There’s one prick every lawyer tries to avoid, and I know of very few firms (and very few groups within large firms) that don’t have at least one partner who is a total egotistical dick—an “ED.” EDs are impossible with associates. Any given ED knows exactly how he’s perceived, and all the partners and associates see him coming from a mile away.
Your average ED is in his 50s and believes he is the primary authority in his area of the law. (He makes it a point to explain that a lot.) When he’s not in the office, he’s working at home til all hours solving important, “critical” client matters. (He drops that fact a lot too.) Not only that, but your most basic ED also tends to have a side obsession: Something intense, like training for marathons or collecting international real estate.
Yet somehow, an ED also has time to be both a star husband and father-of-the-year. Self-professed, of course. Because, in reality, we all know that he only brings his wife and kids into the office to prove to everyone that women and children are not afraid of him. (If you can get passed that terrified gleam in his daughter’s eye.)
As an associate, I once foolishly believed that if an ED ever tagged me for an assignment, I would simply somehow figure out a way to work harmoniously with said ED, even though no associate before me had ever been able to do so. Also, I vowed that I would write any ED who asked a memo that would be so good that I would forever earn a free pass from his wrath.
Of course, every associate believes he/she will do the same thing when his/her time comes.
Then your time comes.
The ominous day for me finally came when an ED summoned me to his office. I waited patiently at the ED’s side table while he took a few calls, but after sitting there just listening for a while, I got up to leave. Immediately, he signaled for me to sit back down. (In need of a Legal Cheerleader, as best I figure.) After the ED finally got off the phone, he used another hour and a half of my time to explain explicitly how important he was before finally handing over the assignment.
The assignment was relatively easy, and when I was done, I felt like I nailed it. I even spent extra un-billable hours making sure that I didn’t just nail it but that I “nailed it, nailed it.” I proofread it over…and over…and over, and then I asked my assistant to proofread it.
Finally, I attached the final version of the memo to an email, and even though I felt like it was a really good memo, I couldn’t help but cringe when I hit “Send.”
Later, my ED called me back into to his office to discuss my work for him. By the look on his face when I walked in, I wondered if I had misstated the law so badly that I was unfit to practice. After he unintelligibly sputtered for a while, $h!thead ED eventually settled down enough to move passed his angry to actually speak. And he dismissively mentioned that I added an extra period at the end of a sentence.
Oh. The. Horror..
The ED complained that he was too concerned about whether or not he could trust my work (a classic ED maneuver). After all, he pointed out, I had just demonstrated that I was capable of being sloppy. My ED never commented on whether my legal work was acceptable, but I knew with absolute certainty that I made him livid by errantly double-punctuating.
I concluded that I must have done something right in the memo because the ED kept giving me projects. I tried to avoid him so he’d stop assigning me work because the process was always the same. I would write a solid memo, ED would find something that made him outrageously angry, I’d correct it, rinse, repeat.
I never spent too little time on the memo. I always spent too much time on the memo.
“You didn’t underline your headings, so how in the hell could the client be expected to understand your memo?”
In addition to this ridiculousness, there were also more serious issues at hand. Mainly, the ED would rarely bill my hours. And the ED also verbally questioned whether I could handle being a lawyer and a mother, a question that has bit some major players in the ass.
My particular ED often commented that my future at the firm depended upon publishing articles and client alerts, on top of everything else I was doing. Yet, as expected, he never got around to approving any of them.
Although I felt like I was going crazy, there was comfort in knowing that I wasn’t alone. One associate was so frustrated with his ED that he switched over to a completely different department in the firm so there was no chance the ED would be supervising him. Another associate was so overwhelmed by an ED that she sought employment at another firm. Another associate was praised by an ED only to later be fired, leaving the other associates bewildered and shocked.
EDs make practicing law unnecessarily unpleasant for everyone. I finally got out from under my ED’s radar by begging other partners for work and telling the ED that I was too busy to provide his projects with the attention they deserved.
Why has this scenario become a rite of passage? Because associates are obviously not in a position to do much about EDs. And EDs’ peers allow it all to happen because they usually make it rain.
And not even an army of unhappy, abused associates can do a thing about the partner who makes it rain.
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There’s one prick every lawyer tries to avoid, and I know of very few firms (and very few groups within large firms) that don’t have at least one partner who is a total egotistical dick—an “ED.” EDs are impossible with associates. Any given ED knows exactly how he’s perceived, and all the partners and associates see him coming from a mile away.
Your average ED is in his 50s and believes he is the primary authority in his area of the law. (He makes it a point to explain that a lot.)
