Senior Partner III

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.