Law School Lies

I would imagine most people who aren’t oblivious have seen the movie Office Space. Most people who have not worked in a corporate setting, if forced to, would classify the movie as humor through absurdity. For those who have worked in a cubicle, the movie takes on a near documentary status of the world in which you work on a daily basis, and they don’t see the movie as funny, they see it as too close to reality to be humorous. Mike Judge seems to make movies which appear to be a funny concept, up until you watch the movie… and suddenly you feel that you are looking at a strange reflection of the world around you. (see Idiocracy for another wonderful example) Anyway, here is a brief description of a job I had for a short time that completely changed the way I saw the movie Office Space. (required reading before going farther)

 

The Beginning…

So I was excited. This was technically the first job I was getting out of law school wherein I was actually being PAID. Shit yeah! Finally all those years of school would allow me to cash in on the ridiculous amount of knowledge I had acquired. Granted, it was document review, but as everyone knows (or should at this point) you work the shit job for money and keep applying to real jobs in the evening. Plus, I originally thought that I had come across a potential rarity. The employer was not one of the faceless legal temp agencies, it was a real firm who was hiring people for in-house work. So I show up for orientation and take the elevator up to the 40th floor of a high rise. The offices were lovely and everyone was very polite to you. I went into a conference room and there was a smallish group of about 15 other attorneys there. It seemed like this was going to be a very nice experience, they gave us refreshments and we sat through the case description for about 4 hours given by 2 firm staff attorneys working on the case . They talked to us about real legal concepts and outlined interesting bits and pieces of legal strategy; in short, they spoke to us like intelligent professionals speaking to their peers. (That conversation was the last time we would be treated as professionals, and definitely the last time we were expected to think about anything even remotely legally related.) Then we were told we were going to be shown to our desks.

If you are a religious person, what came next closely mirrors John Milton’s descent. Basically we were all herded onto the elevators and brought down to the 5th floor. Rent is significantly cheaper the lower you go in high rises. I am quite certain that if they could have, they would have put us in the sub-basement or a parking garage level somewhere. We exit the elevators into what I can only assume was a time warp back to late 1970s chic. The carpet had at one point been a burnt orange, but was now a strange dark brown with pathways between the doors worn down to the jute. The walls were pinkish and had an odd gradation moving towards the ceiling that implied they had seen the days of people smoking copiously indoors and had never been repainted. We were brought down by an administrative assistant; I assume so that the ‘real’ attorneys did not have to set foot on the 5th floor. She opened the door from the hallway into a small warehouse with rows upon rows of cubicles dimly lit by flurescent lights whose lens had so badly yellowed it even made the shadows look depressed. She led us down the center aisle of the room which was already full of probably 75 other serfs doc reviewers. We arrive and find that the cubicles already have your name stuck to them with a push pin. So we all find our assigned seat and sit. And wait, and wait… and wait. At a certain point someone who identifies themselves as QC man (Quality Control) shows up and tells us to login to the doc review program and go. And if you have any questions look in the huge binders on your desk which holds essential info on the case (approx 300+ pages). Barring finding the answer in the unannotated tome, the QCer tells us to email them preferably; or if it is really urgent, find them. They appear significantly displeased with both of those statements. And then they disappear. No mention of where we should find them, no significant explanation as to what to do next. The disappearing act is a learned survival trait in shitty jobs. If no one can find you, no one can make you do work or ruin your day by asking you questions you don’t know the answer to.

Now don’t get me wrong. We were all (theoretically) intelligent people who had graduated law school, and most of us had passed the bar. You can definitely figure out on your own how to do this job regardless of the less than adequate training. It is more the concept that they wanted you to hit the ground running on day 1 with no training on their personal e-doc software system with oblique hidden commands, cobbled together with their less user friendly tracking software, and their shitty corporate email and messaging system, all supposedly explained in a 300+ page manual which in comparison made Chinese ‘engrish‘ instructions seem damn near readable . It would be as if someone gave you a wonderful lecture on Cell Biology, then put you in the drivers seat of a Zamboni and said go to it. The disconnect between what we were talking about in training versus what was staring at us from the shite computer GUI was stark and jarring.

 

The Middle…

I should point out the urgency in which this project was moving. You see, the project was 2 years overdue. Y-E-A-R-S. The client was pissed. Part of the issue was that the firm kept deciding that they were almost done, would fire everyone, then figure out they weren’t and have to hire a whole new batch, train them, and then get it rolling again. That had apparently happened 3 times during the project. My only guess is that the client decided somewhere along the line that it would have been more expensive (somehow?) to have to hand it all over to a new firm than just allow the incompetence to continue a bit longer.

Over several days all us neophytes became quick studies of the shitty computer software and we were all happily plugging away. Unfortunately, we all had the same nagging problem. We weren’t sure if what we were doing was actually correct. Usually you get some feedback. Someone tells you, “oh hey, you did this wrong, do it like this next time.” That is technically the job of the QC-ers. But we didn’t because they were ‘backed up’. We didn’t get any feedback at all for a month. By the time anything rolled downhill, the comments you received were based on work you had done so far in the past, you couldn’t quite remember why you did it that way or even if that was your work product. You would get reports back from multiple QCers directly contradicting each other. You’d have someone come over to explain why something you had done three weeks ago during the first week was wrong, which you had already corrected. Then another person would come over to explain the same thing to you. Then you’d get an email about it. Then a cryptic email from someone who identified themselves as your team lead (who you’ve never met before) asking you to find them, and when you do track down this elusive person it turns out they just want to ask if you figured out what you did wrong… last month.

Early on in this process, one of the administrative assistants came up to me and told me that my time didn’t add up. You see, everything is timed. The e-doc program has an internal timer which logs every minute you are on it, and then bills that to the client account. There is a separate timecard system wherein you enter your daily timesheets which is manually filled in by you, which is what the law firm pays you. So one gets billed to the client, and one gets billed to the law firm. The idea is that there shouldn’t be a significant discrepancy between the two so that the law firm gets to charge the client everything (plus a nice markup) and they don’t have to pay you for time not billed to the client. At first I thought, oh crap… did I forget to log off the systems or something? So I asked how much it was off… 15 minutes…. for the week. I am pretty sure my face betrayed my amusement. “15 minutes discrepancy between the time card and your system monitoring software billed to the client… you realize it takes at least 3 minutes to log onto the system every morning because these computers are so slow. And we were told to log off the client billing system if we went to the bathroom or on break or to the myriad meetings you seem to like having…” Seeing something to grab onto the assistant jumped in, I was then informed I wasn’t supposed to log off the system if I was going to the bathroom or on break, or for meetings. In other words, bill the client for taking a leak, hell bill them for breathing. I’m sure that’s ethical. On the flip side, we were told to log off for the strangely frequent fire alarms. And then we all found out that we weren’t getting paid at all for the time we were forced to stand outside during the fire alarms. Nice.

One day while I was working, a voice suddenly comes over the loudspeadker system that no one there previously knew existed. It informed us that the strange package outside the building was almost assuredly not a bomb; Just continue working and don’t worry about it. This of course brought many questions roiling to mind all at once. These questions were only compounded after a loud explosion was heard a few minutes later. The explosion turned out to be the bomb squad doing a controlled detonation of some poor schmucks briefcase. Because the best way to dispose of potential bombs… is to blow them up with your own bomb. I guess? And something that is almost assuredly not a bomb apparently absolutely needs to be blown up. But don’t worry. Keep working.

I happened to also work at this lovely establishment during some random 3 day holiday weekend. Lets assume the holiday was on a Monday. On Wednesday the week before, multiple people start asking up the chain of pseudo-command whether we had the holiday off. No comment seems forthcoming. Then, on Friday at about 3:30 in the afternoon, we all get a mass email drifting down from on high on the 40th floor. We had the holiday off, and not only did we have it off, but it was a paid holiday. We were going to be paid a full working day and we should enjoy our Monday off. The peasants rejoiced. It was late, many people came in early and decided that this was the perfect opportunity to head out and begin enjoying their holiday weekend. The 5th floor dungeon became a ghost-town in 10 minutes flat. I happened to stick around to round out my hours for the week as I didn’t have anything pressing to head out for. Rounding 5:45 I start to shut down my computer when another email thuds into my inbox. Turns out its a retraction of the previous email, in it, they explain that last year they gave people the paid holiday off but this year they changed the policy; so it wasn’t a paid day off and we were expected to be there on Monday. However, everyone on the 40th floor had the paid day off so there would be no support staff for questions etc, oh yeah, and also the air conditioning would be off in the building because it was a holiday, so dress appropriately. It sounded like a mean spirited joke. I poked my head up to gaze around the now empty room. 2 other people were still there… out of about 75. I turned off my computer and didn’t bother coming in on Monday.

Across the aisle from me sat a mountain of a man. 350 pounds crammed into a tiny office chair that seemed to be losing the impossible battle to hold this man in front of a computer. I found out this man was a running joke in the office. You see, he had been fired nearly 2 years ago. He had been fired, but decided to continue showing up. And the company continued paying him. I shit you not. Friends of his had even given him a red stapler as a joke because of it. I guess everyone involved just decided to say ‘fuck it’ and ignore it ever happened.

The atmosphere deteriorated really quickly. When I had first shown up, the internet was not firewalled. Most projects I have worked on since may block social media sites and the like, but they leave open most other things so that you can still interact with your personal email etc. Mostly because these projects know that this is supposedly a temporary position and you have other job prospects who get back to you via email, plus the odd personal email. Anyway, all I ever used it for was to listen to Pandora. Then one day I came in and everything was blocked for everyone. Then the arbitrary rules started coming down. No phones allowed out while in the office. No talking. No MP3 players or other electronics. Rules suddenly appeared dictating (no kidding) how long you were supposedly allowed to use the restroom. You would think from these rules that people were sleeping in the restrooms while listening to audio books and watch movies on a laptop.

The guy to my right was a ghost. In a given day, I might see him at his desk 2 hours. I always arrived before him, and always left after, yet somehow he was never at his desk doing work. This went on for several weeks. Then I just didn’t see him. The only way we knew he got fired was when the secretary walked over and removed his name from the push pin on the cubicle and walked away. It turns out early on he had started flirting with one of the administrative assistants who happened to be in control of timecards. Then he started sleeping with her. Apparently she was fixing his time. I sorta wondered if the client paid for that or not once they figured it out.

 

The End.

I eventually decided I was done with this job. It sucked. A lot. I ended up getting hired on elsewhere for a project starting in a week. I just had to suck it up for a week and quit. The job was an at-will position and although it was bad form, I could quit on Friday when I turned in my timecard. But then Wednesday rolled around. On Wednesday, the administrative assistant started sending people one at a time to some meeting. I thought nothing of it because I usually had no idea why some people disappeared to a meeting and some of us didn’t. Mind you, at times an email would be sent out telling you that your team had a meeting in half an hour, and if you weren’t bored enough to check the corporate email every ten minutes, you’d have no idea and would get some chiding message asking where you had been during the meeting that half the team hadn’t shown up to. Anyway, check the email, no meeting email had been sent, so I put it out of my mind and ignored it. Then she came over to me and told me to go to the office over in the corner. I actually had no idea there was an office over in the vague direction she had waved at, but I went anyway. I enter a tiny closet of an office to find out that I was meeting with the E-DAT attorney overseeing the whole project. My actual supervisory boss. I had never met nor seen this man before this moment. Sitting to my right is one of the administrative lawyers also running the project who I had at least seen walking around the office. The supervisor starts talking, “I wanted to talk to you today about your performance…” He starts talking about the errors on this, and that. I mention that what he is referring to is the data from the very beginning when the QC didn’t bother sending anything back. He seems unphased by such logic. The meeting seems nothing so much as telling me why I am doing a crappy job.

Then he brings up something quite particular. He mentions a batch of documents I had done which were a bit of an oddity. The reason they stuck out to me was that I had initially been stumped on what I was supposed to do with them. So much so that I had walked across the office and tracked down my QC person and had a short discussion with him, which as expected seemed to irritate him greatly that he had to speak to another human. The QC person listened to my description and he told me to mark them all relevant, and gave various reasons why. The supervisor looks at me and says he is concerned that I marked them all relevant when they so clearly are not. Ah ha! I say, but I talked to QC man and followed his instructions to the letter. There is an eerie silence in the room, and supervisor person says, “well why don’t we ask him.” Something seems off, my spidey-sense is tingling. QC man is standing right outside the door, the supervisor waves hims in and says “is that true?” QC man looks at him and says, “Oh no. I definitely said they were not relevant, Azrael brought over several printouts and we had a discussion about how irrelevant they were.” My head is about to explode I am literally fuming. As I am about to make a very interesting scene, that special voice in the back of my brain says “why are you troubling yourself over this… you were going to quit in 2 days anyway”. In that one brief instant, a weight it lifted off my mind. I turn back around to the supervisor and say “you know what… you’re right. I am crappy at this job. I think I’m going to quit.”

The tenor of the whole room changed instantly. Something had gone seriously wrong and the meeting was suddenly not going as the supervisor had planned. Everyone in the room was suddenly worried and started telling me I shouldn’t quit, and that I was getting the hang of it. That I should hang in there. Then the woman to my right says (verbatim) “But what else are you going to do?” I start mentioning some of the options I had been looking into… and I look over, and she is writing some of them down. That’s right, she is taking notes so that she can try to get the hell out of this job too. I was amazed. The meeting ends with me telling them I’m going to leave on Friday. The supervisor asked me to reconsider and get back to him by Friday. As I was leaving the office, I looked at QC man and said, “you know I don’t have access to printers on my computer… right?” I’m sure it took him a moment to realize I had just called out his lie. It didn’t matter anyway. I walked back to my cubicle and sat down. The other reviewers seated around me were joking about how they had all just had the same meeting where they were told they were doing a crappy job and had better improve. It was apparently standard operating procedure at this place and was used as a motivational tool. (***) I told them how my meeting had gone. I was their hero for the rest of the afternoon.

All told, I only worked for this company for slightly over 2 months. It seemed like a lot longer, and I’m sure you’d think so considering the few stories I’ve told, and there were more… oh so many more. It was such a bad environment that I was looking for any way out possible. As luck would have it, another doc review project opened up in town, and they were offering a whole $2 more an hour. I switched over to that project. So did more than 50% of the people working for this firm. I heard stories later about the vacuum they had to scramble to fill after the exodus for the extra $2.

 

*** Non-sequitor. I had seen this management technique before although I suck at recognizing it in the moment. It is a Japanese style of management wherein you are told you are not performing well in an effort to spur you on to work harder to please your supervisors. Way back in the 80’s during the Japanese corporate incursion it was figured out that it doesn’t work too well on the US workforce, but somehow it persists in those bullshit motivational books corporate execs put so much stock in. Anyway, I had worked for a time in college at a bank lockbox (look it up if you don’t know what it is, but prepare to be bored). The bank had acquired a state contract by being the lowest bidder. Effectively the bank was going to be handling receivables from the whole state and they were easing into it by starting out with 3 counties and absorbing responsibility for a new county or two every week, thus providing a gradual buildup to fulfillment of the contract requirements by the end of one year. The head manager for the lockbox was a diminutive Japanese woman with a ridiculously thick accent. At the end of every week, she would call the whole floor of workers together and tell us that if we didn’t work harder, we were all going to be fired and that we were easily replaceable. Every week without fail. This was her way of motivating her workforce. What was actually happening behind the scenes was the bank had woefully underbid and they were not able to keep up with the incoming accounts (and they didn’t even have half the state’s counties under their purvue yet). They had also literally gone through the entire roster of the local temporary employment agencies to the point that they were having very difficult times getting new workers. To make matters worse, the agency employees who did stay were being paid better than the bank hires. Which meant more people quit, walked over to the temp agency and were ‘re-hired’ at a higher pay rate for the same job. Add to this the fact that the job and office location sucked and they offered no benefits other than being screamed at by a tiny Asian lady (if your into that sort of thing) and you can see why most people quit the job after a few months. The bank ended up ceding the contract after about a year and a half. Shortly thereafter, the whole bank went under and was bought piecemeal for fire-sale prices. I still get a sense of joy thinking about that bank dying.

 

 

edit: fun news article talking about some of this mentality… Part 1, Part 2