Law firm memories

The reason the Rules of the Road work isn't that they are a well thought out plan for driving.  They work because everyone, more or less, follows them.  Sure there are people who roll through stop lights and run stale red lights but for the most part everyone follows them.  If they didn't, there would be chaos.  imagine if everyone followed their own version of the Rules of the Road?  I'm not talking the absence of RotR, I'm talking everyone has a different copy (or maybe there are 20 different copies and you don't know which one someone is using until they reveal it).

That's how life at BigName Lawfirm 1.0 was when I was a paralegal.  Everything was very ad hoc, with few defined processes or procedures.  There was very little oversight, collaboration or desire for continuous improvement.

Sometimes a new person would start and realize just how different here was from whatever there they had come from.  Over the years I've worked at other places, some great, some that had their own special brand of dysfunction.  Even so, each place has been a step up from the BS at BigName Lawfirm 1.0.  Probably due to a combination of Corporate America has made some shifts over the years and also my skill and ability now afford me better paying jobs at better companies.

Tales from the Paralegal Corridor

Supposedly Benjamin Franklin said, “Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” I definitely do better with those last two but I didn't have the self-awareness to articulate it back in the early post-college years.

My first post-college job was a  Paralegal Assistant at BigName Law Firm 1.0. Our role was to do all the little things that had to be done but couldn't honestly be billed back to the clients


One of the problems with this gig was you didn't learn anything unless someone showed you.  The only way you got to do anything remotely KSA advancing was when the shit hit the fan AND then it was "okay we're gonna ask you do something you've never done before and it has to be done right but no pressure."

Yeah we could have had you do it last week but we didn't trust you, didn't want to teach you, didn't want bother.

To be fair, this wasn't, though should have been, baked into their job routines. In all fairness, the culture was different then.  There was no mentoring, no shadowing and no desire to implement better work flow processes.  Also, I was definitely not the best JRP because I felt like if I have this education I should be using it better than just putting labels on paper.  Back then, work flow processes and job responsibility, along with employee maturity, were in its infancy. 


We were supposed to be there to do all the little things that had to be done but couldn't honestly bill the clients for or roll into other billable activities.  But if you don't take the time to show your PA how to do something than you cannot hand it off to them. 

In practice this lead to two other common practices:

• The paralegals would complain that that they had too much to do but when you offered to help, they said they couldn't give it to you because you don't know how to do it (and couldn't take the time to teach you or couldn't let your name appear on the billing form or dinosaurs.)
  
• They would show you how to do something so bizarre and one-off that it not only took longer to show you than do it themselves but it would be over a year before you would even have the opportunity to do it again such that you obviously retained no memory of how it was done.

Most of the tasks we were given were mind-numbing mundane things that were obviously given to as busy work to get us to go away whenever we asked if they had anything for us to do.  Because the paralegals had asked for assistants to help with the work they couldn't ethically bill a client for but had to perform (what would be called Administrative Overhead today), the paralegals were responsible for our workload. I don't think they understood the concept of headcount justification.  They wanted these things called PAs to be available when they needed us but then wanted us to go away when the work was done.  There was no team building or skill training or even friendly bonding.

Now your pool of candidates for JRP were recent college grads because this was an entry-level (barely) position that paid $17K a year.  Secretaries with a high school education were starting at $23,000.  This is a very good recipe for resentment.  Anywho, when you are getting paid the same whether you are doing something easy (control labeling) versus something hard (running to court for a last minute filing) the smart JRP will find ways to avoid court and milk the labeling.

Alas, I was definitely not the best paralegal assistant because I felt I should be using my education for better purposes than just counting sheets of copy paper.  It's one thing to have to pay your dues. But these paralegals were content with us paying our dues until the Second Coming. The only way you got to do anything substantive was when the shit hit the fan AND then it was "okay we're gonna ask you do something you've never done before and it has to be done right but no pressure." Yeah we could have had you do it last week but we didn't trust you, didn't want to teach you, didn't want bother.

This describes what goes on in my head on the drive to work

Something a ChicagoNow Blogger wrote:

"We all have THAT THING that still takes us out at the knees - that memory/decision/thing/death/betrayal/love that can still creep up on us and attack our everything, daggers drawn. Flanked by grief, we are forced to drop everything and attend to the gaping, dripping wound a-fucking-gain.

It can come from a dream (last night), a song, or a picture. Sometimes, we even go searching for it, thinking it will be different this time. We think the temporary immersion of joy will be worth the impact of the inevitable fall.  Or maybe we just don’t have it in us, yet, to resist its pull on our hearts. Either way, when we re-connect to the memory, it’s a shock to the system that briefly stops the heart. Still.

‘Dammit. Why am I not past this, yet? This was so long ago. What more is there to do? I have done it all. I have:

--let myself feel it/cried it out
--read the books
--disappeared
--binge watched all the shows
--journaled like a mad man
--talked it out with the inner circle
--prayed
--turned it over
--thrown shit out.
--journaled some more, this time with some lists
--let time pass, trusting it might heal all wounds"  --- Source

and I really need to stop being so hard on myself about things that happened in the past.  In my younger days,  I didn't have the necessary resources and tools to deal with this thing called Life and all its intricacies. 

PST from a previous job

What do you mean there's a  faster way?

It definitely wasn't all me: I wrote about the PST from a previous job before. I keep replaying all
these old experiences over and over in my head and I realize a couple of things.  One, I really did have a very naive and idealistic viewpoint on how things should and could be.  And two, that place and the people were so fucked up that no amount of governance and therapy could save them.

When I was a paralegal I adapted to the firms new document management system faster than my peers and was treated like a child molester for doing so.  At the time I couldn't understand why the resistance.  This was the direction the firm was going and we all had to do it, so why fight it?

I figured out that it wasn't so much a resistance to tech per se, although that was definitely there.  No it was a resistance to anyone or anything that made them look "bad".  As in not as smart or talented as they claimed to be.  For some people, it is easier to make others look bad than to do a good job.

I had a certain capability to navigate a new technology without fumbling like a fish out of water and this was, for some reason, a threat to them.

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Who is the A-hole?  Let's say you are at you friend Tina's party and you meet Brian.  He seems really cool.  Tina pulls you to the side at one point and tells you that Brian isn't the great guy he
appears to be.  You decide not to give him your number or not to get further involved. years later you find out that Tina exaggerated/made things up and he was actually a really decent guy.

Workplace Reivews are just a zero sum game

so we got our annual mid-terms the other day and I thought about my reviews throughout the years in post-college job as a Paralegal Assistant at Big_Bucks Law Firm 1.0, we had two evaluations per year.  One was a here's how you are doing and the other was For the Money. 
Corporate America.  At my first

IIRC, the review form was essentially two pages.  Page one was some arbitrary generic questions designed to capture the skillset of multiple positions.  The second page essentially had two questions:

1. What does so and so do well
2. What does so and so need improvement on

You can probably guess that most reviewers had more to say for question #2  (the order might even have been reversed).  People tend to try and find something to fill that in because they want to do you a favor and help you improve.  But say something good about you?  well we don't want to lavish the praise for doing your job.

The other flaw as at this job (a law firm) if you screw up big, you're gonna hear about it at run time, not six months later.  So anything that didn't make it to you that way and you didn't hear about until your review there wasn't much you could really do 6 months after the fact.





My first job after G-school was the No-Name Software Company.  My team lead flat out told me that he has to justify a rating above or below a 3 so he is giving me a 3 on everything to avoid paperwork since this one isn't for money.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

I spent last week in a soft skills class and whenever I take a course like that one, I think about how helpful these tools and tactics would have been at the law firm a lifetime ago.  My mind runs through all the conflicts and arguments and passive-aggressive people I encountered there and how I'd use these techniques to create meaningful resolutions to stupid problems.

Actually, for sanity purposes, I have to believe that because Big Bucks was so dysfunction and fucked up that these new skills would not have worked quite the way they are meant to and that they would only have lessened the intensity of some conflicts.

Part of the problem, of course, was my youth, inexperience in the workforce and my engineering mind thinking how things could and should be better, not realizing why they couldn't and wouldn't.

Another aspect is that Legal America has its own wacky way of doing things.  There were few defined processes and procedures.  Most things were done on an ad hoc basis and rarely if ever did anyone go back and try to figure out what worked, what didn't and how could we improve things for next time EVEN though we knew there would be a next time.

It didn't help either that the support staff was a mixture of Never_Went_to_College and Didn't Enjoy College so you are threatened by anyone who did. The other part was the majority of the attorneys had no reason to change things because it suited their needs.

There were two types of attorneys at Big Bucks Law Firm 1.0.  Well, there were many types but if I could only put them into two buckets there was the Don Reagan and the Lindsay Pillers type.  The DRs of the world knew they were the boss inside the firm but if they ran into you outside the firm, say in line at the grocery store or movie theatre, they realized you got there first and they waited their turn.  The LPs, however, felt that they were better than you in all facets, that their dominion extended beyond the office and expected you to let them cut in line.

Note: I'm using these as examples to illustrate my point.  the likelihood of bumping into either of them outside the office was extremely low.  Maybe at Marshall Field's during the holidays but otherwise we ran in completely separate circles.


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Late Court Filing Runs and paralegal SLA

I've written about the time at the BigName Law Firm 1.0 and promised to write some more posts when I'm looking for post fodder.  I really should let this part of my past go but for some reason my mind wanders to this time period when I drive to work.  Which implies that something going on today is influenced by something from the past.  Or at the very least writing about it will help me exercise those demons so that there is room for more current devils of torment. 

The PA position was created to serve two primary purposes.  The first was to perform  Late Court Filing Runs.  The other was to work on non-billable tasks or tasks that should be billed out at a lower rate than the standard Legal Assistant rate.  Both of these roll into the bucket of Things the Paralegals Didn't Want to Do.

I've given a few examples of the non-billable low-billable tasks we were given.  Most of the time they were mind-numbing mundane things that we were obviously given because the paralegal didn't want to do them.  That wouldn't have been so bad if it had been properly communicated that this is as good as it gets.  Instead a tactic many paralegals used was the implied promise that if you did enough of the crap work, they would eventually be able to trust you with the more substantive stuff.  Later than sooner,  I realized that there wasn't a large supply of substantive stuff and whatever there was, they kept for themselves.  

One of the things we could and were expected to bill for was Late Court Filing Runs (LCF). What this involved was being available to run to court after the last daily docket run if an attorney had a last minute filing.  This was supposed to be a rarity but alas in a firm with a litigation dept as large as ours and as many attorneys who wanted to spend as much time as possible making sure that brief was perfect -- not because they cared over a silly filing but because they didn't want to take any chance of screwing anything up on their path to partnership -- you eventually got more requests than capacity.

A smart thing to do would have been to provide LCF as a service and bill accordingly for it, but we -- and perhaps Corporate America -- were not there yet in terms of business maturity.

Our building was a good 15 minute walk from both the US District Court and also the State Court House.  Even if you jumped in a cab, at that time of day with traffic (foot and car) it could still be a good 10 minute trip. 

For some reason, the PAs didn't like LCF probably because the onus of success was on us.  It didn't matter if the filing got to us so late that by the time we got to court, the clerk wouldn't let us file it.  In the attorney's mind, we had enough time and there wasn't any of this governance thing to protect us.

There was also the pettiness amongst the PAs.  The problem with a random assignment is that during a short cross section of time, it can seem disproportionate.  "So and so never has to go to court but the late filings come on my day. "   Add to that the more malevolent PAs gaming the system and you have some animosity.

One thing to consider is that back then, work flow processes and job responsibility, along with employee maturity, were in its infancy.  The concept of taking on Docket overflow was  ad hoc when it should have been better thought out.  The necessarily training was omitted from the PA position partly because it was supposed to be the exception not the rule but also because on the job training wasn't really a thing there.

If I knew then what I know now...it wouldn't make too much difference because we certainly weren't empowered to change anything.  and we were marginalized, the paralegals didn't care because we were there to do the LCF and with five or six of us, they would never themselves have to go run to court.

Still, it would have been better to have a weekly rotation instead of daily with a primary and backup lined up.  The backup for one week could be the primary the next week and could shadow docket people to court on scheduled runs to learn where everything was and how filings worked.  [I write this in case some day the technology exists for Future Me to warn Past Me about all this.]

The First Assignments

When I worked at the BigName Law Firm 1.0 a lifetime ago, I got a job as a paralegal assistant.  I was actually working in the mail room while finishing up college and after graduation, a PA position opened up. 

I was assigned to 3 paralegals:  Jane, Eileen and Denise.  Right off the bat, there was something off about Denise.  She seemed to be an airhead.  In fact, she single-handedly did her best to promote the dumb blonde stereotype.  The skinny from the other PAs was that the other paralegals didn't like her.  It took a while for me to learn why.  Apparently she wasn't someone you could count on to help out in a jam and towards the end of her time there, she really mailed it in.  She would leave her computer on and leave for hours to make it look like she was in the office working. 

It would have been tolerable if they had looked like these ladies

The idea behind the paralegal assistant position was that we would help out with tasks that paralegals couldn't bill a client for.  And that is one of the recurring themes from this period.  The war cry "I can't bill for that" was used so liberally whenever there was something that would be described as sh*t work that it lost any meaning.  Yes, a paralegal billing at $80 an hour probably shouldn't be bates stamping documents or running off to court to file a simple memorandum when a less expensive option is available.  But since we also operated on a needs to be done right away or yesterday model, there wasn't much in the way of workflow process.

The compromise was that PAs could bill if the situation allowed for it.  [Note: to give you an idea of just how SNAFU this place was, those two points were deduced and inferred over time instead of explicitly stated.]  We didn't generate our own work product, we were given -- or not given -- tasks by the paralegals.  No real training was baked into our workweek.  Secretly, it seemed our position was created to help with court runs because the paralegals didn't want to do it.

So one of the first assignments Eileen gave me wasn't much of an assignment at all.  It had more the makings of something to keep me busy. And slowly kill my brain.  She wanted me to count the number of pages in a copy job.  That's right.  We make a lot of copies in a law firm and even in the anarchic early 90s the copy machines had a mechanism to count the number of copies which would be placed on the return slip.

Eileen was convinced that the Copy Center was padding their numbers to make a little extra money.  I don't remember how much we charged for copies back then -- it was certainly higher than market value -- but let's say for argument it was a whopping 0.25 a page.  The only way this translates into anything significant is if they make 100 copies but charge you for a 1000.

Having me count each page isn't a good use of my time -- whatever you catch in their "error" is offset by my cost.  Granted my cost for that project was non-billable and my hourly pay was rather insignificant too.  Still, it really wasn't a good "project" to unload on anyone, especially a recent college grad with a desire to do more with his brain width.

In all fairness, I should have simply done the assignment without complaining and seen it as "paying my dues" and bond with Eileen by agreeing that yes the Copy Center pads their numbers.  Evil Bad.

I did the assignment in what is thought was an innovative, creative manner which should have demonstrate my abilities.  I measured one inch worth of documents, counted those and then measured the stack and calculated that the number given to us by copy center was indeed within the range we should have.  Eileen was pissed that I didn't simply do what she asked.  She made me recount the documents.

****

One time Denise asked me to do something.  While it certainly wasn't rocket science, it did have a certain level of complexity that required some explaining.  I honestly cannot remember exactly what and that's not important.  The point is that it probably took three times as long to explain what it was that she wanted me to do than to simply do it herself.   And I nonchalantly said something to that affect.  Not snooty or like it was beneath me...just a comment that "wow in the time it took [you to explain that 2 minute task to me], you could have done it yourself."  This wasn't even something she was going to give me on a regular basis.  It literally was something she dug up because she was asked to find something for me to do. 

And therein lies one of the many problems with that position and the culture in general.  They wanted these things called PAs to be available when they needed us but then wanted us to go away when the work was done.  There was no team building or skill training or even friendly bonding.  The concept of headcount justification was someone else's problem.

******

Jane had a better tolerance for dealing with me.  And we usually got along and worked together well, especially once I was promoted to full paralegal.  She had her own special quirks too.

When someone asks how your weekend was, generally speaking, they usually are only interested in a high level recap.  You went to a nice dinner on Friday, you took the kids to the zoo on Saturday.  You saw a cool movie on Sunday that you recommend everyone go see before the Oscars ruin it for you.

Other people are interested in the granular detail of what your kids said and did and whether you had buttered or salted popcorn at that movie.  Still others want high level some of the time and more details some of the time.

Jane didn't run in different modes.  You asked "how was your weekend" and she heard "tell me in excruciating detail all about your kids, your life and your dog until my ears bleed."  She could go on and on about the little things her kids did that wouldn't be interesting to blood grandparents but once you made the mistake of giving up the spotlight by talking about what you did (at a politer high level) you had to listen to what the kid did until someone else mercifully came along and interrupted your conversation.

Some things I think about on my Morning Drive to work

Coulda, shoulda have been me:  Once in a while I'll see some news tidbit of my former colleagues from the No-Name Software Company on LinkedIn or Facebook.  Someone I worked with in the trenches is now a manager or someone who joined after me is higher up on the food chain.

We use to joke that it would be cool if Microsoft bought us out.  Well a big name company did eventually buy it up, though it was after a lot of other mergers and take overs in the meantime.  And I had to leave because I was never going to advance party because of my own shortcomings and party because I wasn't part of Director Palpatine, clique.

You always hear about those lifers at IBM who retired with boatloads of stock and are set for life. That should have been me and some of my colleagues, had we not been forced out of there.  Essentially as the company got bigger and the workload increased faster than we could keep up with it.  That's what happens when only half the call takers take calls.  Those who were not part of Director Palpatine's hand-picked band of merry ass-kissers had to go.

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Like Art Therapy, without the Art:  A long time ago, there was this Twilight Zone or TZ-like remake show that featured Ed Asner as an author who retired.  He started seeing these strange creatures in the background that no one else could see.  He eventually confronts them and asks what he has to do to make them go away.

"Write about us," one says.  He takes out his type writer and the show ends.  So it goes that I need to start writing about something that has been forcing it's way into my active brain feed, especially whe I drive to work in the morning.  I've alluded to it before but it has to do with my first job out of college as a paralegal assistant.

So I'm going to start writing posts about those days on this blog.   It's good to get it in writing and out of my system and perhaps I can parlay it into some fodder for the other site.

My former life as a Paralegal

Every so often I think about my first post-college job as a Project Assistant at BigName Law Firm 1.0.  This position was created by the paralegals because they wanted someone to offload the non-billable work they had to do so they could focus on the more substantive legal work they were given by the attorneys.  There are a lot of problems with that last sentence.

The first is that the firm was so growing so large that the substantive legal work rarely trickled down to the paralegal level.  Maybe it did before the Project-Assistant-Era, but it certainly didn't after that.

The second problem was that there wasn't a lot of up front training investment in PAs.  Most of the non-billable work was not the repeatable, learn it once and do it every day type of stuff.  There was some of that of course, but most of the things they wanted to give us required more time to explain it than to do it yourself.  And if it was something you weren't going to do again for six months, it almost didn't make sense to teach a PA because they were not gonna remember it in six months and you'll have to teach it again.

Quite a bump from two decades ago

The paralegals were so busy with their real work that they didn't have time to train us, and that wasn't baked into their job descriptions.  Even if it was, I’m sure the threshold for catching on would be very small.

On top of that, the position didn't pay very well yet they got either fresh out of college, or still students as job candidates.  In other words, you put fairly smart people into a mind numbing job with no chance of advancement and eventually entropy takes place.  Now I will be the first to admit that I had the wrong attitude and outlook for a position like this.  Beside my own personal issues and shortcomings, I just didn't understand how Corporate America worked.

 I think I was from the future because I really liked to leverage technology to make life easier and I worked with people who feared technology because it was new and scary.  Looking back, I acknowledge that I did have what would be perceived as a bad attitude.  I think my intentions were good but my execution and communication were poor, which is always a bad combination.

The era of PAs being non-billable didn't last long.  Someone figured that since we were billing for some of our work, why not give us a billing requirement and have us bill for all of our work.  In a way this was good because it made the PA position evolve into more of a junior paralegal position.  But in many other ways it was bad.  Remember the substantive legal work mythical unicorn beast I mentioned.  If very little trickled down from attorneys to paralegals, how much do you think trickled down to PAs? 

In hindsight I wish I had been smart enough to keep my head down, use the paralegals as Attorney Shields and go to g-school a few years sooner. 

Could have used this advice many years ago

I read through this Lifehacker piece the other day and I really wish I could email it back in time to my twentysomething self.  Which is why I will include some fun pictures of me grilling outside in the snow.

shoveled just enough to grill

My first "real-world" full time paying job after college was something we'll call Junior Paralegal (JRP).  It actually had a different name and a different idea at its inception but if you went to any law firm today and searched for the equivalent position, Jr Paralegal is what you would find.  Ironically, if any of those paralegals were reading this blog they would not for one minute connect JPR with the position they created that later morphed into more of a true Jr Paralegal description.

The backstory on this position was that the billable hour requirement for paralegals was increasing while at the same time the types of things they could "bill for" was undergoing stricter scrutiny.  In other words clients, rightfully so, didn't want to pay the paralegal rate for things that were considered administrative.  And also the paralegals didn't want to be the backup to the Docket department and run to court for late filings. 

The legal profession is very well institutionalised. Lawyers have logged hundreds of hours of learning before they are even allowed to practice. So lawyers enter the work force already being taught to sense and act (to follow a subliminal process) and most strongly believe that a professional should know how to execute there chosen profession. Process Management is not often well established in law firms, especially back in the Dark Ages of the late 20th Century. Therefore the idea of introducing a defined process naturally causes scepticism.

There go the calories i just burned shoveling

So the idea was that they needed JRP to handle the non-billable crap so that they would be free to do the more important billable items. It wasn't a bad idea. The flaw in the design was that they didn't really know what to do with JRP besides treating us like kids who were visiting their aunts and uncles at work for the afternoon. Also I believe one of the conditions was that JRP time could be billed if appropriate. This would later come back to bite the Senior Paralegals in the butt.

The workflow was basically standard stuff like Control Labeling, chron filing and going to court for late filings.  The other part was what would be referred to today as "one-offs."  In other words stuff that isn't describable in a standard manner because it doesn't come up too often and is often easier to do oneself than to take the time to show someone else.  Like maybe checking through a stack of forms to make sure Section 2 was completed a particular way.

Now your pool of candidates for JRP were recent college grads because this was an entry-level (barely) position that paid $17K a year.  Secretaries with a high school education were starting at $23,000.  This is a very good recipe for resentment.  Anywho, when you are getting paid the same whether you are doing something easy (control labeling) versus something hard (running to court for a last minute filing) the smart JRP will find ways to avoid court and milk the labeling.


"When you're just out of college, it's easy to get a big head about what you can do in the workplace"
yep.  Especially if you work with people with never went to college or never really experienced college.

"It might sound like simply "paying your dues," but it's easy to get a little full of yourself when you first start a job."

Yep.  The problem is my first job the paralegals were content with us "paying our dues" until the second coming.  They didn't have the luxury or the foresight of training us for situations before they became mission critical.

The only way you got to do anything substantive was when the shit hit the fan AND then it was "okay we're gonna ask you do something you've never done before and it has to be done right but no pressure."  Yeah we could have had you do it last week but we didn't trust you, didn't want to teach you, didn't want bother.

 In Corporate America the form of government is called Management. If you look closely at people who are succeeding, you'll notice they have something in common: they're fast learners and they're willing to adapt.

In all fairness, the culture was different then.  There was no mentoring, no shadowing and no desire to implement better work flow processes.  Also, I was definitely not the best JRP because I felt like if I have this education I should be using it better than just putting labels on paper.

Eventually the law firm decided that they should bill a certain amount of hours.  The same amount of hours as paralegals in fact.  We had no advocates, no one to say "well they are entry level people maybe we should have them only bill 900 instead of 1800 hours, see how it goes and build that up."
So once you made our job as hard as Sr Paralegals by telling us that we are essentially going to be doing the same type of work, there hierarchy kinda broke down.

In the world today, when I'm sending out an email or leveraging any technology to make my life easier, I often wonder how these Senior Paralegals would act today.  I should mention that they hated technology, especially the invisible electronic kind.  I remember once trying to teach Jane how to copy a file from a floppy disk to a computer and it was an epic fail.  I also remember that I was a bit of a brat and did not have 10% of the communication tools I have today.