In Parts One and Two, I set out some questions that articling students and young lawyers should ask about their firm’s Managing Partner and Practice Group Leader.
Today I will tackle the much trickier issue of the Chief Operating Officer (the “COO”).
In Part One, I set out some questions that articling students and young lawyers should ask about the Managing Partner. This time let’s talk about your Practice Group Leader (the “PGL”).
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Later he kicked Adam and Eve out of the Garden of Eden and decreed that from that date forward, people would have to work very, very hard, just to survive.
From then until recently, if you chose Law as your profession, you did not have to read much further into the Bible to understand what was expected of you.
A young lawyer asked me for advice. He was contemplating making a jump from Big Law to a smaller firm, for the usual reason that he wanted to work less and enjoy life more. I was not completely sure that it was the right move for him.
I have a theory about life which I espouse in my less optimistic moments. My theory is that for many people, things become less and less familiar as they age. What is socially acceptable changes, people dress and act differently, friends and family move away and pass away, technology changes, and so on. Eventually everything is so unfamiliar that they do not feel that they belong in the world, and they are then ready to die of natural causes.
The title of this post is taken from an advertisement for Dr. Pepper’s zero sugar soft drink and is a nifty introduction to the topic of entitlement.
One of my minor pet peeves is advertisements that tell me that I “deserve” things. How do people trying to sell me stuff know what I deserve? On the other hand, one of my major pet peeves is people who actually believe that they deserve stuff – especially when they have not worked to earn it.
I was telling my wife about the recent post by Frank Ramos about LinkedIn having an AI product to help us write our posts. Those of you have followed me for a while know that I think that I am kind of smart, but I know for a fact that my wife, Maureen McKay, is way smarter than me. She has a great ability to look at a fact situation and see where things are going to end up. Here is her take on the use of AI to write posts:
Most of us consider ourselves to be lucky if we have a handful of real friends. Usually these are people who we know from way back. They know who we really are, and they want nothing from us. If we need them, they will be there for us. When we get busy with our careers, we sometimes do not speak to them very frequently, but when we see them again it is like no time has passed.
I was a super-fantastic lawyer. Really, almost everyone says so. And yet, there were a few clients who did not appreciate what I did for them or what it cost to have me do it. Luckily for me, during most of my career Google Reviews were not much of a thing. And until they were, those few and far between ignorant and unappreciative ingrates who did not like me did not have much of a public forum for spreading their lies.
I was a socialist at age twenty. I went to law school because I wanted to help the poor and the oppressed. By the time that I was thirty I was a business lawyer. Stuff like that happens to people.