Big firm lawyers spend years training to be precise with their language. Partners reinforce that message by providing new associates with illegible markups of draft briefs or merger agreements and regaling them with stories of misplaced commas that cost clients katrillions of dollars.
So you can imagine my confusion when I started my career in BigLaw and discovered the huge gap in meaning between what people say and what people think. Even the most basic and routine interactions take on a form of their own when they occur in a law firm. Take the frequent example of two associates having a chance encounter in the elevator. The conversation is broken down to reflect the differences between the spoken word and its true meaning.
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