Description
- Partners deflecting blame: A common trend in firms, shifting responsibility to protect their image.
- Junior associates' learning curve: Early years are about learning, not faultless execution.
- Importance of support: Backing colleagues fosters forgiveness for errors.
- Detail vigilance: Hyper-focus on detail crucial, even after minor missteps.
- Personal connection matters: Relationship dynamics can mitigate repercussions.
- Harrison's personal experience: Anecdote on handling a challenging workplace situation.
Transcript:
Thank you for answering my earlier question regarding the new associate who lost the position of a separate issue at a very nasty part of my firm, part of my firm, I was getting feedback my first six months, according to the firm's internal billables, I was one of the most profitable associates, the firm, however, none of this matters.
I ended up on a case with a partner that was spiraling out of control. And the moment he could point out. Point to something he felt and did wrong. He basically wrote an email copying my boss, crushing me and put all his weight in trying to blame me for the faults of the case. I tried to push back politely, but I lost my job within days because a powerful partner was out to get me.
The firm didn't give me severance or time to look for a job. Why was the firm so vindictive? What went wrong here? Okay. Great question. And I'm sorry that happened to you. That's pretty crappy and I'm sure that's not easy. So let's break this down. So let me just see here. Okay. So here's what happens a lot of times.
So this is many times what happens. Partners will, and I don't know if this happened here, but in every firm partners will make mistakes. Those mistakes may be, the partner may have been working for another partner's client, who knows? But what partners will do a lot of times is, so they, if they made a mistake or they weren't supervising you properly or whatever, they will try to look for people to blame, so the fault's not on them, and then they look better to the other partner.
Sometimes. The same thing happened to them when they were younger, that someone, they're just following some kind of pattern that someone, and no matter what you did, you would be in that situation. That can happen too. Sometimes you just don't know what happened. You may have had something else happens, but generally if you're fired from a firm, like it's in your billing, a lot of hours they're going to lose money.
They fire you. They're going to need to get someone else trained. It doesn't always look good in the client. When the person is person switching, so you have to think about what could have happened exactly there and why are you getting blamed or maybe there's some stuff you did wrong, maybe not, but.
Here's the point, is the first five years of any attorney's career, first five years, you're really learning and it's not, you're learning and it's not really fair for you to have responsibility for almost everything that you're doing. But especially in the first one year or two years.
It's pretty difficult for you to, you should not, and this is just my opinion, but from what I've seen, if you're smart enough, you're keeping up with what's going on and you make a stupid mistake and stuff, these are just learning experiences, they're not necessarily something. That you should be getting fired for, that's just my opinion.
And many times the firm is firing you for something like that. Maybe they're looking for a reason to fire you that has nothing to do with you. It could be about money. It could be about, who knows? It could be about a lot of things, but you shouldn't, if I were you, I wouldn't really feel too much if you're a junior associate because junior associates make problems all the time, have problems all the time.
Obviously they were mad. I don't know exactly what happened, but here are the lessons that I think young attorneys should learn. The first one is you have to be, this is the, these are, I'm just bringing this up. The lessons are you need to be as careful with everything as possible, not make, and meaning credibly emotive, incredibly more so than you've ever been.
Incredibly attentive to details and watch them and then you need to protect. And so then there's the soldier versus generals. So then you need to be watching to make sure whatever you do, that you're not, that you're not making those mistakes or you're not upsetting a general. So you want to be, you want to follow orders.
You want to basically be solicitous of them by finding, by helping them in whatever way they can, ways they don't anticipate. Things and just being very careful of everything and then doing whatever you can not to make errors. And again, there's nothing wrong with you having made these errors, but you just need to learn from it.
And it doesn't sound like you lost the case or did anything that bad, so I don't. Really know why the firm is reacting that way and it's not fair, but you will encounter people like this all the time. So my first job was working for a, but yeah, I was working for a judge. And in my first like month there, I made a really stupid mistake.
Where I was, where instead of I was dead, I was doing all these prisoner petitions where people were doing these petitions to get out of prison and for different crimes. And they were just these form things where you would just say denied. And it's just scary now that I think about if I was a prisoner.
But then I would give them to the judge for signature. And anyway, so then I had this one and for whatever reason I said granted, type granted in there instead. And so I gave it to him and he was like, He called me in his office and closed the door and said, This is fricking outrageous. The guy wouldn't have been let go.
I would have been caught. But you almost let this convict, the person in the prison. And it's very funny. Never would have happened, but a horrible mistake. And so then I'm just completely obsessed with details. I'm sitting in the stand for nine or 10 months there. But what had happened was he and I were I just.
I was working with this court reporter that had all these awful things to say about him. And I would go golfing with her and he would see me talking to her and knew what was going on. And knew I wasn't on his side with the political way he was approaching things. And so he basically didn't like me. It was looking for a reason to, I wasn't comfortable with me and like my, the fact that I didn't support him, which is absolutely right.
And so he was looking for me to make mistakes. And then I wrote him a memo about something and which I wasn't even asked to write, and he found an error in there and called me to his office. He was very upset about it and mad. And I realized that because of all that, I was going to probably lose my job if I didn't do something.
So I went to talk to him and ended up leaving without getting fired, but pretty close to it. So basically, because I wasn't supporting him, he didn't feel like I had my head back. And he had every right to, basically, I would have been fired had I realized what was going on. So he had every right to do that.
And your employer, whoever this person was, may not have felt supported. Because if people support you, if they feel like you support them, Then they will overlook any error, they will come, they will help you if you make errors. So you have to understand that it's not, you have to basically, people want to feel like you have their back.
And if they feel that way they're going to be much more likely they'll overlook all this stuff. And if you had a connection with this person, like some kind of connection where you were nice to them, or you, I don't know, you shared some, something like that, it would have been very helpful.
