I took my kids to school today. I figured that after yesterday's filing debacle I could be a little leisurely getting into the office today. It's Friday anyway. On Friday all of the associates assume that because it's the end of the week they don't have to do any work. They keep forgetting that since they're in here on the weekend half the time anyway, it's not really the end of the week and they're just creating more work for themselves. There is no end of the week when you're a lawyer. There's barely an end of the day.
When I was an associate I would take advantage by being a real machine on Fridays, helping partners save their weekends. I don't think they realized exactly what I was doing, but they would start to associate me being on their case with them getting weekends at home, and that worked out nicely. It's a strange thing at these firms -- we have these over-the-top summer programs in part so people can get to know their fellow associates, make friends, and feel that emotional pull to come back to the firm with their offers, but then once they're associates, we make them stab each other in the back to get on the "right" cases and basically compete to see who can most impress partners like me. I have three actual friends left from my summer class, two who became partners, and one who figured out early on that the law wasn't for him and now he runs a literary magazine based in the mountains of Utah, where he goes skiing three times a week and has like ten kids and knows all their names or something absurd like that. Everyone else either did something ruthless to me or I did something cutthroat to them, and whatever thread of friendship we had just sort of faded away and turned into indifference. In any case, I don't have any associates today as willing to sacrifice their Friday happiness so I get my weekends. It's a shame, really. If I found one reliable associate willing to go the extra mile, I'd be their biggest advocate at the firm. You want an office on the ocean side instead of the trash compactor side? I can do it. I have power.
When I was an associate I would take advantage by being a real machine on Fridays, helping partners save their weekends. I don't think they realized exactly what I was doing, but they would start to associate me being on their case with them getting weekends at home, and that worked out nicely. It's a strange thing at these firms -- we have these over-the-top summer programs in part so people can get to know their fellow associates, make friends, and feel that emotional pull to come back to the firm with their offers, but then once they're associates, we make them stab each other in the back to get on the "right" cases and basically compete to see who can most impress partners like me. I have three actual friends left from my summer class, two who became partners, and one who figured out early on that the law wasn't for him and now he runs a literary magazine based in the mountains of Utah, where he goes skiing three times a week and has like ten kids and knows all their names or something absurd like that. Everyone else either did something ruthless to me or I did something cutthroat to them, and whatever thread of friendship we had just sort of faded away and turned into indifference. In any case, I don't have any associates today as willing to sacrifice their Friday happiness so I get my weekends. It's a shame, really. If I found one reliable associate willing to go the extra mile, I'd be their biggest advocate at the firm. You want an office on the ocean side instead of the trash compactor side? I can do it. I have power.
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