Someone Needs To Come Get These Junior Associates

Episode Notes

Transcript

Joe Patrice:

Hello, welcome to another edition of Thinking Like A Lawyer. I’m Joe Patrice from Above the Law. I’m joined by some of my fellow editors. I’ve got Kathryn Rubino over here.

Kathryn Rubino:

Hi.

Joe Patrice:

Hey. And Chris Williams joining us.

Chris Williams:

Hello.

Joe Patrice:

And we’re here doing our usual bit where we talk about some of the big stories and Above the Law and the legal world from the week that has concluded. And we catch you up on all of that and talk about some of our takes and in the, but first we have a little bit of a small talk time.

Kathryn Rubino:

We just came out of a long weekend here for President’s Day, and are you excited to get another president’s birthday off?

Joe Patrice:

Oh yes. No. Exciting news. With all of the issues going on right now, our legislators are apparently meeting today to discuss the possibility of Turning Flag Day into a federal holiday for Trump’s birthday.

Kathryn Rubino:

And we’re also talking about etching his face into Mount Rushmore. So let’s double down on the desecration.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, it does seem like there might be more important issues to be pursuing if you controlled both houses, both chambers of the legislature, but

Kathryn Rubino:

Well, there’s also a little thing like securing our nuclear arsenal, which they are not hitting or making sure that there are fewer plane crashes because there seems to be a run of them since we’ve done away with DEI.

Joe Patrice:

The most recent one seems to have not been, well, one it was in Canada and two it seems to have been just a,

Chris Williams:

You mean the 50 pro state?

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, well I guess that’s fair. I guess if Trump wants to claim it as a state, he has to claim, but it seems as though that was seeing the video of it, it seems as though hit the ground really hard and broke the front landing gear was the cause of that one, which is not good, but is certainly not a air traffic control problem.

Kathryn Rubino:

Sure. And yet there are more in this year, calendar year than there have been in the proceeding. Been

Joe Patrice:

A while

Kathryn Rubino:

Bit.

Joe Patrice:

Certainly been really bad.

Kathryn Rubino:

February friends, it’s not even the end of February quite yet.

Joe Patrice:

Well over the weekend several hundred FAA employees got fired, so

Kathryn Rubino:

It’s only going to get better. No, but for real. Are we nervous about getting on an airplane right now? I don’t love the idea.

Joe Patrice:

I got multiple airplane trips in the next few weeks, so I hope you come back. Yeah, that’s what I’m hoping too.

Kathryn Rubino:

But for real, I did read about the Delta flight, wear your seatbelt the entire time, even if they don’t have the signup, because they said that that was actually instrumental in stopping some injuries.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, I mean everybody survived that one I gather from what I’ve been reading. So

Chris Williams:

Yeah, speaking of Canada though, Joe, your boy Drake dropped an album.

Joe Patrice:

Oh

Chris Williams:

Yeah. By

Joe Patrice:

The way, I don’t know how this became my boy, but alright.

Chris Williams:

Yeah, some sexy songs for you, which is actually the name of the album. It’s a joint album with him and Party Next Door, couple earworms on there. Nothing surely a Taylor Swift level, but it was pretty good. The song Nokia has been on repeat, so if you ever want to wonder what I’m listening to when I’m writing, it’s that, it’s that.

Kathryn Rubino:

It seems weird though that after being dragged the responses some sexy songs.

Chris Williams:

Yeah, I feel like it dropped on Valentine’s Day and it is really good for a singer songwriter in third period in high school listening to, I was like, wait, this man is 40. Why is he writing like this still?

Joe Patrice:

Well, I think he should avoid writing for high school as a general matter. That seems like exactly what he should not be doing

Chris Williams:

Now you tell him. But yeah, I will say it’s fun. It feels very campy. I feel like it’s, but not enough to the point where I don’t think all the cringe is deliberate. I think some of it is actually just a cringey Canadian with money, realizing he’s not as liked as he thought he was. But yeah, party next door is great. It is worth listening to when you’re billing.

Joe Patrice:

Well, all right, let’s move on. We’ve got a lot to talk about today, so let’s begin. The kids are not all right potentially. No kidding.

Yeah, generally speaking, look, I’ve been throughout my life, generally on the side of the up and coming generation, I feel they’re usually much maligned. I remember when I was of the slacker generation, despite the fact that, and we came out fine, and the reason is because every generation at their first job is lost and they get a bunch of flack for it and get called things like slackers and lazy and whatever. And then what happens is they learn the job and then they do well. And this is just a thing that happens to every 20 to 26 or so year old in the workforce. And so I always have, I’ve hated the Gen X slackers, the millennials do everything wrong. All of those generational attacks I’ve always thought were inaccurate. But there may be an issue with Gen z. I don’t know if this is a dun

Kathryn Rubino:

Dun.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, well we have that sound effect too, but I don’t know if this is a product of whatever, but we have a story of a young associate, so a mid to senior level associate goes to Reddit and asks our big law group for some advice, how do you deal with a junior who refuses to do what you ask them to do to be clear, not like bad work product. I just asked a junior to input the partner’s edits into a doc and the junior straight up said, nah, you do that.

Chris Williams:

Well, one quick caveat before we have this conversation that we’re about to have. Let just be clear, this is a lone instance that we know of. So before we’re like, oh, this is some systemic, all Gen Z lawyers are bad and not accepting the authority. It’s one dude that we know of that this happened out of the thousands of, at this point 20, mid 20 something lawyers. So before it’s like a condemnation of an entire class. Maybe it’s just this one bad employee, but that’s it. Carry on.

Joe Patrice:

So that is a very good caveat. I will say since posting this story, I have received multiple tips from mid-level and senior folks explaining that this is not an isolated incident and that it’s happening in all layers of the legal industry from firms. I heard from somebody talking about it happening.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah. I mean, okay, let’s get back to the initial query. I think the first part is you don’t ask, you tell.

Joe Patrice:

Well, sure,

Kathryn Rubino:

Right? But no, this is unfathomable happening even once in anything more than an effort to get fired and collect unemployment.

Joe Patrice:

I mean, hey, maybe that is the end game here

Kathryn Rubino:

Maybe, but man,

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, I just don’t understand it. And this is what tracks the various other people who’ve reached out to me since I wrote this story as well as some of the commenters in the Reddit original Reddit thread. It seems as though there are a lot of folks of that cohort who just don’t, and maybe it’s not even malicious. It almost seems like they just don’t comprehend the concept that there is a hierarchy they own the firm owns you or just a hierarchy. Well, they

Kathryn Rubino:

Pay you a shit lot of money for somebody who theoretically has no relevant work experience. You worked a summer, maybe that’s it, and mostly you were wind and dine before you started big law. You have no prior experience. All you have is a law degree and a dream, and they’re paying you buttload of money. They kind of own you. And it’s not like this is a ridiculous request. These changes must be inputted into the new document. Mid-level or senior associate. Doing it at those billing rates is absurd. Of course, the person who bills out at the lowest rate must be the person who does it. It also shows a complete lack of understanding of the business model of big law, both in terms of what your client is willing to pay for, which is a junior person doing the easiest work and saving the mid-level or higher rates for more complicated legal tasks. Complete misunderstanding of the business model, complete misunderstanding of the hierarchy involved maybe being a lawyer for you friend.

Chris Williams:

What’s the firm training look like?

Joe Patrice:

Maybe

Chris Williams:

What if there was a drop in? I hear your point, this person clearly doesn’t understand what the established culture is, but what if it was just assumed that they knew?

Kathryn Rubino:

I mean, that has always been true though. That was not true of millennial attorneys when they started. They were not saying no to work. Could you imagine starting your big law job and not saying yes immediately? I said yes to things that I didn’t understand what they were, wrote down the exact phrase, asked a friend, Googled, talk to people, be like, I don’t know what it meant to turn a change or whatever it was at the time. Of course you said yes. You had to say yes,

Joe Patrice:

These people went to school. Did the school never say, Hey, write this paper? And they go, no. They understand the concept. I would hope of someone told you to do something so you do it.

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah, and this is not a one-off. I think you’re right Joe, that obviously you talked about how other folks are writing in now that it’s become a story. But last year I wrote a story too, right about Gen Z lawyers and that case, it was the opposite. It was opposing counsel who had an issue, but when somebody tried to, in that case it was trying to track down a Gen Z lawyer to be like, Hey, you need to approve or file an objection to the following motion. And when they were diligent about pestering this lawyer for that signature, they were like, you’re not respecting my boundaries.

Joe Patrice:

Okay, so I break this into a few buckets and I think this gets to some of what Chris’s concerns were. So one bucket is the kids aren’t all right, which is the respecting my boundaries nonsense where they think that the world revolves around them. Now, if that’s the case, that is a deep seated generational problem. We’ll put that to one side. Flip side is the training point part that Chris is talking about. Now, could the problem be that we have raised a generation of mid-levels and seniors who aren’t capable of projecting the proper levels of authority and instruction that they need to, could be a function also of covid times where they weren’t in an office, they weren’t interacting with people in managerial settings like that. And again, lawyers are bad managers as a rule almost because we don’t as an industry, take that as seriously as the rest of corporate America

Kathryn Rubino:

Or is the managerial skillset rewarded in your legal career? So there’s no incentive to build out those skills either.

Joe Patrice:

Sure. So maybe though the hybrid work from home kind of world has raised people in that managerial set position who aren’t capable of doing it.

And then there’s also the argument that that work from home hybrid. One of the hypothesis I have is that work from home hybrid universe has resulted in work being done at inappropriate levels. For instance, if I’m a senior and I get a bunch of edits, do I want to have to go into some slack or teams and ping somebody and get them on video to tell them to do this or I can just enter them myself and I shouldn’t be doing that for billing reasons, but I can get it done faster. I don’t want to have to hassle with it. That’s

Kathryn Rubino:

Also true. That’s also related to the flexibility of the schedule. Maybe somebody is being flexible with their time, which is absolutely appropriate, but it’s harder. Maybe they went to see their kids’ soccer game, so they’re getting to this task now at 10:00 PM and they need somebody to turn those changes and doing it at 11:00 PM is more challenging than 11:00 AM

Joe Patrice:

So I don’t think it’s necessarily just a broad base. There’s a problem with generation though. People as I hear more horror stories maybe that it’s too much to say that it’s everybody but covid affected and the lockdowns and working from home affected everybody. It could be that the junior just isn’t getting the leadership that they need, which is part of the problem here.

Kathryn Rubino:

And the reality is, and the unfortunate thing that maybe younger attorneys listening to this aren’t necessarily hearing directly from because people are increasingly confrontation, avoiding, is that these sorts of responses to requests or thinly veiled requests will absolutely have an impact on your career,

Joe Patrice:

Right?

Kathryn Rubino:

Their big law hires and fires and cycles. There are self layout offs happening all the time. And if you’re like, well, we could do with some cuts and you have these sorts of stories about an associate, it’s super easy to be like, this is a justified cut right now and I’d rather cut someone like that than someone who’s putting in 110% of their effort. It matters. It may sound like a suggestion when a mid-level is telling you, but do not assume for a second that information is not going up the chain.

Chris Williams:

To Joe’s point, to my point about this being a mid-level institutional issue, I think it’s worth pointing out the obvious how. I’m assuming Joe found out about this, some mid-level posted this to Reddit. Did they not have a peer that they could talk to? That’s weird.

Kathryn Rubino:

Well, you also, in that case, maybe were trying to avoid a bad reputation getting around about the associate until they felt confident in their answer was my.

Chris Williams:

That could be part of it. But people, we at a firm, you’re expected to be dealing with confidential information. Can’t you talk to a peer, maybe a friend who’s at the level be like, Hey, between me and you, worker X was wallin, how would you handle this? Or say you have a member of your cohort that went to work at some other firm who’s in a similar position to you, reach out to them to get their input and be like, Hey, this is between me and you and since they’re talking for nothing, that putting another firm, it’s not like Attorney X at this firm is going to be negatively affected. There should be some first reach out besides Reddit that mid-levels have access to. That’s an issue.

Joe Patrice:

I mean, I hear that. I do think that internally, I think you’re right, Kathryn. I think the effort was to not

Chris Williams:

Malign,

Joe Patrice:

Nuke somebody’s career if they were wrong.

Chris Williams:

Is there ways to do it while still talking to a peer?

Joe Patrice:

And I didn’t check out this person’s posting history, but it’s also possible that there are people, I’ve never been totally active on Reddit, but there are people for whom that is their community. They post there every day and whatever, and maybe that is what’s going, I

Kathryn Rubino:

Dunno. I also don’t want to sound like an old person who’s like, why aren’t you going to a bar to meet people instead of going on Tinder,

Joe Patrice:

You and your online kids?

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah,

Chris Williams:

No, no. It seems to me what this person was looking for was counsel and expertise.

When you look for counsel and expertise, I don’t know how other would do it. I think to myself, who do I think is reachable and qualified to speak on this issue? Now of course there are people in the legal subreddits that are there that have the expertise, but my assumption would be, especially if it’s an intimate problem, something that’s like short term I need answers to, I would go to people in my circle. Now Reddit can be a circle, but I think the fact that I’m assuming, I’m assuming it’s the first place they went to, maybe they went to reach to have conversations with other people, but the fact that it happened, I think is noteworthy.

Joe Patrice:

No, that’s a good point. I will say most of the people responding to it,

Chris Williams:

It was good advice.

Joe Patrice:

See, I was going to say I don’t think it was particularly grand advice. I think a lot of it was feeding my feeling that this might be a managerial problem. There was a lot of, let’s be very deferential and let’s find out what’s maybe going on in their lives, whatever. And it’s like, no, you tell them do it or be fired or give me a good reason not to. They need the person who’s saying, nah, you do it. If there’s something going on that prevents them from doing it or some reason they need to be the advocate for that, it should not be, the burden is not on the person giving the work to lay the groundwork and find out whether or not you’re okay. It’s like do it or give me a reason why you can’t do it. You can’t just say, no, I’m not doing it. That is the bartleby situation.

Chris Williams:

There was a longer post under that thread, I think, and to be short, it really got to what Kathryn was saying about the rank and order of these things, how things ought to be, but it was done so in a way that related to the person being like, Hey, in case you didn’t know, here’s how it is. This could negatively affect you, blah, blah, blah. But to be there on the thread, there was a lot of the, I can’t believe blah, blah, blah, but there were a couple gems. You got to know how to mine Reddit,

Joe Patrice:

Right? Again, I thought that’s fine. I think the actual gems were the people going like, Nope, tell ’em they’re not there anymore.

Kathryn Rubino:

You should clean out your desk.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, you should prepare to be gone soon. I will say the last point on this to the idea that it’s generational in this story, I do reference Bartleby and I think it is worth noting whenever somebody wants to say, oh, the Gen Zs whatever. It is worth noting that Herman Melville wrote that a long time ago. That is a book, a very old book about somebody doing exactly this. Perhaps it’s not a time issue. Oh well we are last week a lot of legal action, but one of the biggest is that some of the various musk driven doge firings got put on hold because Judge Meyer was hearing an emergency. TRO request ruled that those changes and those cuts could not go into effect until there was a ruling on a variety of issues dealing with administrative law that are not really here nor there. It is not Engle Mayer’s case. To be clear, the case is going to be heard. It was heard on Friday by another judge that said this. TRO kicked off a wild run of Musk and his fellow travelers and the other people officials in the administration and Congress trying to impeach him, claim that he’s activists, that it’s judge shopping that got them there. I don’t know how they got judge shopping by going to the southern district where there’s like 40 judges, but whatever. Really interesting.

Kathryn Rubino:

Maybe my parent of a toddler is showing, but the only thing I could think of when reading about this story was just what a tantrum. You need to go in a corner, friends.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah.

Kathryn Rubino:

Think about what you’ve done,

Joe Patrice:

What really should be worrying. I thought what was really worrying was the attack on this temporary restraining order. This is not a judge who said you can’t do this. This is a judge who said

Kathryn Rubino:

You have to hold the status quo until we litigate the issues.

Joe Patrice:

Until there is going to be a case on this. That case is scheduled for the end of the week. It was little less than a week that this TRO was put in place. If that’s what’s making you mad, wait until the judges actually start ruling against you.

Chris Williams:

Here’s a question. I’m pretty sure it’s related, but it may be tangential and I think this goes to the, I think it’s unitive executive theory the way you were talking about it, Joe, but I think what we’re seeing in real time is an emergence of executive review where you just have the executive as being the branch that can dictate and legitimize what the judiciary is doing. I think that’s the under guarding sentiment that makes sense of JD Vance is not clear attack on judicial review, but where he’s saying judges can’t do this about the executive blah blah. It’s

Kathryn Rubino:

Pretty clear. I thought,

Chris Williams:

Well, you’d think it’s pretty clear, but then you see the people supporting him. So I’m assuming that it’s not because the dumb dumbs are loud.

Joe Patrice:

Yeah, I mean these attacks resulted in follow-up comments that said stuff like the executive gets to decide all federal questions, which seems though that would obviate what the court is for. Look, there is something to be said for the executive has control over hiring and firing within the executive. There’s money that’s earmarked from Congress to do things, but internal decisions about how to execute those laws are executive prerogatives. That said, when you do something like say, Congress gave us a bunch of money to have A-U-S-A-I-D and we are just firing everybody that now crosses over into not being a internal efficiency decision and becoming, we are going to defy Congress and it’s those questions that are at issue here and that’s why, and also there’s a issues as far as some of these regulatory rollbacks have to go through review and comment periods and stuff like that, that none of them are, they’re just being slashed with no regard towards the laws that govern rulemaking, which are issues. The courts have to decide because if you are, this isn’t a question of the courts trying to usurp executive power. This is the courts saying Congress has already made some decisions here about what you have to do and you’re in violation.

Chris Williams:

Has we ever have a presidency where so many people in the executive has called for the impeachment of judges over disagreeing with them?

Joe Patrice:

No. I mean look, there were impeachment calls often in the civil rights era. There were a lot of southern judges who had been appointed largely by

Chris Williams:

You mean 1964? 1960,

Joe Patrice:

Yeah. Largely people who were veterans from the Truman, the FDR Truman Eisenhower years who were serving in districts in Alabama and stuff like that, who would make rulings that said yes, no, I mean you can’t block voting and a lot of very racist people in the south were very upset about that. And so there were calls to impeach some of those kinds of judges that era, but it was never as extensive, I don’t think as this,

Kathryn Rubino:

The interesting part of course is that it is a real flip from when Joe Biden was president to when the right very much held up the courts and the court’s ability to change the law as the true salvation, which really just goes, shows how craven it is. It’s not about any principles about what government should be or separation of powers or checks and balances or anything like that. It is just which branches do we currently control? Full stop. That is it. That is the only governing principle that any of these attacks have, and that has been true for the last 10, 15 years

Joe Patrice:

When folks were concocting jurisdiction out of Wholecloth to go to Amarillo to have a right-wing activist who had been elevated to the bench, make decisions to issue nationwide injunctions

Kathryn Rubino:

So people couldn’t get their medicine. Yeah,

Joe Patrice:

They had no problem. Now, when the executive is in clear breach, and to be clear, the Biden administration, while they would complain about this being a problem and there were calls to have reforms to how nationwide injunctions work or calls to,

Kathryn Rubino:

But it’s different than

Joe Patrice:

Or calls to change the judge shopping rules. Those never, this ruling is illegitimate. Those were always, there need to be ways of dealing with this for the purpose of protecting the judiciary. We have crossed a line on this one into they are straight up calling these judges illegitimate, which mirrors the Roberts report this year. Roberts said in his report this year, he complained of people who criticized judges. I think some people give him a little bit more benefit of the doubt than I do. I don’t think he was foreseeing this kind of attack or trying to direct it at Trump. I think he was very much trying to direct it at the folks criticizing people like Judge Kaz Merrick and so on. But we will

Kathryn Rubino:

See maybe he hears more in these far right circles and knows what it’s going to happen and is trying to cut it off at the pass

Joe Patrice:

Maybe. But yeah, I didn’t have a ton of faith in his ability to do that, his ability to foresee this issue, but oh well. Alright. Speaking of judges,

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah, we’ve wrote and spoken a lot about when appellate judges try to make rulings or issue statements or appear on podcasts as the case may be to kind of stake out legal positions that might get the attention of Donald Trump. It’s purely speculative obviously on our part. No one’s actually come out and said that they’re low key auditioning for a role on the Supreme Court, but it feels like they are, and it’s not just James Ho anymore. There was a recent ruling concurrence to be specific out of the 10th circuit that really makes you think that maybe somebody wants a promotion.

Joe Patrice:

So there was a question, this case is kind of janky how it comes up. It’s somebody who’s complaining about how it’s an independent candidate to a

Kathryn Rubino:

Right and they were complaining that Trump was on the ballot in 2024 and said that they wanted Trump to be off the ballot for in the future as well, and the majority in the 10th circuit were like, I mean he’s in his second term, he’s already won the election, it doesn’t matter,

Joe Patrice:

But then what’s the concurrent? So then it was two one decision, well it was a 3.0, but there was a concurrence that made what point?

Kathryn Rubino:

Yeah, judge Allison Edith, who is actually inherited a Neil Gorsuch’s old seat on the 10th circuit went kind of off on the notion that this is the last time that Donald Trump can run for president. Said that kind of chastised her colleagues on the court saying that the question of whether or not the 22nd Amendment means that Trump can’t run for president again is a novel and complex constitutional question that they should not talk about.

Joe Patrice:

So the issue here is this guy, this crank candidate was trying to say, well, I need a verification that Trump’s not going to run a third time. Court says there’s 22nd amendments. Pretty clear. This is the amendment that says you can only run for two terms as president. There’s little carve outs for if you’ve assumed the job as being elevated vice president, but that doesn’t concern us here. You can only be president twice. That seems pretty clear in the grand scheme of whether or not constitutional amendments say what they say. I know there’s a lot of conversation about that. Generally this is not one of those difficult ones and nor is it one that’s steeped in ancient history. We remember what happened here. FDR had four terms and Republicans were mad about that. So they passed an amendment that said you could only have two terms. It’s pretty clear what the point was. It’s clear what people understood it to being. Its text is pretty clear.

Kathryn Rubino:

And again, to get this kind of craven point, there’s also litigation about it because when Rightwing plaintiffs are trying to make sure that Obama could not appear on the ballot because he was not a natural born citizen, they dismissed it because it was the middle of his second term. They’re like, the ship has sailed my friends, and no one complained when the courts were like, Hey, the 22nd amendment means what it means, but now it’s an issue.

Chris Williams:

I’m just waiting for the day where we have to figure out if it’s a novel and complex constitutional question to ask if soldiers can order themselves in private homes or in case time.

Joe Patrice:

You stole that one right out of my head. That was going to be the joke that I was going to tell was the novel. The novel and complicated question of Quartering troops.

Chris Williams:

But I do think that she has her sights in the wrong spot. I get it’s important to try to sway Woohoo to Trump, but you don’t do it with outrageous opinions like this. You go star on a reality TV show and then you get appointed. There’s a clear pipeline here.

Joe Patrice:

Well, alright, well that’s all for today. We thank everybody for listening. You should subscribe to the show so you get new episodes. You should be giving reviews, stars writing things. You should check out other shows. Kathryn’s the host of the Jabot. I am a guest on the Legal Tech Week Journalist Round table. There are other shows that we aren’t involved with, but on the Legal Talk network that you should check out, you should be reading Above the Law, so you read these and other stories before we talk about them here. You can follow on social media at Above the Law dot com. On Blue Sky, I’m at Joe Patrice. She’s at Kathryn one, the numeral one. Chris is at writes for rent as in writing, not human rights and similar places over on the Twitters. Not that they’re all that much and that is everything base.

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