The Supervising Attorney, Your Client

My research and writing professor in law school, who -- as good professors often are -- was both brilliant and slightly mad, explained to the room of bright-eyed future lawyers that most legal writing has two audiences that you must keep in mind: the judge (or whatever other manner of arbiter), whom you need to convince that your position is the correct one; and the client, whom you need to convince that you are doing your job.

As he often was, my professor was correct, but his explanation was not complete. He neglected to mention (or maybe I wasn't paying attention) that there often more than one "client."  For junior attorneys, the most important of these "clients" is the partner who is managing the matter and assigning you the work.

The "partner as a client" school of thought works on a few levels. First and foremost, the partner (along with his colleagues) is literally the one paying you for your legal work; thus, in a real way, they are your customer. You need to make sure that, of anyone else (the judge, the actual client, the actual client's boss) you make the the partner-client happy. While you may instinctively think that the desires of all of these clients should be aligned, there will be many instances where the way the partner wants you to do something doesn't make sense to you (writing a 50-page brief when a 10-page one would do), doesn't best serve the needs of the judge (she has to read 50-page brief saying what could be said in a 10-page one), or doesn't serve the best interests of the client (spending money for all the additional time you spent writing those extra 40 pages).

What should you do when this situation arises? Well, that depends on your situation. If you are a brand-new law clerk or junior associate, you should probably just say "yes sir/ma'am" and do your best to give them a product in line with their expectations. I know it is hard: throughout school, college, pre-law school professional life, and maybe even in law school, you've been used to being the smartest person in the room. And surely they hired you with the expectation that you will be contributing to projects with your own professional judgment, which, to an extent is true. Surely if you see a glaring in error in their understanding of the facts or their legal reasoning, or, better yet, you find something that will amplify or support the argument they want to make -- you should speak up.

But, as will be common, if you just don't like the way they've written or organized something, or if you don't understand why they've put in ten seemingly-redundant clauses in the agreement, just shut up and roll with it. Maybe you're right, maybe their writing is crap, and maybe their clauses are insipid. Conversely, you could be viewing some language as trivial that the partner, with his experience, has stumbled across before and knows that importance of.  More likely, its some combination of the two. But I can tell you (from experience) that if you give the partner something completely novel and/or redesigned instead of what the partner has indicated that he wants (or assumed that you knew) because you think it works better -- you will find yourself redrafting after being dressed down, and possibly seeing some of your billed hours on the cutting room floor.

In this way, you nurture the relationship of your partner-client in much the same way as you would for your client-client. You should do this in other ways too: communicating clearly and consistently, but taking care of manageable issues yourself; expressing excitement and appreciation when they deign to give you some new piece of work, while unobnoxiously cross-selling other services you could be doing for the client or the matter; and -- most importantly -- giving them bills/time entries that they can justify or at least live with.

Lastly, you will have to decide how to handle problem "clients." Client-client and partner-clients can both be real thorns in your side for a variety of similar reasons: they come to you with impossible situations or unrealistic deadlines, they undermine your conclusions and/or disregard your contributions, they are rude, they are unavailable, or -- worst of all -- they take issue with your bill. You will experience these with some frequency and you will need to learn how to deal.

Your default setting should of course be, especially if you are a junior associate, to accept these foibles as part of the job and do your best under the circumstances. That said, forgive but don't forget.  If the same partner consistently causes you problems, you need to assess the value of the relationship.  Is s/he feeding you a significant amount of work and is s/he billing that work? If so, then the answer might still be to suck it up, buttercup.

But if the answer is no, then you need to get out of this dysfunctional relationship. A dozen hours a year is not worth the stress of a bully partner demanding that you drop other (higher reward) assignments to work on his and then giving you grief for your necessarily-rushed product.  You need to tactfully dump him. Next time he asks you for an assignment, give him a timeline that you know he won't like: "No problem, Bill, though I am pretty swamped, is sometime next week OK?" Partners follow the path of least resistance with associates, and if you're no longer the one-stop last-second-assignment shop he's used to, he will soon stop knocking at your door. (Conversely, if you have a partner relationship that you want to nurture, be sure to set ambitious but attainable timelines).

Worse than this, and sneakier, is the deadbeat partner. This partner knocks at your door with a smile and time-intensive assignments, which you complete and bill appropriately.  All good, at least until you're looking at your time stats for the month and you notice large chunks of this time was written off. Now maybe it's a one-time thing; maybe something came up in that billing period which caused the firm to go way over budget and everybody had to eat some time for the sake of keeping the client -- it happens, probably a lot.

But if it's more often than this, and a particular partner is mowing down large swathes of your time every month -- you are essentially working for free. The firm wouldn't tolerate a client that didn't pay it's bills, and you shouldn't tolerate a partner who doesn't pay yours. You can attempt a surreptitious break-up as above, but in this case, you would probably be fully justified in being frank with the assigning attorney -- tactfully frank, of course. It's as simple as saying, "Hi Billina, I really appreciate your giving me this work, but I can't help but notice a lot of my time isn't getting billed." If nothing else, this might invite some explanation of why your work isn't getting billed.

If that explanation is not satisfactory, you might say, "I certainly understand that, Billiard, but I am falling behind on my billable hours, and until something changes, I will have to give priority to matters that I can bill." I can't say this won't lead to some hard feelings, but the partner has to understand. You are not a summer intern (anymore), your work isn't free, and your job depends on meeting your quotas.

Then again, I tend to be the kind of person who decides to speak truth to power at inopportune times, so maybe you would be better served to come up with some excuse.  But like all dysfunctional relationships, it doesn't matter how you get out, it matters that you get out.