You know me. Always giving back to the profession. Today I want to help associates understand what the partners mean when they use certain phrases. Here is your handy, dandy guide to some translations of partner talk (“PT”) to plain English (“PE”).
Author: Murray Gottheil
One of my favourite clients was an engineering firm. I once wrote a letter of intent for them concerning the purchase of a business. They only had one comment on my draft document. They asked me why I had only taken the numbers to two decimal places, which is not a surprising question coming from a group of engineers. However, I found the question to be quite amusing, since the numbers in question were dollars, where the use of two decimal places is quite an accepted custom. (Did you ever have a store clerk say, “that will be $5.0156?). But at least they read the document, which is more than I can say about many of my other clients.
Once again, since I am all about giving back and public service, I offer these translations from legal talk (“LT”) to plain English (“PE”) to help lawyers communicate effectively with opposing counsel. I hope that you find them helpful.
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Targets (On Our Backs)
Law firms give lawyers minimum billable hours targets to meet. There is nothing wrong with setting expectations, I guess. The theory is that you make the lawyers aware of the firm’s expectations, and they then work to achieve them. Transparency is good.
Yet another public service. Lawyers are busy people and often do not have the time to get to personal stuff, so I thought that I would help by providing a first rough draft of New Year’s Resolutions for you. Of course, feel free to use this as a precedent and edit for your personal circumstances.
I recently authored an article about law firm compensation systems, lamenting how they are usually laser-focused on billable hours and business brought in, but not so much on all of the other skills required to build a great firm. Of course, there is a great deal of lip service paid to the so called ‘soft factors,’ but the conversion rate of lip service to cash for ‘soft factors’ is not particularly great.
I met Paul at my very first job as a lawyer. Paul was a commercial real estate lawyer. He was hard-working and extremely capable. Paul thought quite a bit of himself and other people who he considered to be intelligent and diligent. However, Paul did not suffer fools gladly.
I was born and raised in Montreal. I started my legal education at the Faculty of Law at McGill in 1975. My plan was to obtain my Bachelor of Civil Law and practice law in Quebec.
In 1976, the Parti Quebecois was elected in Quebec for the first time. As an Anglo in Quebec, I thought that it was a good idea to also obtain a common law degree so that I could get the hell out of Quebec should the need arise.
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All About the Lead Dog
Many years ago, the managing partner of my firm, who I will call Sid because that was his name, had on his desk a replica of a dogsled with a team of dogs in single file. There was a pithy saying attached to the sled which read, “if you are not the lead dog, the scenery never changes.” Think about that for a minute. No, I mean really think about it. Take a moment to focus on exactly what every dog following the lead dog had to look at for the entire trip.
I practiced business law for 40 years. I never knew much about criminal law. In fact, I knew so little about the subject that I used to tell my clients that if they got arrested, they probably should not use their one phone call to call me because all that I could do for them in their hour of need would be to incorporate a company.