wishes from many of my clients during this time of shock followed by recovery. I have been unable to eat much of the fruit and baked goods that have been sent my way, but I have donated the extras to a variety of third-tier law schools. Even though their students cannot get jobs, at least they can enjoy some Harry & David pears and apples. I especially appreciated the gingerbread cookies that a group of unnamed associates at the firm sent me. Although they had all been mangled much like I was -- arms torn off, eyes gouged out, holes in the centers of their chests -- I choose to believe it was a consequence of the shipping process and not a deliberate attempt on the part of the associates to poke fun at my predicament.

None of my clients have suffered due to my incapacitation, nor has the firm's hiring season. Tech support was able to retrofit my computer system with a device that allowed me to input commands by blowing through a straw, and to interview candidates via teleconference. I am proud to say we will have the strongest class in years, although due to the limitations of the conferencing system I expect the summer associates will be on average less attractive than we as a firm aspire to have, as well as more diverse. I have assured the leadership team that I will overcompensate next year on those two dimensions. In addition, since I have been unable to travel between the office and home, I have been able to bill an additional hour per day over these past two weeks, and this has allowed us to provide health care to one lucky member of the support staff. She is thrilled, despite her pre-existing illness.

Two weeks without the ability to control my bowels have given me time to reflect on my life, and the kind of person I've become. On many levels, I'm ashamed. I didn't take this job hoping to lose my soul. I didn't take this job in the hope that I could lose touch with what really matters in life and become a petty, intolerant, and downright unpleasant middle-aged man. I didn't take this job looking for a way to ruin every other aspect of my life and be left with a comfortable salary and nice things but little fulfillment. I didn't take this job because I was looking for something to distract me so I wouldn't be forced to think about the kind of person I wanted to be and the kind of good I could do in this world. I didn't take this job so I could spend a hundred hours a week in an office, hurting more than I'm helping. No, I took this job because it was here, and it was easy to say yes.

It's in that spirit that I realize what I need to do to help the firm stay competitive in this tough market. I need to make it easier for our candidates to say yes. I need to allow them to accept their offers via e-mail, text message, and AOL Instant Messenger. In fact, I need to go a step further than that. For every candidate we offer a position, I hope, within my lifetime, to be able to offer a system where they receive an electronic device with one button at the center, and that by pushing that button, any time of day, we will be alerted that they accept our offer to join the firm and we can immediately go to their homes and remove all evidence that there is anything else in their lives besides us. This is my goal, and I think we can reach it. I think the technology is close. I hope to see it come to fruition.

To those who brutally attacked me: I harbor no grudge. I understand you were driven to it by the oppressiveness of the corporate law environment. The fact that you were able to rise above the soul-crushing nature of the work and take real action -- that you were able to summon the desire to take matters into your own hands and do something about the way I was treating you -- means that as a firm we simply have not done enough to beat those feelings out of you. It's a lesson that we have to heed. We must work harder to kill your spirits. We must work harder to get rid of that beacon of light at the end of the tunnel that tells you things could be better, if only you maimed your direct superior. We must extinguish your flame, or this could happen again. And next time it might happen to someone less strong than I am, less resolute. It could turn someone against this firm and places like it, and we can't have that. It is critical we end your hope, before it is too late.

To those who stood by me in my time of need: I thank you, and I hope it didn't interfere with your work, because you will be held accountable for the hours missed, even if they were spent at the 72-hour vigil held outside my hospital room, praying I would come out alive. I heard those prayers, and I answered them. Because it is the partners who have the power to answer prayers, and only the partners who have that power.

Full mobility should return to me by the end of the week. In the meantime, I should get back to work. Posts will resume on a regular schedule.

2006-09-20T20:01:00.000-07:00

I've had it with one of my associates, and after today I'm making sure I never work with him again. We had a conference call scheduled for 7:00, and I told him to come by my office and we'll do it from here. So at 6:56, he knocks on the door. I didn't know who it was, I said "come in," and there he was. At 6:56. I looked at my watch. I asked him what he wanted. He said he was there for the conference call. I told him the conference call was at 7:00, he was 4 minutes early, and I didn't want to see him until 7:00. I don't have 4 extra minutes to entertain an associate. My time is valuable and if the call isn't until 7:00, I don't want to see him until 7:00 on the dot. Not a second before. He looked at me and said, "what do you want me to do for 4 minutes?" I told him I didn't care. Walk around the hall. Go to the bathroom. Or, better yet, get some damn work done. It's not just 4 billable minutes for me, but it's 4 billable minutes for him too. Ridiculous. And by then it was 6:57, and I told him to shut the door on the way out. 7:00 comes and he's not back, I start the call myself, and it wasn't until 7:02 -- practically 7:03 -- when he waltzed back in like nothing was wrong. I put my phone on mute, looked at my watch, told him he was late, he stood there like an idiot, and I told him to get out and I'd find another associate to help me. Crazy. He can't even read a clock. How can I expect him to be able to do good work if he can't even tell time. We don't ask that much of these people. All we ask is they show up on time, prepared and ready to work. And he couldn't even do that. I've lost all patience with people like him.

2006-09-12T18:53:00.000-07:00

Got a call today from a telemarketer trying to sell me a cemetery plot for me and Anonymous Wife. I hung up on her. My wife is frustrating enough to be around while I'm alive. I certainly don't want to be stuck next to her for all of eternity. I don't understand the desire to be buried next to one's spouse. Most of the characteristics I find tolerable about Anonymous Wife depend on her being alive. I wouldn't like her quite as much if she were dead. If I were looking for a partner in the grave, the set of characteristics I'd be looking at would be very different. In any case, the call gave me the idea that we ought to put together some plans for a big plot for the firm, and include in every partner's compensation package the right to be buried with the rest of the firm. Why not spend the afterlife among the same people you spend most of your life with. We could bury some incriminating evidence along with the partners, maybe bury some young associates to do the due diligence, and have an entire working law firm even in the great beyond. Although my role as hiring partner would be somewhat pointless when our new additions would join us underground through very different means. Nevertheless, it's an idea to think about, and I'm sure lots of partners would be in favor of it. Especially the ones without families, spending their lives alone and otherwise destined to that fate for the long haul.

2006-09-04T15:05:00.000-07:00

I'm pretty broken up about the death of Steve Irwin, the Crocodile Hunter. I was planning on calling him to help us make the Snakes at the Firm event a reality. In all seriousness, I think his death will rightfully make our associates even more appreciative of the lifestyle we allow them at the firm. There are no wild animals here. There is almost no danger of death from animal bite, sting, or venomous attack. Even if a partner bites you, it's almost certain not to kill you, and the probability is higher than not that he won't even infect you with anything. We did have that scandal when the partner with hepatitis started biting his underlings, but there were almost no casualties and the press really blew that out of proportion. I wasn't terribly thrilled with a lot of what the Crocodile Hunter stood for in life. By making crocodiles and alligators and other wild animals seem less dangerous, he made law firm partners, and the law firm lifestyle, seem more dangerous in comparison. There are only a few careers we can confidently say we compare favorably to, in terms of lifestyle: (1) amusement park beta ride testers, pre-seatbelt stage, (2) assistant to a literary agent, (3) live-in housekeeper, (4) crash test dummy, and (5) person who sticks his hand into the mouths of wild animals. Steve Irwin made that last of those seem safer than we'd like it to seem, and made us seem worse by comparison. I'm sad to hear about his accident, but I do hope it teaches people that we're not such a bad alternative. It wouldn't hurt to have aspiring crocodile tamers come work at the firm anyway. Associates and paralegals need to be treated like wild animals sometimes, tamed, beaten down, stripped of their natural instincts to fight back against oppression, to sleep, to eat, to fight. They need to learn to obey, and they need to learn to listen to their masters. The summer associate program is all about conditioning them, and priming them to listen to us when they return in the fall, to strip them of their defenses, to make them let down their guard, and be open to influence. To turn them into clay we can mold in the image of our founders. To help them become adults. Responsible, legitimate, boring, overworked, exhausted adults. With health care, 401K plans, and no time for their kids. Just like their parents. I did a survey of our associates a few months ago and many of them come from broken homes. It makes sense. They look to me and my colleagues for the conditional love that they're used to. Maybe if they behave, Mommy and Daddy won't fight anymore. Maybe if they do what they're told, no one will yell at them. But they soon learn it doesn't matter. Mommy and Daddy are always going to fight, and there will never be peace. Yet they still hold on to that hope. It's how a firm like this one survives. Associates clinging to the hope that if they work hard enough, long enough, well enough, things will get better. They won't. One day they will get bitten. They will all get bitten. The strong will survive, but they will be different, weakened, lacking in spirit. Just the way we like it. I may not be the crocodile hunter, but I'm the law student hunter, me and all of my colleagues. We find them, we tame them, and then we exploit them for commercial gain. I ate crocodile once. It tasted like clients.

2006-08-28T14:24:00.000-07:00

I watched the Emmy Awards last night, hoping that the PBS Masterpiece Theater showing of "Bleak House," my favorite television event of the year, would win the award for best movie or miniseries. It didn't. But I, along with many viewers I'm sure, was shocked by the opening sequence, which showed Conan O'Brien bouncing around in an airplane before it crashed on an island, spoofing the show "Lost," which happens to take place on the same island we send aging partners once they don't bring enough revenue into the firm. The fake plane crash followed a day's worth of news coverage about the real plane crash in Kentucky, and was clearly in poor taste. It surprised me that someone at NBC didn't notice the parallels and replace it with some stock footage of Hurricane Katrina, or something less timely. But, actually, I feel bad for NBC and the heat they've been taking today for the screwup. It reminds me of a similar incident at the firm a decade ago. It was back in 1992, and one of the new associates had just been caught leaving the office at around 4:00 for some sort of doctor's appointment. Which he hadn't gotten permission for, and his colleagues were naturally sore about the fact he'd left early and they'd been stuck in the office until midnight. So a few of them, on their own, dragged him into one of the open conference rooms and starting beating him up, in full view of anyone who walked past. Normally this would have been seen as somewhat extreme, but understandable given the circumstances, people get a little too worked up sometimes over how many hours their colleagues work, and sometimes want to take matters into their own hands. But, anyway, it was only a week or two after the Rodney King incident, and people started to draw parallels, and it was a pretty big public relations mess that we had to pay some people quite a bit of money to keep quiet about. At least I'd been stuck doing document review that entire quarter and so I was locked in a conference room and had nothing to do with any of it. Of course there was also the incident in 1994 when I was on the associate life committee and we printed up some shirts for the first-years to wear that said "It's all my fault," with a picture of an earthquake fault on it (silly pun, I know), right after the Northridge Earthquake, and then three months later we found out one of our paralegals had died in the earthquake (we just thought she was in the records room) and people felt kind of awkward wearing the shirts, but that wasn't as big an issue as the 1992 incident. So I know how Conan O'Brien must feel about it all. The show also gave me an idea for how we can speed up settlement negotiations. They locked Bob Newhart in a chamber filled with only enough air for three hours, and said if the show ran long, he would die. We should do the same thing with associates when clients are negotiating. Not that they have any control over how long negotiations go, but it starts to get boring sitting in the room after a while, and if I knew that I was going to get to watch an associate die after four hours, it would give me something to look forward to.