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Office Blunder |
 "Heck, Joe, all Jonas did was accidentally send his email to the firm's underwriters. Mine was an outright rant against Bush and somehow Ashcroft got it!" |
Every lawyer can learn
from the 'Jonas Blunder'
By PATRICK McFADDEN
of TheColumnists.com
What’s the worst mistake you’ve ever made at work? How would you like to have made it in your first job?
Although there is certainly plenty of time left for him to dig a deeper hole for himself, Jonas Blank may well have already nailed his all-time office blunder.
A summer associate at one of the nation’s most-respected law firms, Skadden Arps, Jonas took a break earlier this summer to compose the following carefully worded and thought through electronic missive.
“I’m busy doing jack shit,” the would-be lawyer began discreetly. He went on to describe the two-hour lunch from which he had just returned, and to add, “Unfortunately, I actually have work to do - I’m on some corp finance deal, under the global head of corp finance, which means I should really peruse these materials and not be a fuckup.” Savvy lad, Jonas.
How do I know about this e-mail? Every lawyer or law student in the country, and half of everybody else, knows about this e-mail, because Jonas, intending to write a friend, instead managed to write to 40 members of the firm’s underwriting group.
I’ll wait a second for you to digest that.
Now, I will throw in the little detail that really makes the story. This young man was being paid $2,400 per week for his keen legal mind.
You may need another moment.
Those of you who are not law students, lawyers or relatives of one of the above may not be familiar with the phrase, “summer associate.” Allow me to explain.
After securing admission to a good law school, working hard, getting good grades, and slogging through endless screening interviews, if you are lucky, you land a position as a summer associate at a law firm. It’s basically a paid internship where, for three months in between your second and third years of law school, you work at the firm. You meet a lot of lawyers, shake a lot of hands, eat a lot of lunches, do a fair amount of work, and try not to be seen with spinach stuck in your teeth. It’s an interesting three-month courtship: you are trying hard to impress the firm, and the firm is trying hard to impress you.
At any rate, if you work hard, do well, and avoid getting blotto at a social event and punching out one of the partners, you hope to emerge from the summer with an offer to come back to work for the firm after you graduate. Emphasis on hope, given the current state of the legal job market.
(One of my professors once mocked the propensity of law students to flock towards law firms “like lemmings.” Significantly, said law professor wasn’t looking at the wrong end of a $30,000 tuition bill at the time, so he can basically stuff it.)
Occasionally, you hear stories about summer associates who manage to blow it, generally in spectacular fashion. Alcohol is usually an integral part of these stories, but not always. For some, poor judgment is an inborn gift, requiring no chemical inducement. Take Jonas, for example.
Now, poor judgment is forgivable. I forgive my own poor judgment all the time. I have, on occasion, been known to abuse e-mail. Years ago, I sent a message, ostensibly from one of the grand pooh-bahs of the firm, to a fellow legal assistant. The message instructed the lad to go home immediately to change out of the cowboy boots he had chosen to wear that morning, “lest the firm’s clients be led to believe we are expanding into the burgeoning field of veterinary law. Saddle up, cowboy, you’re going home.” Yes, upon reflection, that was probably an inappropriate use of firm resources.
What chapped me about this summer associate’s e-mail, however, was that is was more than a lapse in judgment or an ill-advised prank. It was also snot-nosedly arrogant. Snide, or something awfully close. I don’t know the young man in question, but I’m willing to bet he smirks a lot. Anyone who brags to his friends about how little work he’s doing and the cushy lunches he’s enjoying while getting paid $2,400 per week when the unemployment rate is 6.4% basically cannot be good people.
In all fairness this was not entirely his fault. In the late 1990s, tired of losing their young associates to the world of dot.coms and stock options, law firms boosted both salaries and perquisites for entry-level lawyers. Your typical A-type, cum laude graduate of a top tier law school can, thanks to that salary boom, expect to pull in $125,000 her first year out of law school. The combination of skyrocketing pay and plush summer accoutrements helped to generate a sense of entitlement among top candidates that was both naively short-sighted and gratingly offensive.
That sense of entitlement has been largely exorcised by the weak economy. The specter of graduating with six-figure debt and no job tends to alter one’s perspective. Evidently, however, certain students still assume that they have already snared the brass ring by getting a summer position, and feel comfortable declaring it Miller Time as soon as they walk into their lavish offices.
When I worked as a legal assistant before going to law school, many of us resented the annual crop of summer associates because, despite being fairly useless, they were paid three times as much as we were.
Years later, having just finished my own summer at a firm in Washington, I can say that my fellow summer associates were great people. Everyone was well aware of how much we still had to learn, grateful for the opportunity we had, and generally very diligent. I guess that’s careful recruiting.
Nevertheless, even though I have now been a summer associate, I deeply resent people like Jonas. He doesn’t have enough sense to know how privileged he is, and how precarious that privilege can be.
But I like to look on the bright side. Maybe getting an early start on the all-time gaffe list will turn out to be good for him.
©2003 by Patrick McFadden.
The illustration is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895
Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA.
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