I read the ABA article regarding Big Law and the expectations that the law firm has for the associates. I have worked for a “Big Law” firm in a major metropolitan city (Pacific Northwest) and I can tell you that there are no surprises in this presentation. The senior partners / managing partners expect you to please the clients (regardless of ethics, morality or even sometimes the law) to keep everybody happy and have the billable hours keep flowing. In my personal opinion they are self-serving.
Big law could be brought down a notch or two by the state bars who control their behavior but the state bars are filled with cowards who know the big law firms have the assets to crush them like a bug so they go after softer targets.
I worked for a law firm in downtown Seattle who senior partner was the father of the client (who owned a major software firm in Redmond, Washington) and double and triple billed hours however the state bar would not touch them. Why, because at the time the Disciplinary Counsel was trying to get a job at that software company. Incestuous does not even begin to describe the corruption between big law, the businesses that they represent and the state bar who has attorneys that are trying to get a job as ethics counsel in said business.
I appreciate that this comment starts with some attempt at anonymization (big law firm in a major metropolitan city) and then puts in like 4 details that could only be a single office in the world.
I've worked at big and small firms. A partner at a small firm tried making me do something so shady that I went to another attorney and shut it down. I haven't encountered the same at big firms with that type of conduct, but I've seen it repeatedly by solos and small firm opposing counsel. I have encountered at big firms blatant fraudulent billing with that behavior being rewarded by promotion to partner, so I concur with that statement.
“We are in the business of client service—you are the concierge at the Four Seasons, a waiter at Alinea. The client always comes first and is always right. If a client wants a mountain moved, we move it. No questions. As a junior, your ‘clients’ are the associates and partners on the deal team.”
The idea that the client is "always right" and "we" move mountains for them
overlooks the fundamental limitations on how any officer of the court can permissibly advocate. Anyone who has ever had to tell a client "no" understands this. The fact this nonsense shows up in a written presentation is shocking not for its substance (like 11:54, I could see some folks at my old biglaw shop endorsing some of these bullet points), but for its brazenness in saying the quiet part out loud to an audience of junior associates who are learning how to practice law from attorneys who think like this.
For anyone wondering where the mentality leads over time, Enrich's "Servants of the Damned" has a great description of the lengths to which some biglaw firms go in order to please their clients.
I do not have time for books or movies, or this blog. I might be able to spare a second to read ChatGPT's summary of comments on this issue but that's it.
We may all take issues with some of the things in PH handbook – but this is absolutely undebatable: " “WFH is a luxury. Don’t take advantage of it. Buy a full home setup (2 monitors, docking station, keyboard/mouse and a working phone) or come into the office. No poor connections. No excuses.” I would likely add "There is no WFH available at this level of law practice. If you want WFH, look somewhere else."
4:05 – that's just not true. I worked at one of those typical big law bet-the-company litigation firms and they were fine with work from home and gave us equipment to accommodate it. I have a friend who works at another one of those firms and who tries cases that make national news and his firm discourages people from ever going to the office. He goes a couple times a month max and works from home (60 hours a week or whatever) the rest. But maybe the stakes are just so high in your line of work that it's impossible for people to use a VPN.
What sold me on WFH was the telephonic oral arguments during COVID. I had several Ninth Circuit oral arguments during that time. Although I love walking into those beautiful appellate buildings in different cities, when I had several thousand pages of records and only a few minutes to argue it really helped to have several screens open so I could keyword search the answer to a judge's obscure (to me at least) E.R. citation question in a few seconds, instead of thumbing through a huge binder. Also appreciated the extra hour spent running through last-second prep that would have otherwise been spent commuting to the courthouse. I think WFH helps advocates make better arguments, at least in the cold-record context.
Guest
Anonymous
April 12, 2023 7:27 pm
I’d rather hear who everyone’s voting for. So far I’m going with Franco and Nadig. Any recommendations on the last two?
Guest
Anonymous
April 12, 2023 7:41 pm
Not voting from anyone who is at a Large firm because they do not represent smaller firms. Problem that I have is that the people who work for the Federal Defenders Office is that they are probably out of touch with small firm needs. They have a guaranteed income and with a work environment that is better than most of us have.
12:27 here. I don’t see large firm employment as an immediate no vote. I have a lot of friends who know Franco and she’s gotten positive comments so I’m voting for her. Generally I am looking for someone who gets small/solo issues with the Bar though. The person who cited civility in their bio is an automatic no. OBC already appears to be operating under the impression that a bar license means they’re allowed to regulate your private speech. Hell no!
Guest
Anonymous
April 12, 2023 8:12 pm
Who is going to apply to be the next discovery commissioner now that young is leaving
Wow. Is it just me (having lost 3 years in the pandemic), or was this a pretty short stint? Never even had the pleasure of appearing before him, but he's always struck me as smart with a good bench demeanor. That's too bad.
I stand corrected: HM Jon Norheim has a listed base annual salary of 174K and change last year per Transparent Nevada (more than a district court judge). He has been there for a minute though.
Is that total compensation or salary? The former includes retirement benefits. My understanding is that special masters start at about $130k, which isn't that great, especially when you lose the flexibility of private practice. Pay for judicial officers needs to be dramatically increased.
In 2020, Erin Truman made $143,203.20, according to Transparent Nevada. Discovery Commissioners also work for the county, so the time off/flexibility is not as good as judges. I don't know why anyone with a successful practice would accept the role. Agree that pay needs to be increased.
The pay probably doesn't compare at all with private sector. County does provide paid leave (two weeks) plus the holidays and insurance. County also has a rule about starting salary so assume the Masters start around 110K base salary with option for 7% bump first year and 4% thereafter. I think county enjoys paying staff more than the judges as an actual point of pride.
As far as all the BOG discussions of the last few days, and fairly consistently throughout the history of this blog, I'd like to pose a question:
Is it really that thematically simple and clear that the BOG caters to prominent big firms but dumps on the small practitioner, or is that a gross over-simplification, and it is far more nuanced than that?
Solos are more likely to have one-on-one contact with a client. If the case doesn't go in their favor or not exactly the way they want it, they file bar complaints. I have multiple bar complaints from an opposing party who repeatedly lied in court and the judge made findings to that effect. Doesn't mean I did anything wrong. In fact, I won which made the opposing party even more angry. Solos are also less likely to have the funds to mount a decent defense against OBC. Big firms have more money, connections, and fire power than small and solos. OBC would be buried by any one of the larger firms in town. Big firm lawyers also have a lot less contact with clients and the clients they have are typically companies, not individuals. When you add in an OBC who is highly prosecutorial and adopts unreasonable positions regarding attorney discipline, you end up where we are now.
OMG this sounds like a plant for my new website that I promised – will be going live within the next couple hours (possibly in the morning). I am not tech savvy but the domain name and the website have to sync up or connect or something. Thank you.
Andrew Craner needs to be retained. I am voting for Terry Coffing. Sykes and Nadiq. I can't say enough good things about Andrew Craner. He has always gotten back to me when I had questions.
8:13-None that I know off, but he does return the call when 7:41 has a question.
Guest
Anonymous
April 13, 2023 1:11 am
People complain that BOG candidates almost always consist of very long-serving, and highly influential and successful attorneys, with high name recognition, great connections and juice and working for large, highly prestigious firms.
But looking at the field of 13 applicants and the bios they provided, the direct opposite appears to be the case. The list is dominated by attorneys most of us have never heard of, and who have been practicing law for about five minutes. And there are not too many exceptions to my observations, although Terry Coffing would certainly be an exception as he is a well-known, long-serving attorney.
So, anyone reviewing that list of 13 would be hard pressed to conclude that the BOG will continue to be run by well-known attorneys from large firms, and that therefore the BOG will continue to greatly favor large firm attorneys while continuing to dump on the small solos.
Invariably, a few of those small solos will get elected. There are several people on that list of 13 who, by way of example, got licensed from 2017 to 2022, and some of them attended Boyd. Hardly sounds like veteran attorneys of sterling pedigree
Aside from Coffing, who definitely is a veteran attorney, there does not appear to be a veteran attorney on that list, unless someone's definition of a long-serving attorney is someone who has been licensed six or seven years. And, as stated, many of the applicants have not even remotely been licensed that long.
So, don't worry so much about elitism and entitlement from the next BOG. Instead, worry about a lack of experience and probable lack of sufficient competence.
.
@6:11 seems like a comment from a current (very defensive) BoG member. There are numerous candidates with 10-20 years experience. If you think Coffing is the only one with real experience, you haven't read their bios. Conner has 12 years, Craner has 23 years, Franco is approaching 10 years, Kamschror has 10 years, Lambrose has 14 years, Schuler-Hintz has 24 years, Nadig has 17 years, and Sykes has 17 years. That's a lot of experience. I agree someone licensed for a couple years should probably get a bit more experience, but to characterize these candidates as inexperienced and incompetent is just wrong.
8:33-I can't necessarily say you are wrong(about your assertion that 6:11 is a current BOB member) but it seems highly unlikely to me.
It is true that 6:11 states the opinion that it is their belief that the current 13 is a thin field of candidates, generally lacking in quality and/or quantity of legal experience. But when 6:11 states what the common view is concerning the currently serving members(that they are entitled elitists, and long-term lawyers who protect big firms at the cost of solos) 6:11 does not take any issue with that representation or its veracity. 6:11merely observes that it cannot really be said about the current crop of candidates as many of them seem to have only been licensed a few years which, by the way, is quite true.
So, 6:11 does not seem impressed by the current BOG members as a whole, nor is 6:11 impressed with the latest slate of candidates. And I share that opinion. I have real problems with the current board, but as to the current candidates(who do seem, as a whole, to be relatively inexperienced), based on their written statements, most of them don't even offer the pretense of wanting to change anything,.
8:33-But about half the applicants have been licensed like from 2017 to 2022, and that is absurd. So, 6:11 is at least partially right, but does over-state their case.
Eric Kohli has over 20 years experience in patent litigation, is active in the community and licensed in multiple states. He’s got my vote!
Guest
Anonymous
April 13, 2023 1:13 am
This brings tears to my eye. How perfect. How true. Words to live by. Interview a young associate today and all they want is WFH (sort of), four day "work" weeks, 6 weeks vacation, and be sure to respect their feelings….I understand there are those who prefer to do the least, but there are so many government jobs out there. Why impose this on us? Can the private sector get the producers so we can pay the taxes that allow the fluff to puff around government agencies?
Words to live by:
• “You are ‘online’ 24/7. No exceptions, no excuses.”
• “PH is an AmLaw20 law firm. You’re in the big leagues, which is a privilege, act like it.”
• “We are in the business of client service—you are the concierge at the Four Seasons, a waiter at Alinea. The client always comes first and is always right. If a client wants a mountain moved, we move it. No questions. As a junior, your ‘clients’ are the associates and partners on the deal team.”
• “Timelines/Quality: clients expect everything to be done perfectly and delivered yesterday.”
• “WFH is a luxury. Don’t take advantage of it. Buy a full home setup (2 monitors, docking station, keyboard/mouse and a working phone) or come into the office. No poor connections. No excuses.”
• “Take ownership of everything you do. Once you touch a document/work stream, you own every mistake in it—fair or not.”
“We are in the business of client service—you are the concierge at the Four Seasons, a waiter at Alinea. The client always comes first and is always right. If a client wants a mountain moved, we move it. No questions. As a junior, your ‘clients’ are the associates and partners on the deal team.”
Dedicated customer service doesn't require this statement, unbounded by ethics or concern for well being and mental health. If I'm at a family event, I'm not taking a call from anyone. It's not a virtue to make oneself so fully available for anything at anytime, no matter how trivial. It's a personal failure.
"Not how this job works." Maybe not in-person external client-facing aspects of this job, but easily 80-90% of the remaining attorney work and support staff assignments have little to do with the physical location of the employee. Are you grumpy because if they work from home when you're in the office, you'll have to get your own coffee? Have you considered getting the best person for the job and being flexible on where they base their operations out of? That way, you can get the best paralegal, not just the best paralegal that wants to live in Las Vegas.
@9:54. Yes, you will refuse to take the call during a family event. And you also make 1/4 or less of what attorneys make at Paul Hastings. If you want to start at $250K a year out of law school, you're damn right you will jump when I say jump and ditch any family event when the partner tells you to. Or you can get out and go back to living like a serf. At a certain salary, you have no basis to ever say no to the boss. That's the reality. You can leave and take a lower paying job, but you can't expect to have a good work life balance if you stay at such a job. You are being paid to forsake your life, that's the point.
9:54 AM here. I'm not sure we're in disagreement about the expectations, only whether it is worth it. A cunning man once said, "You can buy anything in this world for money." A wise man, when pressed as to how much money had had answered, "We have sufficient for our needs." Both principals are at play here.
I hate to admit it, but if I am being honest, I *would* have taken a job like Paul Hastings out of law school if it had been offered to me. The exclusivity and pay would have beguiled me and I would have partaken. However, now, years later, with experience in the lone and dreary world, I am grateful that opportunity was not available to me. I would have been a mediocre associate at best, and worse, a failed spouse and parent. Wasn't it Garth Brooks who sang that sometimes God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers?
I have sufficient for my needs, and honestly, quite a bit beyond that. I want to work less and relish life more. I am happy to forego some of the money offered by the cunning man to have more time with the people I love. Paul Hastings could offer me $800,000 a year right now, today, and I would turn it down. If I'm at my child's event, I'm going to be at that child's event. Calls get sent to voicemail. Maybe you can't buy anything in this world for money after all.
6:11-Looking at the admission dates of the applicants it is not as bad as you say. About half of them have been licensed over ten years. With that understood, very few of the have been licensed 15 or 20 years. So, yes, in total, it is a relatively inexperienced ballot of names.
Your better point is that this list, relatively speaking when compared to ballots of the past, has startling low name-recognition value. About 10 of these 13 applicants are almost totally unknown to most practicing attorneys.
And worse yet, the mission statements of most of them clearly demonstrate that they will do nothing but to maintain the BOG status quo so that they can bask in their own self-aggrandizement if elected. They will relish, at the expense of our Bar dues, the elaborate junkets and vacations, but thinly disguised as supposed seminars and conferences.
Guest
Anonymous
April 13, 2023 4:42 pm
If the sausage gets made, I don't care if it happens at home or in the office. Most of the complaints about WFH come from dinosaurs.
I read the ABA article regarding Big Law and the expectations that the law firm has for the associates. I have worked for a “Big Law” firm in a major metropolitan city (Pacific Northwest) and I can tell you that there are no surprises in this presentation. The senior partners / managing partners expect you to please the clients (regardless of ethics, morality or even sometimes the law) to keep everybody happy and have the billable hours keep flowing. In my personal opinion they are self-serving.
Big law could be brought down a notch or two by the state bars who control their behavior but the state bars are filled with cowards who know the big law firms have the assets to crush them like a bug so they go after softer targets.
I worked for a law firm in downtown Seattle who senior partner was the father of the client (who owned a major software firm in Redmond, Washington) and double and triple billed hours however the state bar would not touch them. Why, because at the time the Disciplinary Counsel was trying to get a job at that software company. Incestuous does not even begin to describe the corruption between big law, the businesses that they represent and the state bar who has attorneys that are trying to get a job as ethics counsel in said business.
I appreciate that this comment starts with some attempt at anonymization (big law firm in a major metropolitan city) and then puts in like 4 details that could only be a single office in the world.
I've worked at big and small firms. A partner at a small firm tried making me do something so shady that I went to another attorney and shut it down. I haven't encountered the same at big firms with that type of conduct, but I've seen it repeatedly by solos and small firm opposing counsel. I have encountered at big firms blatant fraudulent billing with that behavior being rewarded by promotion to partner, so I concur with that statement.
“We are in the business of client service—you are the concierge at the Four Seasons, a waiter at Alinea. The client always comes first and is always right. If a client wants a mountain moved, we move it. No questions. As a junior, your ‘clients’ are the associates and partners on the deal team.”
The idea that the client is "always right" and "we" move mountains for them
overlooks the fundamental limitations on how any officer of the court can permissibly advocate. Anyone who has ever had to tell a client "no" understands this. The fact this nonsense shows up in a written presentation is shocking not for its substance (like 11:54, I could see some folks at my old biglaw shop endorsing some of these bullet points), but for its brazenness in saying the quiet part out loud to an audience of junior associates who are learning how to practice law from attorneys who think like this.
For anyone wondering where the mentality leads over time, Enrich's "Servants of the Damned" has a great description of the lengths to which some biglaw firms go in order to please their clients.
For those who don't have time to read Servants of the Damned, maybe just watch Keanu Reeves in The Advocate.
I do not have time for books or movies, or this blog. I might be able to spare a second to read ChatGPT's summary of comments on this issue but that's it.
We may all take issues with some of the things in PH handbook – but this is absolutely undebatable: " “WFH is a luxury. Don’t take advantage of it. Buy a full home setup (2 monitors, docking station, keyboard/mouse and a working phone) or come into the office. No poor connections. No excuses.” I would likely add "There is no WFH available at this level of law practice. If you want WFH, look somewhere else."
4:05 – that's just not true. I worked at one of those typical big law bet-the-company litigation firms and they were fine with work from home and gave us equipment to accommodate it. I have a friend who works at another one of those firms and who tries cases that make national news and his firm discourages people from ever going to the office. He goes a couple times a month max and works from home (60 hours a week or whatever) the rest. But maybe the stakes are just so high in your line of work that it's impossible for people to use a VPN.
What sold me on WFH was the telephonic oral arguments during COVID. I had several Ninth Circuit oral arguments during that time. Although I love walking into those beautiful appellate buildings in different cities, when I had several thousand pages of records and only a few minutes to argue it really helped to have several screens open so I could keyword search the answer to a judge's obscure (to me at least) E.R. citation question in a few seconds, instead of thumbing through a huge binder. Also appreciated the extra hour spent running through last-second prep that would have otherwise been spent commuting to the courthouse. I think WFH helps advocates make better arguments, at least in the cold-record context.
I’d rather hear who everyone’s voting for. So far I’m going with Franco and Nadig. Any recommendations on the last two?
Not voting from anyone who is at a Large firm because they do not represent smaller firms. Problem that I have is that the people who work for the Federal Defenders Office is that they are probably out of touch with small firm needs. They have a guaranteed income and with a work environment that is better than most of us have.
12:27 here. I don’t see large firm employment as an immediate no vote. I have a lot of friends who know Franco and she’s gotten positive comments so I’m voting for her. Generally I am looking for someone who gets small/solo issues with the Bar though. The person who cited civility in their bio is an automatic no. OBC already appears to be operating under the impression that a bar license means they’re allowed to regulate your private speech. Hell no!
Who is going to apply to be the next discovery commissioner now that young is leaving
Where did you hear this?
Confirmed with him
Where is he going?
Back to ARM
Wow. Is it just me (having lost 3 years in the pandemic), or was this a pretty short stint? Never even had the pleasure of appearing before him, but he's always struck me as smart with a good bench demeanor. That's too bad.
Anyone have intel on why Young is leaving? He is really good. Very detailed oriented.
What does he get paid as Discovery Commissioner? For some reason, it doesn't show up on Transparent Nevada. I wonder if pay is a factor.
I think HMs earn about 110K to 126K per year. You can check via names of current HMs (Norheim/White/Mastin – now a judge)
I stand corrected: HM Jon Norheim has a listed base annual salary of 174K and change last year per Transparent Nevada (more than a district court judge). He has been there for a minute though.
Is that total compensation or salary? The former includes retirement benefits. My understanding is that special masters start at about $130k, which isn't that great, especially when you lose the flexibility of private practice. Pay for judicial officers needs to be dramatically increased.
In 2020, Erin Truman made $143,203.20, according to Transparent Nevada. Discovery Commissioners also work for the county, so the time off/flexibility is not as good as judges. I don't know why anyone with a successful practice would accept the role. Agree that pay needs to be increased.
The pay probably doesn't compare at all with private sector. County does provide paid leave (two weeks) plus the holidays and insurance. County also has a rule about starting salary so assume the Masters start around 110K base salary with option for 7% bump first year and 4% thereafter. I think county enjoys paying staff more than the judges as an actual point of pride.
Bonnie Bulla was making 150k (over 200k with benefits and PERS) before she went to the CoA.
I could see why someone would want this job.
As far as all the BOG discussions of the last few days, and fairly consistently throughout the history of this blog, I'd like to pose a question:
Is it really that thematically simple and clear that the BOG caters to prominent big firms but dumps on the small practitioner, or is that a gross over-simplification, and it is far more nuanced than that?
I'll say it: solo's go stir crazy and are a pain in the ass to deal with…
Solos are more likely to have one-on-one contact with a client. If the case doesn't go in their favor or not exactly the way they want it, they file bar complaints. I have multiple bar complaints from an opposing party who repeatedly lied in court and the judge made findings to that effect. Doesn't mean I did anything wrong. In fact, I won which made the opposing party even more angry. Solos are also less likely to have the funds to mount a decent defense against OBC. Big firms have more money, connections, and fire power than small and solos. OBC would be buried by any one of the larger firms in town. Big firm lawyers also have a lot less contact with clients and the clients they have are typically companies, not individuals. When you add in an OBC who is highly prosecutorial and adopts unreasonable positions regarding attorney discipline, you end up where we are now.
OMG this sounds like a plant for my new website that I promised – will be going live within the next couple hours (possibly in the morning). I am not tech savvy but the domain name and the website have to sync up or connect or something. Thank you.
2:32 back – just want to say to 2:29 – you are 100% correct in your brief analysis
To what is 2:32 referring? Was there a comment that was deleted or something?
He's the guy who claims going to sue SBN in wrong jurisdiction and then will transfer his life savings to SBN in atty fees after losing.
Lambrose, Kampschror and Nadiq
Andrew Craner needs to be retained. I am voting for Terry Coffing. Sykes and Nadiq. I can't say enough good things about Andrew Craner. He has always gotten back to me when I had questions.
Earnest question: what is the change and improvement for which Craner has advocated and accomplished?
8:13-None that I know off, but he does return the call when 7:41 has a question.
People complain that BOG candidates almost always consist of very long-serving, and highly influential and successful attorneys, with high name recognition, great connections and juice and working for large, highly prestigious firms.
But looking at the field of 13 applicants and the bios they provided, the direct opposite appears to be the case. The list is dominated by attorneys most of us have never heard of, and who have been practicing law for about five minutes. And there are not too many exceptions to my observations, although Terry Coffing would certainly be an exception as he is a well-known, long-serving attorney.
So, anyone reviewing that list of 13 would be hard pressed to conclude that the BOG will continue to be run by well-known attorneys from large firms, and that therefore the BOG will continue to greatly favor large firm attorneys while continuing to dump on the small solos.
Invariably, a few of those small solos will get elected. There are several people on that list of 13 who, by way of example, got licensed from 2017 to 2022, and some of them attended Boyd. Hardly sounds like veteran attorneys of sterling pedigree
Aside from Coffing, who definitely is a veteran attorney, there does not appear to be a veteran attorney on that list, unless someone's definition of a long-serving attorney is someone who has been licensed six or seven years. And, as stated, many of the applicants have not even remotely been licensed that long.
So, don't worry so much about elitism and entitlement from the next BOG. Instead, worry about a lack of experience and probable lack of sufficient competence.
.
@6:11 seems like a comment from a current (very defensive) BoG member. There are numerous candidates with 10-20 years experience. If you think Coffing is the only one with real experience, you haven't read their bios. Conner has 12 years, Craner has 23 years, Franco is approaching 10 years, Kamschror has 10 years, Lambrose has 14 years, Schuler-Hintz has 24 years, Nadig has 17 years, and Sykes has 17 years. That's a lot of experience. I agree someone licensed for a couple years should probably get a bit more experience, but to characterize these candidates as inexperienced and incompetent is just wrong.
8:33-I can't necessarily say you are wrong(about your assertion that 6:11 is a current BOB member) but it seems highly unlikely to me.
It is true that 6:11 states the opinion that it is their belief that the current 13 is a thin field of candidates, generally lacking in quality and/or quantity of legal experience. But when 6:11 states what the common view is concerning the currently serving members(that they are entitled elitists, and long-term lawyers who protect big firms at the cost of solos) 6:11 does not take any issue with that representation or its veracity. 6:11merely observes that it cannot really be said about the current crop of candidates as many of them seem to have only been licensed a few years which, by the way, is quite true.
So, 6:11 does not seem impressed by the current BOG members as a whole, nor is 6:11 impressed with the latest slate of candidates. And I share that opinion. I have real problems with the current board, but as to the current candidates(who do seem, as a whole, to be relatively inexperienced), based on their written statements, most of them don't even offer the pretense of wanting to change anything,.
8:33-But about half the applicants have been licensed like from 2017 to 2022, and that is absurd. So, 6:11 is at least partially right, but does over-state their case.
Eric Kohli has over 20 years experience in patent litigation, is active in the community and licensed in multiple states. He’s got my vote!
This brings tears to my eye. How perfect. How true. Words to live by. Interview a young associate today and all they want is WFH (sort of), four day "work" weeks, 6 weeks vacation, and be sure to respect their feelings….I understand there are those who prefer to do the least, but there are so many government jobs out there. Why impose this on us? Can the private sector get the producers so we can pay the taxes that allow the fluff to puff around government agencies?
Words to live by:
• “You are ‘online’ 24/7. No exceptions, no excuses.”
• “PH is an AmLaw20 law firm. You’re in the big leagues, which is a privilege, act like it.”
• “We are in the business of client service—you are the concierge at the Four Seasons, a waiter at Alinea. The client always comes first and is always right. If a client wants a mountain moved, we move it. No questions. As a junior, your ‘clients’ are the associates and partners on the deal team.”
• “Timelines/Quality: clients expect everything to be done perfectly and delivered yesterday.”
• “WFH is a luxury. Don’t take advantage of it. Buy a full home setup (2 monitors, docking station, keyboard/mouse and a working phone) or come into the office. No poor connections. No excuses.”
• “Take ownership of everything you do. Once you touch a document/work stream, you own every mistake in it—fair or not.”
Is that a joke? A candidate asked you to respect their feelings?
Not just attorneys. We have lost 3 support staff in the last 18 months who insisted that they would just work from home. Not how this job works.
“We are in the business of client service—you are the concierge at the Four Seasons, a waiter at Alinea. The client always comes first and is always right. If a client wants a mountain moved, we move it. No questions. As a junior, your ‘clients’ are the associates and partners on the deal team.”
Dedicated customer service doesn't require this statement, unbounded by ethics or concern for well being and mental health. If I'm at a family event, I'm not taking a call from anyone. It's not a virtue to make oneself so fully available for anything at anytime, no matter how trivial. It's a personal failure.
"Not how this job works." Maybe not in-person external client-facing aspects of this job, but easily 80-90% of the remaining attorney work and support staff assignments have little to do with the physical location of the employee. Are you grumpy because if they work from home when you're in the office, you'll have to get your own coffee? Have you considered getting the best person for the job and being flexible on where they base their operations out of? That way, you can get the best paralegal, not just the best paralegal that wants to live in Las Vegas.
@9:54. Yes, you will refuse to take the call during a family event. And you also make 1/4 or less of what attorneys make at Paul Hastings. If you want to start at $250K a year out of law school, you're damn right you will jump when I say jump and ditch any family event when the partner tells you to. Or you can get out and go back to living like a serf. At a certain salary, you have no basis to ever say no to the boss. That's the reality. You can leave and take a lower paying job, but you can't expect to have a good work life balance if you stay at such a job. You are being paid to forsake your life, that's the point.
@10:39 AM,
9:54 AM here. I'm not sure we're in disagreement about the expectations, only whether it is worth it. A cunning man once said, "You can buy anything in this world for money." A wise man, when pressed as to how much money had had answered, "We have sufficient for our needs." Both principals are at play here.
I hate to admit it, but if I am being honest, I *would* have taken a job like Paul Hastings out of law school if it had been offered to me. The exclusivity and pay would have beguiled me and I would have partaken. However, now, years later, with experience in the lone and dreary world, I am grateful that opportunity was not available to me. I would have been a mediocre associate at best, and worse, a failed spouse and parent. Wasn't it Garth Brooks who sang that sometimes God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers?
I have sufficient for my needs, and honestly, quite a bit beyond that. I want to work less and relish life more. I am happy to forego some of the money offered by the cunning man to have more time with the people I love. Paul Hastings could offer me $800,000 a year right now, today, and I would turn it down. If I'm at my child's event, I'm going to be at that child's event. Calls get sent to voicemail. Maybe you can't buy anything in this world for money after all.
@12:40 That Lucifer was a damn liar. Time to look for further light and knowledge elsewhere I guess.
I concur with 12:40
6:11-Looking at the admission dates of the applicants it is not as bad as you say. About half of them have been licensed over ten years. With that understood, very few of the have been licensed 15 or 20 years. So, yes, in total, it is a relatively inexperienced ballot of names.
Your better point is that this list, relatively speaking when compared to ballots of the past, has startling low name-recognition value. About 10 of these 13 applicants are almost totally unknown to most practicing attorneys.
And worse yet, the mission statements of most of them clearly demonstrate that they will do nothing but to maintain the BOG status quo so that they can bask in their own self-aggrandizement if elected. They will relish, at the expense of our Bar dues, the elaborate junkets and vacations, but thinly disguised as supposed seminars and conferences.
If the sausage gets made, I don't care if it happens at home or in the office. Most of the complaints about WFH come from dinosaurs.
Amen sister.
#freebogsballots
#freebonniebulla
#freerjcsecurity