Category: Job

I was involved with breaking a human being. I think it disturbed me more that I had forgotten this story until recently. In my own defense, there was no way to know what was happening at the time. I think it says more about the profession in general that no one at his firm noticed until it was too late.

I was working on a fatality case. There were big numbers involved based on how the ‘client’ had died. There were also about 6 different corporations being sued. Each of the corporations had hired their own defense firm in one relatively small town. This also meant that the last person to the party got last pick of the defense firms in town, and therefore most likely the better / larger firms had already been hired by the co-defendants.  The last corporation joined in this particular case hired a mid-small defense firm of about a dozen attorneys.

Well, at a certain point in the case, as seemingly with any case with multiple defendants, there came the winnowing. Everyone decided it was time to try to MSJ themselves out. And one by one, the various defendants dropped out. Except one; in particular the last one joined to the case. They didn’t file an MSJ at all.

In fact, it turned out they had not filed a single motion on their own behalf during the entire case. The attorney who had been representing this corp. had gotten his name ‘signed with authorization’ onto all the motions filed by the other corporations’ higher priced firms. When the dust had settled, that one attorney and his client were the only ones left in the suit. Every other co-defendant had taken the opportunity when they filed their MSJ to point their collective finger at the one remaining defendant on their way out the door.

Deadlines were gone, motions had not been adopted by this counsel, his name had been signed on things but nothing of great consequence. In short, he was screwed. The winnowing of defendants also mean that a plaintiff no longer has to use the shotgun method of going after multiple targets. Now we had a single target with a bullseye painted on them courtesy of their co-defendants, and I started sending out our usual ramped up (and trumped up) motions now that we were getting closer to the trial setting.

For those not in the know about shady plaintiff’s work, one of the pre-trial tactics used is to file fast and furious motions. And file lots of them. The more the better; file to strike anyone and anything that supports the other side’s contention. File motions to compel to get the attorneys baby pictures from his mother. File requests for sanctions because you heard a rumor opposing counsel might have possibly have been related to Hitler. It really doesn’t matter what the content is, it is more important that you are sending a lot of them. And make sure to send lots and lots of seemingly levelheaded emails to opposing counsel too… because then you can print them out and attach them to your motions too. Especially when opposing counsel starts sending back emails ranting at you because you are emailing and calling their cell phone constantly (seriously… and a pro-tip for any aspiring attorneys… never, ever ever ever hand out your personal cell phone to another attorney if you can possibly help it).

Well, we started doing just that to Opposing counsel. We realized early on that he was screwed since he had filed no motions during the whole case. Our office was nothing if not efficient at sending these types of crap motions at a breakneck speed.

And then it happened. Opposing counsel replied with 2 motions of his own. They were incomprehensible rantings interspersed with legal argument that wouldn’t be made by a first year law student with a complete lack of knowledge of civil procedure. We immediately set a hearing for our motions at the soonest date possible. I had started to respond to his replies for the hearing. But the hearing never happened.

Two days prior to the hearing, we got a call from one of the partners at this law firm. The partner who had this case had a mental breakdown and was taken by ambulance from his office. He was removed from the firm / partnership. He had been forcibly retired. A partner from the firm  took over and tried their best to salvage what they could from the case. I am quite certain the firm had a fucking ridiculous malpractice case against them after the dust settled, but I never did find out. To my boss’ credit, he reined everything in and told us to stop. The litigation machine was put on hold until they could pick up the pieces of what used to be someone’s life.

In all likelihood if it hadn’t been the case I was working on, it would have just been someone else’s case that pushed this guy over the edge. But it wasn’t. It was me working at the direction of my boss and the firm. And without meaning to, I took part in irreparably breaking another human being. It’s sorta a fucked up feeling to realize that.

I’ve been told to consistently lie about where my boss is and what he is doing. The standard lie I am supposed to use when someone asks is to say “he’s in a deposition.” And when I say someone, I mean the other lawyers at the firm. You see, my boss often is not in his office, and is unreachable except through text message. I am uncertain where he is, or what he’s doing. I seem to be the proxy signature for him because he doesn’t really like signing anything. (as everyone should know, this is a bad warning sign).

As previously noted, the firm has a new compliance attorney stalking the halls, and they’ve set their sights squarely on my boss. The way my boss has decided to deal with this is doubling down on making sure they are unavailable at the office; always the best course of action to avoid the situation.

Probably the best interaction related to this was when the compliance attorney asked the paralegal where my boss was and they replied he was on the phone in the garage. As it was already late into the morning, the compliance attorney dug in and started asking “so does he normally talk on the phone in the garage? Is he like superman and runs out to the garage like its a phonebooth to protect his identity? Why is he in the garage on his phone?”

Eventually it became a game. The compliance attorney would wander by looking for him. The paralegal would come up with something so obviously a lie that it became somewhat obvious that she had to be fucking with him. Probably the best one I saw was when the compliance attorney came down a very short hallway and asked where our boss was. The paralegal did a double take and said “he literally just went down the hallway… I don’t understand how you could have missed him.” And to add to the whole charade, she stood up, and leaned over to look down the hallway, as if he might be hiding just out of sight. The compliance attorney was boiling, but couldn’t specifically say she was lying, and just stalked off. The moment he was out of sight, we both died laughing.

The paralegal and I had gotten this dance down to an art. She blocked the compliance attorney. I would text our boss and tell him Rainman was on the warpath looking for him. Our boss then would put in an appearance at the office. He made sure to arrange it so that the compliance attorney was likely out for lunch or busy, and our boss would then do a fly through of the office and talk to several of the higher level partners. Just to make sure that everyone saw him. The compliance attorney would then show back up and find out he had just missed our boss, and all of these other people in the office had seen him.. people who were beyond reproach. It must just be his bad luck that he missed him.

It drove the guy absolutely insane, but he couldn’t prove what was going on. Honestly it was a lot of fun watching it happen.

The firm had decided they were getting serious about getting rid of some people. And at the top of their list was my boss. For almost the whole time I was working at the firm, we had been operating in the blissful absence of “compliance attorneys”. Prior to my start at the firm, there had apparently been some other compliance attorney who had lasted over a year before pulling the ripcord. But since that guy had left, the firm had chosen not to hire a new one… until now. The firm took on a full time compliance attorney about 3 months before I quit. He was a short, angry little man who looked (and sounded) a bit like Dustin Hoffman if you squinted. The recurring thoughts about Rainman aside, he was a rather poor attorney and seemed to survive by getting angry and hoping it made people uncomfortable enough that they would back down. (In fact, I’ll just continue referring to him as Rainman… it is oddly fitting actually).

Rainman’s angry demeanor didn’t work so well when it came up against my crazy boss. Angry just made him stronger, like the Hulk, or maybe tequila. It didn’t work so well with me either, angry doesn’t really do anything to apathetic. The compliance attorney would yell at me (literally) for something, and my response was usually to sigh, or shrug, or generally ignore him. This in turn actually made him actually angrier and he would eventually storm off to his office, no doubt to write angry interoffice messages. The pure inviolable feeling one has when you don’t care if you get fired is truly amazing.

The compliance attorney had been given marching orders to try to get my boss fired. He came to me very early on and specifically told me “they” were trying to fire my boss. The problem was, by this time, I had already turned the corner and now I liked my boss. Hang around someone long enough and you start to see things from their worldview, and his was actually pretty interesting, and in a strange way how he operated made much more sense compared to the rest of the attorneys working there.

Initially I did nothing with the information Rainman told me. But this particular conversation would be the linchpin which ultimately made everything fall apart. (much more on this later)

At some point shortly after the first few interactions with the compliance attorney, the powers that be decided I was not being helpful, so I must be part of the problem. This didn’t help matters because the more Rainman pushed and prodded me, the closer I ended up getting to my boss and those of us working directly with him.

My boss started having very contentious ‘conversations’ with Rainman. Many of these conversations involved Rainman second guessing the litigation maneuvering  we were doing on cases. The problem was, Rainman was a crappy attorney. He had recently moved to the state and had waived into the bar, and had no idea about why certain things could or could not be done because of his poor understanding of the local / state rules. Rainman had come from New Jersey, one of the easiest bars in the country (I can say that with confidence having taken and passed it as an afterthought) and he hadn’t been a litigator there. His advice was uniformly off the mark, but he stated it with the confidence of the truly ignorant and self assured.

At a certain point, my boss got tired of dealing with him. So he didn’t. What do I mean? Well, from my perspective, he just stopped showing up… for a few weeks. The armchair psychitrist in me wants to say this was just part of his manic / depressive cycle; first he’d be there 14 hours a day, then no one would see him for days at a time. But I think he just figured out he didn’t have to deal with the crap if he didn’t show up, and let’s be honest, a lot of what we do as attorneys can now be done anywhere given a laptop and internet connection. During this period there was veritably no communication; at best, I would get cryptic text messages which may or may not be deciphered. I would however get near daily visits from Rainman yelling at me for my boss not being around. Because that is obviously within my power to alter. At this point I would always drop my boss a note saying Rainman was wandering the halls looking for him.

This was punctuated by the amusing game which was being played outside my office as well. Rainman garnered a particular dislike for our paralegal. So when Rainman would ask if my boss was in, the paralegal would make something up just to fuck with Rainman. “Yes, he was just here.” / “Isn’t he in his office?” / “He just walked that way (down the same small hallway Rainman had just come from), I can’t imagine how you missed him.” / “You just missed him, he went to lunch.” It became hilarious. Eventually Rainman knew she was lying, but couldn’t prove her wrong on most occasions. Especially when the boss would do a fly through to show his face to one of two people who would verify he had been in that day. It drove Rainman insane.

Unfortunately, Rainman decided the best way to get to my boss, was to create problems for the people working for him. (more to come)

You always hear about ethics issues in law school. Everyone sorta knows lawyers are ethically questionable, but I always assumed it was more associated with the concept that we choose to go into a profession that represented criminals and other assorted horrible people for money.  It’s like a more erudite form of prostitution. We’ll do almost anything for money; no check that, after working here I know that lawyers will do anything for money.

I probably should have figured the ethics in the real workplace were going to be nasty. I made it thorough a retelling of merely one of these stories to a friend who is an associate elsewhere, they told me I was obliged to quit immediately. I explained to my friend I had this pesky addiction to food which I could only satisfy with those little green slips of paper the law firm gives me so long as I keep showing up.

So, what have I witnessed so far? I’ll start simple.

My boss’ desk is stacked with papers. Mostly because they tend to never be in their office. Which is part of the problem with the affidavit issue, if they are never there, they never end up signing those all important time sensitive documents. But don’t even suggest they appoint an authorized signor; this other arrangement is better. I watched a paralegal take an unsigned affidavit, sign it for an attorney then proceed to cut-and-paste the seal and signature of a notary onto the affidavit and submit it to the court. I know, you’re probably thinking this is maybe one bad actor… not really. I also saw another attorney who ‘could sign the absent attorney’s name better than the paralegal could’ sign an affidavit in front of the office notary, who then signed and notarized it. If you can think of any permutation of this arrangement with an office full of paralegals and attorneys, I watched it happen. The office notaries would notarize any document with any name on it, no questions. I think they just really liked to use stamp; I’m sorta surprised they didn’t just stamp random objects around the office with it.

Back to the avalanche of papers on my boss’ desk… I got a motion to compel (our) discovery through service. When I started looking, it seemed like we never sent the discovery out, and thus missed the deadline by a month or (much) more. I asked if anyone knew if it had gone out. A helpful paralegal said, of course it went out, I sent it out in the mail myself. I will admit, I thought that was odd considering we e-serve everything, but hey, who knows. I was relatively new, and this was an old file. It was possible they sent paper copies previously, recently… maybe? So I told opposing counsel it had been sent out, but I’d be happy to email over a copy if they couldn’t find it; I emailed it over and I put the issue out of my mind. Opposing counsel might have figured out something was wrong but my understanding was they ended up in rehab the day after I sent the email… so they had other things on their mind. Weird coincidences like this seem to happen way to often in the legal world, I chalk it up to the weird as fuck characters who populate this profession. I didn’t think much of this incident… until it happened again.

But this time, it was a little different. This time the firm definitely didn’t send it out. This was an issue because it was in at a highly litigious point in a high value case and opposing counsel seemed to have forgotten they requested the information; but if they figured it out, we would have had limitations placed on our objections  blah blah blah (legal mumbo jumbo no one but lawyers care about so I won’t keep explaining). The paralegal again says, don’t worry, we have ways of fixing this. Then they open their desk and start rummaging through and pull out a handful of metered stamps with backdates on them, like many months backdated. They take the discovery, put it in an envelope to send out, and put a backdated stamp on it to make it fall within the discovery period. I brought up the issue with the senior litigator that technically we were late and out of time. The paralegal looked at the senior and said “don’t worry, we fixed it with a stamp.” The senior said, “oh, then no problems.”

Continuing on… How about something more malpracticey? The lit group sent off one of any number of continuing motions in one of the multitude of cases in our section, only to have it bounce back from opposing counsel with an email saying “this case was dismissed… why are you filing into it?” This was news to us, so we looked into it. The case had been dismissed when the opposing side had set a docket control hearing about 2 months prior and our firm was a no show. For those who don’t know, these things are usually a formality handled by a paralegal who just calls in to it. It might require an in-person hearing, but that’s rare and usually only for contested issues. Well, the group looked into it and here was what we found… the opposing counsel had the phone number, email, physical office address, and was actually personally acquainted with the senior litigator in our group from a previous job. The court for some reason did not have current contact information for the senior litigator; mind you, contact information is, at a minimum, listed at the end of the original complaint, and also on every motion filed into the court, and on all the discovery docs sent to opposing counsel. The court did however have the contact info of the Senior Litigator at a previous job, so they sent it there, and in the best fashion possible, messed up the address so it wasn’t even served properly on them. At the court hearing, opposing counsel did not attempt to contact the senior litigator or anyone else in the office, instead they just said “we have no idea what happened” and let the court dismiss for want of prosecution. The correct thing to do is to call on your cell and ask where counsel is, not to lie to the court and say they have no idea how to contact them or where they are. Things don’t (and aren’t intended) to work in that fashion.

We filed to reinstate the case and I was sent to the hearing. While preparing for it, I found a notice for the docketing hearing we had received a month before the docket control hearing. I brought it up to the paralegal (who was supposed to be responsible for scheduling it) and the senior litigator. They specifically said “we never received that” and proceeded to delete it from the network. Everyone involved had unclean hands. It is so god damned icky working around these people.

I was sent to the court to argue the very narrow statement “Senior litigator person had never gotten the hearing notice” (which they had). The judge was ticked and handed me a copy of the email they had sent us (you know, with the copy of the DCC that no longer existed on our computer network?) Anyway, I basically said the senior litigator had never gotten it personally (because they never actually check their own mail themselves, so technically true). The judge was really not happy, but then, opposing counsel jumped in and said they too had problems getting hold of senior litigator and it must be a problem with our phone / email systems.  Opposing counsel was now lying to try to make themselves look better for intentionally not contacting my firm at all. The judge was now stuck with two lawyers effectively lying about the same thing… They were outnumbered and gave up, but basically said you only get one fuck-up in their courtroom and made sure I would pass along that statement to the senior litigator.

I could keep going, I think I will in later posts about the shady as fuck goings on, but for now these last few will have to suffice for a bit.

I have noticed a strange propensity at my firm. I think it exists in the wild in our profession almost everywhere. There is a complete lack of appreciation for specific knowledge of the individual. This is an odd claim for what in effect is a profession of ‘knowledge workers’ such as attorneys, where specialized knowledge is supposed to be our raison d’être.  It is a simple concept, firms very often don’t use the people with the most knowledge for the specifically on-point task that knowledge would most benefit. For example…

Several months ago I was given a research task. Our litigation group was expecting a radioactive motion to be dropped in our lap by the opposing counsel any day. We knew it was coming, and we generally knew what the legal theory they would be arguing was going to be, and that it would be bad for us. But beyond knowing the outline of the problem, no one in the firm had done any in-depth legal research into the topic. The onus fell on me (for a variety of political reasons above my paygrade) to untie the Gordian knot of a state law which had basically been enacted as a complete bar against what we were arguing in the case. It was a big case, and I was aiming to impress.

I spent what was very likely, collectively, days researching the topic. We knew the motion would show up at some point, but until it did, I kept researching the issue. I had read every case dealing with the particular statute, I knew the loopholes, I had read the legislative floor session for the bill, I knew who was currently arguing similar cases in the state and had even reached out to other law firms to speak to attorneys who had lost a recent case on the issue to see where they thought they went awry. In short, I knew the issue better than anyone in the firm. I kept researching the issue, because the motion we were all expecting just never seemed to materialize.

But finally, the day came. The motion showed up with exactly the argument I was expecting. I gave a short presentation on the topic to a combined litigation group and talked about strategy and how we might attack it or maybe even sidestep the issue. It all seemed to be very well received and I came in the next day ready to write an amazing answer.

But, instead it was assigned to a different associate from a different group who hadn’t researched the law at all. I handed them a respectable pile of research notes and caselaw, which I am fairly certain they never looked at considering the answer he wrote was so poorly constructed. He argued a very weak point, that was at its core… just… wrong. It wasn’t merely that I disagreed with how they attempted to approach the issue, it was that it was legally incorrect and showed a profound misunderstanding of the central construction of the law at issue.

It didn’t make any sense… why have the person with the greatest background in a given topic, NOT work on that topic? I was actually angry I hadn’t been given more work to do, because that should have been my work. But it obviously isn’t only me this happens to.

This institutional ignorance is probably shown nowhere better than during an actual trial. It seems no matter the firm, the story plays out the same. I’ve had a chance to watch it unfold several times. Most recently another litigation attorney at the firm had a case actually reach trial. A few days before trial was set to start, they were kicked from first to (effectively) third chair. Instead, the managing partner effectively waltzed into a trial and took over the whole of the litigation from the attorney and associates who knew the background and intricacies of the case. I watched the managing partner proceed to question witnesses about generic topics, eating up the majority of the time grandstanding, and leaving only a few minutes for the other attorney who had been working the case for 2-years to try to clean up the facts and the record before the witness was excused. Apparently, a brief conference room meeting is all it takes to get caught up on a complex litigation case.

(to name drop a little) I also watched it happen at Reed Smith. The exact situation played out, and the senior associate who had been in the case and elbow deep in the paperwork quite literally every day for months, was relegated to spectator seating (not even at the attorney tables) while 2 senior partners argued the case instead. It almost seems like the British Barrister / Solicitor system.

The same thing happens at the firm I am at during meditations. A senior partner would decide to show up and continually ask questions (during the mediation) and then make snap judgments without the benefit of knowing why certain arguments (or settlements) were ridiculous and potentially hurting the mediation.

In effect, for the political benefit and cachet of parading in front of the client to show that “the big guns” are on the case, the quality of the representation takes a hit as those with the least knowledge decide to take it over. I am in awe of the stupidity, every time it happens, and yet it happens so often in so many ways.

I kept hearing vague mentions of the people who had been in my position before me. Associate-X really wasn’t very good at his job. He never did any work… It took him days and days to write a single letter… I don’t know how he passed the bar. We fired him cause he vividly threatened to kill his paralegal.

Wait. Huh?

Yeah, I was replacing a guy who was a returning vet with PTSD and had threatened to kill not one… but two paralegals. In separate and distinct encounters. In point of fact, I had been told the story once with no mention of the parties involved. And then a second time by one of the paralegals I worked with daily who told me they were the one who was threatened. Being the subtle person I am, I blurted out far too loudly, “THAT WAS YOU?” then, realizing volume… I leaned in and quietly said… “that was you?”

It was relatively remarkable because the paralegal was a really nice person, except that she swore like a sailor, which honestly merely added to the charm. I constantly hear some light profanity wafting by my office door. It really is highly amusing.

The conversation at some point spiraled into the ‘other’ attorney everyone knew about. Apparently this one had been disbarred in one jurisdiction due to mental issues involving schizophrenia. They had then moved into my current jurisdiction, applied to the bar and been accepted (?). She had been working as a paralegal until the bar came through for them, so the standard background sweep done on attorneys wasn’t really done on her, because laziness and stuff I suppose.

All anyone knows is that at some point, she stopped taking her meds. Then somehow they found her kill list. Yes. She had a list of people she was going to kill at the firm. And it was published online. Interestingly it had people on it at the firm who had never met her. The Frat Attorney was on the list and he had apparently never laid eyes on her. His recollection of the whole event was getting a phone call early in the morning and being told “don’t come into work today.” He said no one even told him why until the next day when he found out they had to get the police to take her to the psych ward from the firm.

I apparently had big shoes to fill.

I will say, I honestly think my paralegals are working more than I am. But the work itself is very different, so it’s not quite equivalent. I am spared (a fair amount) of the weird busywork involved with complying with capricious internal company policies, because it falls on the paralegals. But… I’m going to sound like an elitist here, so go ahead and get good and indignant now… Although they are very good at what they do, many (most) don’t quite understand what we (the attorneys) are writing. There is an education gap which I didn’t fully appreciate until I saw it in action. We often pass off our motions to the paralegals to check over for spelling / grammar / (copy-paste) errors. But in terms of the actual content, it may as well be ancient Greek. Most paralegals have only a high school education and potentially got a paralegal certificate at a community college somewhere. I found this disconcerting when I realized the massive understanding gap when I would be asked if I had misspelled a word, only to explain what I used was a correctly spelled word they had never seen, or when one told me they had no idea what I had written — but it sounded good.

I am an elitist, by philosophy. But in practice, it made me feel very uncomfortable. I really liked talking and joking around with my paralegals, but there really was an invisible yet palpable rift in understanding.

Most attorneys use a paralegal to run the scheduling, call the court, and generally try to keep up with the deadlines which are connected to literally everything we file. There is little doubt that a fair number of them have a better handle on the deadline portion of civil procedure than I may have for years to come. We also use them to copy / paste rote motions which don’t change except for the named individual and the pronouns, notice of depositions, LOPs, and all manner of industry specific paperwork which doesn’t really need the attention of an attorney except for a quick glance and a signature.

There is a line though, as I said above, there is a benefit for going to college and law school which paralegals do not have. Where I work, there are a fair number of senior litigators who have associates, in fact some have multiple associates working for them. But there are also the unfortunate few who have none.

One such unfortunate at my firm assigned out a complicated (research) motion to their paralegal to write. The paralegal rightly told the senior litigator that they had no idea what they were doing and didn’t understand it. The litigator looked at their paralegal and said “Google it” and walked away.

If anyone reading this is ever considering hiring an attorney for a complex issue, ask beforehand how many associates work directly under / for that attorney. If the answer is none, find a different attorney. Otherwise you will probably end up getting the best legal advice google can offer.

 

There has been a consistent issue the whole time I have been at this firm regarding my boss which involves communication. It is an odd dichotomy because it is both too little, and far too much.

As with everyone in an office environment my boss has a phone sitting on his desk which is equipped with voicemail… which they staunchly refuse to use. Why doesn’t he want to use the office phone? Well, because the office records phone calls, and he is fantastically paranoid because he thinks they are out to get him (which he’s actually correct about as it turns out, more on that later). Instead my boss has 2 cell phones and therefore he never picks up the office phone unless absolutely necessary… as in the name flashing on the caller-id is the top boss is calling. He will by preference not ever call on his office phone; even in the office; even if his cellphone is almost out of power and the short charging cord leaves him stuck in a hunched position near an outlet like Golem caressing his precious… it must still be a call through his cellphone. He carries both cell phones at all times, but almost never uses the firm provided cell phone because of his paranoia, which brings up the excellent question of why he has it, or carries it around. I’ve been told multiple times by him that the firm has GPS tracking enabled on the phones to keep tabs on their employees, which although possible, starts to hint at the state of mind with regard to my boss.

He asked me at one point how to check his voicemail on his desk phone, which I showed him how to do hovering over his shoulder with the speakerphone on, only to find over 60+ messages from as far back as 8 months prior (now closer to a year). As soon as he heard the date on the first voicemail from 8 months ago he immediately hung up the speakerphone, and looked away and said he would take care of it later. The voicemail light is still blinking on his phone to this day. He knows, hell everyone knows, that is a huge ethical breach to do this, but he decides to ignore it anyway. His opinion is that anyone who matters has his cell phone number(s). He also hates calling other peoples offices for the same paranoid reasoning, thinking the conversations are being recorded. Thus I end up in uncomfortable conversations with OC offices trying to convince a secretary or paralegal to hand over their boss’ cell phone number to me… because obviously this is normal.

Which brings us to the flip side of the communication with him.  If you provide him with your cellphone number… may lord have mercy on you. I have text messages which are not merely multiple text messages in length… no, they are literally pages upon pages of text. You will get phone calls at all hours. Text messages appear almost daily after midnight and at odd hours asking about random matters and scheduling (as if I have the firm calendar in front of me), because I guess he thinks that’s acceptable and that everyone who works for him is on call 24 hours a day.

Oh yeah, its not like its just me he or the paralegals he does this too either. Opposing Counsel has actually stated on the record that they were getting messages from my boss on their phone at 3 in the morning. We had another OC who told him point blank to stop calling and texting their phone or they would complain to the judge about the harassment. If you are a client, you don’t exist unless you have his cell number, mostly because you will only ever be routed to his office phone by the secretary, and we all know it will be a cold day in hell before he answers that phone.

I’m taking another story out of order, because it is just too amazing not to.

Recently, I was heading out to lunch. As I often do, I was getting lunch late because things seemed to quiet down around three in the afternoon, so escaping for food then is usually least noticed by those around me. Before I made it to my car, I got a phone call from the paralegal telling me Mr. Senior Partner was calling a meeting of a bunch of associates. When asked what about, turns out there was no information given. The paralegal had given me an out saying they didn’t know where I was, and then calling me on the phone. (lying in this manner is done so often it may as well be company policy) I had a brief opportunity as I looked between my car and back toward the law firm building. I told them I was headed back inside and I would get lunch later. (I greatly regret this decision not to place more value upon my lunch and will not make this mistake again).

I show up and am told it the meeting was for associates. So I file in expecting to see a bunch of us. Well, not quite. I see maybe a dozen of us… which is odd because there are a whole bunch more around the office. Mr. Senior Partner does his usual meeting appearance half an hour plus after it is supposed to start, making everyone just sit and do nothing. He looks around the room and points at the 2 associates of one of his favored litigators, and says “I didn’t ask for you two, you can go.” Which just seems to make the whole situation stranger that those of us left were apparently hand picked for this assignment. Which did not bode well, because at one end of the room were some lower level associates who had never graced the floor of the building we were in before this.

He starts talking, and weaving a story about a some random guy. The last time he spun a story in a meeting like this, it is slightly notable that he lied about the story, by vastly embellishing details which were material to the case at hand, but no matter. The short version was that there was a guy, who was now in the hospital and we were being conscripted to guard the client from other *cough* less scrupulous attorneys who might try to get them to sign something. (I am unsure if a less scrupulous firm exists). Someone asks if this person is a client. Mr Senior Partner sidesteps the question and doesn’t answer. He then quickly leaves and says the compliance attorney will fill us in on any other details.

So we are given signup sheets to go guard a patient, in a hospital, over the weekend. At least once more someone asks if they are a currently client, and the answer was something to the effect of “he’s a really nice man”. This time I ask the compliance attorney directly… Is.. he.. a.. client? There is a pause and apparently committed to it, the compliance attorney says “Of course he is. why else would we be doing this?” Then we’re told the ‘client’ has no family and it’s so sad what happened, as if this is supposed to explain away why we are doing this…. assigning a cadre of attorneys to hover at the bedside of some random person in a hospital.

Now most people can already smell the bullshit. The favored associates were given a pass, “handpicked” ones were being made to hang out in a hospital over the weekend, doing the absolute epitome of ambulance chasing.

I left the meeting and talked to someone who had been with the firm almost from the beginning. When I told them, they literally gasped, and said that the firm never does this and the founder must not know because this is strictly taboo. (also illegal pretty much everywhere… look up barraty).

I had lucked out and gotten a slightly better timeslot. I showed up, and found out first and foremost, the grand lie that the person had no family. There were about a dozen family members packed into the hospital room, and there I was, shifting uncomfortably around them until I finally just decided to wait in the hall. And damn am I glad I did, because shortly thereafter they began praying. And not the quiet praying… nooo… I’m talking loud yelling praying which turned into speaking in tongues. No shit. It was a cross between hilarious and horrifying.

I waited out my time. This was quite literally the slimiest thing I’ve done to date. Basically the firm used a bunch of attorneys to guard some guy in a hospital bed as if he were a big pile of money. Because that’s how the firm saw him. I am willing to work pretty much anywhere at this point. I really hope someday I get to testify in front of the bar against these people.

My boss has been effectively absent for the last 3 weeks. I am actually curious to know what his opinion is on this latest activity. Of course, he has to show up for me to actually communicate with him beyond very short text messages.

These posts are mostly there to give you an idea of who was running the show on a daily basis. The general disdain of the Senior Partner for everyone else trickled down into everything done at the office. For example:

I was sitting in my supervising attorney’s office. We were talking about the various tasks for the cases that they are running, and I am helping to manage. We get to a point where we need to file for a hearing, so my boss asks me to get the paralegal.

From the doorway to the paralegal’s desk was possibly … 7 feet? maybe?

I step out of the doorway a little more than 2 feet towards the desk and ask them to come join us. I turn to re-enter the office and quite literally the door slams mere centimeters from my face. About 4 people were standing around and froze for a moment while I nearly fall onto the unexpectedly and quite suddenly closed door.

In the second it took me to step out of the doorway, the Senior Partner walked into the office behind me and shut the door on me. Without noticing I was there at all. The secretary behind me laughed a little and said “well at least you didn’t hit the door…” With not much more to be said, I turned and told her “I seriously think I am invisible to that man.”

She looked at me and said,”Honey, I think we all are.”

—

Then there were the meetings. The attorneys in the whole office were informed of a meeting with the Senior Partner. So pretty much all work stopped, as everyone from the senior litigators to the lowly associates like me filed into a conference room. And proceeded to wait.

And wait.

Now, the Senior Partner was the one who called the meeting. He knew where everyone was and had told us when to be there (now.. was the timing given to me). The entire office basically just waited for about 45 min doing nothing until the senior partner wandered in and held an under 30 second meeting in which he introduced the new compliance attorney, who we had all met already, cause they had been working there for 2 or 3 weeks at that point. And then he walked out without talking to anyone. Good meeting.

But hey, at least there had been a meeting this time. This exact scenario had happened a few weeks prior, and in the end he sent a paralegal to say that he needed to reschedule whatever meeting we had all been waiting for the past hour for. Good use of time.

The point is, this was not unique.