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”).
Tag: lawyers
When articling students or young lawyers enter a law firm of any size for the first time, they see the carefully cultivated image that the law firm promotes and are often thrilled to be part of a legal fantasy world where every lawyer is dynamic, brilliant, experienced, strategic, and practical.
Over time they get to know the lawyers and other key players, and eventually figure out what is real and what is not.
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.
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Stupid, Stupid, Stupid
I once proposed raising our hourly rates and was met with furious resistance by the head of our litigation department who assured me that no assessment officer would ever permit lawyers to charge the amounts that I had proposed. He was a brilliant litigator and he was completely correct. However, he was not much of a businessperson and had not considered how rarely our accounts were assessed. I was more than willing to lose all of the assessments and rake in the extra dollars on more than 99% of our files.
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Artificially Human?
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.
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The Zero You Deserve is Finally Here
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.
“According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. Does that sound right? This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.” Jerry Seinfeld
Early in my career I spoke to a group of lawyers about opinion letters. I was awful. I read the entire presentation, which was chock full of technical details, and bored the audience to tears. To this day, if I close my eyes, I can still hear them snoring and crying at the same time.
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Real Friends and Friends Light
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.
The other day my wife, Maureen, told me about a friend who was complaining that his busy adult children do not call him very often. Her friend asked Maureen, “Don’t they care about their dad?” To which Maureen replied, “they care… in their spare time.”
Maureen had it exactly right. Busy people tend to focus on the issues in their life that require their immediate attention. They put the things that they can take for granted aside to worry about when they can find the time.