Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Partnership at BigLaw has very little to do with hard work or skills, except to the extent that those things are an indicator of whether one brings in business. There are a lot of talented lawyers out there. Given where work comes from, black attorneys are at a big disadvantage in trying to develop books of business.

It's always safer to go with the big firm. No one questions you when they screw things up.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

the best advice I've had to give over and over, is that "I know you see senior people make seemingly snap decisions. But they are basing those on your research/memos. We aren't looking for you to hurry. slow down."

But at big law I would never write any of that. It is a killer for white/black/anyone if it finds its way into a yearly review.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

In-house into firms is tough- the work one does in house is not usually the work one does at a firm. Also, what ever client relationships one develops in early firm years is completely lost once one goes in house. And you don't build any in-house, surpringingly. I've seen people come into firms from in-house thinking all those contacts they have from in-house groups will turn into big billings! it has never worked though.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Did you read a redacted version of my post?



hello 1995! how ya been?

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Do you think we disagree?

I'm sure it's an evergreen point, but it might as well be said. I have spent a lot of time pushing alternatives to Big Law, and everyone says all the right things but they never quite seem to get the work.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

You're last position is probably one with such stakes, it would be one of the last to move away from Mega-law. I've seen movement on many fronts.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

The movement can go both ways. In my area, a number of years back, there was a concerted effort by a number of leading venture firms to move work, especially company-side work, out to lower cost firms. The same thing happened in a number of Universities doing tech transfer work. Both movements came after a couple studies had shown that legal costs were among the most rapidly rising, difficult to control costs in venture-backed companies.

But as fund and deal sizes have increased, the pendulum has shifted back some, and I'd say we're closer to the "hire the big firm to shield yourself from blame" approach than we were five years ago. (That said, a client who had recently brought in one of top people at one of the top firms to do a critical deal where they wanted to be free from blame just fired them and hired me, because they were taking blame from the big firm screwing up.)

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I've been part of a couple of raids of in-house lawyers. It works when you have patience and provide support.

The in-house attorney is often a better general counsel than the over-specialized firm attorney, has a better understanding of how business and law interrelate, and has access to a broader network of in-house attorneys than firm attorneys. But they almost always need help figuring out how to translate those advantages into business, and a couple of years to do it.

Most big-law shops don't have that patience or support network.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Well, that's good. OTOH, that's why it's so hard to become a partner at BigLaw. There is too much capacity, and a lot of the work is slowly commoditizing.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

To say it more explicitly (and in agreement with you), the written review is for the personnel file, not for giving constructive feedback. The audience is the rest of the partnership and future litigation, not the person "being reviewed."

You need continuous communication for constructive criticism.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

We had a guy leave to go in house at a rival of said large client only to get reorganized out of the job and come back with visions of big billings from his old colleagues. I was part of the "team" for them, which meant when the in house lawyer was swamped or had neglected something, she'd loop me in at the last second and then complain that I hadn't fixed it. She eventually got fired after the figured out that she was the problem. I, personally, never heard from them again.

He did get some ongoing business from them, I think, but he eventually left again.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

The worst possible way to bring along associates is to worry about "future litigation" in personnel decisions. Reviews should be key moments for intervening in and improving careers. The worry about future litigation is especially damaging to minorities, since white men will go overboard on the CYA if given a chance rather than focusing on helping them out.

There is always a need to coordinate messaging about what associates need to do and need to focus on among the many people with whom a good associate may work. Delivering contradictory messages doesn't help anyone.

A lot of advice happens in the trenches on small things and individual matters, but you also have to step back periodically and think about the overall direction of a career. You have to help people realize when they're going down career dead ends or how they can develop skills needed long term instead of just mastering the stuff they're thrown. When we give a truly bad review it often comes with a special coach or mentor being hired for them or assigned to them. And it's very easy for a good associate to become a profitable workaholic without a future by spending too much time serving partners and too little worried about building their own business, and a review is a chance to intervene when your partners are doing that to someone.

If I can't give a bad review to some mentees that will restrict the support available to them to improve and make partner.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

You have this wrong. 35% of attorneys at firms are women. 20% of them are currently partners and it's been at that number for quite awhile. That's a significant difference.

Yes. I'm not sure why we are discussing the baseline reality for everyone. The point I'm making is that diverse and female attorneys flee law firms at way higher numbers because they do not see a future for themselves as owners and/or in firm leadership. This is borne out by the numbers.

Sure. But the real problem is how those who are in a position of power perceive those who have children. Men who have children are considered solid, grounded, and mature. Women who have children are perceived as having a shift in their priorities, a risk in that they will surely leave, and distracted. Confirmation bias comes into play when a woman leaves work early to go to a kid's play vs. when a man does the same thing. One gets, "Here we go, choosing family over work," and the other gets, "Wow, what a dedicated father." And the work, and therefore the opportunities, available to those two people differs greatly.

What's interesting now is that for millenials, diversity is a big issue for everyone. The white candidates judge the fuck out of firms on their diversity numbers and frequently ding them for poor performance. Yeah, imagine my shock.

Uh...thanks.

Not sure I understand your point. Do you need me to outline the fact that my experience is so rare that pointing out how it happened is almost completely irrelevant? Again, 1% of firm partnership is made up of black attorneys. 1%.

Which part? That it happens or that it should happen for diverse associates more than it does?

This is standard practice and the only way a firm can create institutional clients. The question is, who gets picked to inherit the work and credit?

This is where clients can make a huge difference. You can ask why more diverse attorneys and women aren't on your matters and you can request that they staff them. You can mention to the relationship partners that talented women and attorneys of color be given more work and more responsibility. When the time comes, you can ask what succession planning they have in mind and whether they have considered such-and-such in that planning. Etc.

How involved were you up until the point of the handoff on who was doing your work? Were you making calls to firm leadership to express how happy you were with the diverse associates who did your work? When you were pitched or had a meeting or went to a firm dinner or function, did you ask why there were so few women and diverse attorneys in attendance?

I'm on the hiring committee. It amazes me how people who went to second tier law schools and who made it will sit in those meetings and talk about how we can only hire from top tier schools and how there are so few candidates of color available at those schools since the competition for them is so heavy. I look at them like they're out of their fucking minds. They're not coming here. Hell, you wouldn't even hire yourself out of law school. Why is looking for talent at other schools such a big deal to these people. They're all fucking nuts.

No shit. You asked for solutions. This is one. If you wanted me to restate the current state of affairs, then what's the point of having the conversation?

If you want female and diverse talent, stop looking at lateral partners who have a book of business you like. Have your headhunters put together impressive offers to people who are rising stars at companies and who have deep connections at potential clients. Since this is where women and attorneys of color go to escape big law fairly early in their careers because they don't see opportunity, that's where the talent is. Poach them and give them attractive offers to become a part of your firm's leadership.

In the last article I posted about a safe space for white men to discuss diversity issues, there is a great quotation. "Often, when people hurt others, they want to focus on the intent, but what really matters is the impact." This is gospel. White people seem to be capable of only seeing racial issues from a perspective that revolves around intent. Disparate impact is to be explained away constantly. So ask yourself, do you not see rampant bias because you're looking for (or only see) nefarious intent?

Then read this: http://nextions.com/wp-content/uploa...per-series.pdf

And take this implicit bias (race task) test: https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/Study?tid=-1

What do I think about it? I think white people have spent generations trying to set up a system for which they can claim that "objective" standards are the most important measures of who should be admitted to the best schools and given the most opportunity. In order to keep those spots to themselves, they segregate themselves, send their kids to the best schools where one can have a 5.0 GPA, pay a ton of money to tutors, enroll their children in test-taking courses to ensure success, institute and take advantage of a legacy system, pay tons to colleges in order to secure admission, etc. When their kids benefit from all of these advantages, they point at those who didn't have them and say, "Objectively speaking, my kid is a superior student and using any other measure for admission other than the ones we spent all this time defining is completely unfair!"

Now that Asian parents and students have mastered this criteria in such a way that they would dominate almost every single elite school in this country if the decisions were made solely based on "merit" (as defined the way white people have set it up), white people are now pissed off that Asians are now being "overrepresented." It's absolutely hilarious. Now they want to go the other way and talk about how there should be some balance when it comes to admission standards.

TM

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

This is exactly right. Anything negative on an associate review is used to fuck people on comp.

TM

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I first joined a small boutique. After 3 months it merged into my first biglaw. The first set of reviews, the IP guys had no idea what the reviews were about. 1 of the 7 partners had a legit beef about the quality of my work. I'd fucked up a project for em. but i got 5 reviews saying I did sloppy work. when i asked, the other 4 pointed to the one guy's complaint. i about got fired. don't know what you mean by "co-ordinate" but I don't trust most of these guys to do that. reviews are about what each reviewer feels about work they've reviewed; not about what they've heard others say.