Nearly everyone at a law firm was an associate at one point in his or her career, and some played (or play) the part better than others. Here are twelve things that, in our opinion, make an associate great.
Be Available And Responsive. Partners expect you to be available pretty much 24/7, because, as noted below, one of your jobs is to make them look good, and they want to look good all of the time. Check your e-mail and cell phone voicemails at night and on the weekend, and be prepared to work late at night or on the weekend. Respond promptly to other attorneys’ questions and communications. Set an out of office notification if you’re in a deposition, court, or on vacation, so that those you’re working with will know when you’ll likely get back to them.
Don’t Be Helpless. If a partner asks you to draft and serve a subpoena, or a 30(b)(6) notice, etc., don’t say right away, “I’ve never done this before. Can you show me how to do it?” Take good notes as to what the partner wants, then figure out how to do it. Show some initiative and read the applicable federal rule, research the subject matter on Lexis/Westlaw, discuss the project with a more senior associate, etc. Don’t immediately ask for help from the partner who assigned you the project. There’s a good chance that the partner himself doesn’t know how to do the project (e.g., “serve Defendant A in South Korea through the Hague”), or, if he does, he doesn’t have the time to explain how to do it to you (it would often take him more time to explain it to you than to do it himself).
Know How To Perform Support Staff Functions. You should know how to operate a fax machine, pdf a document, electronically Bates-label or redact a document with Adobe, and operate the copier machine. In many instances, you’ll be working late at night or on the weekend with a partner, and you’ll be the one expected to perform these tasks. Or, there may be many times that your support staff isn’t available during the day that your big brief is due to be filed. And, in other cases, you may have to fix your support staff’s mess-ups.
Make Your Time Entries Spotless. There is nothing worse than reviewing bills, a task typically assigned to younger partners. It can take hours to review a single bill. As an associate, make sure that your time entries do not need to be edited. That means, at a minimum, no spelling errors and full time entries (e.g., “telephone conference with A. Partner regarding temporary injunction research,” not “telephone conference.”). Also, know your clients’ policies regarding outside counsel bills. Many clients won’t think twice about paying for a 9 hour time entry for a day spent legal researching the Erie doctrine, but will fly off the handle at a $5.75 charge for a bagel and a coffee that shouldn’t have been billed. Others refuse to pay for entries that are “block billed.”
Turn in Perfect Work. Assume that anything you turn in to a partner could be immediately forwarded to a client or filed with a court. Don’t put qualifiers in your cover e-mail like, “I wasn’t able to spend as much time on this as I would’ve liked” as nobody likes to see such things and it’s basically an (advance) excuse for poor work product.
Don’t Turn Down Work. Never turn down work (subject to the qualification immediately below). When you turn down work, a partner will have to either find someone else to do the work, or do it herself, neither of which she wants to do (since she contacted you to do it). The partner has already formed a belief in her mind that you are the right person for the job. Don’t let her down.
Turn Down Work If You Truly Cannot Get It Done. The only thing worse than turning down work is accepting work and then not getting it done in time or turning in bad work product, both of which will require the partner to do the work himself or to find someone else to do the work—unacceptable outcomes for the partner, which he’ll blame you for. So, if you can’t produce great work product on time when asked to handle a project, explain to the partner that you’d really like to help but you have too much on your plate already. In certain instances, you can suggest to the partner that he or she discuss your workload with the other partners you’re working with (i.e., that if your help was truly necessary, the partner could discuss your workload with other partners and rearrange your work flow). You can also offer to help find someone else to do the work you were slated to do.
Take Charge of a Case / Your Assignments. Sometimes, it’s tempting to be an automaton and just do the minimum amount required of you. It involves less thought, and certainly less effort, to simply do the project assigned to you, go home, and never think about the project or case again. But that’s taking a short cut, and you should strive to make yourself indispensable to those you work with. For instance, if you’re assigned to research issue A, and in the process you notice issues B and C, raise such issues with your colleagues. Others on your case may be on many, many cases, and may not have the time that you have to devote to the issue or the case. Or, if you serve a subpoena on a third party, take charge and make sure the date for the deposition is calendared and ask the partner running the case if she’d like you to take the deposition (or help prepare for it). Volunteer to respond to the summary judgment motion that came in. Be the master of the case’s facts or law. Relatedly, when assigned a project, know when the deadline is and stay in contact with the partner who assigned the project. Don’t require the partner to hound you about your progress, whether you’ll meet the deadline, etc.
Speak Up Once. The practice of law is an art and not a science. This means that, for any given problem or issue, there may be many “correct” ways to handle it. You may not agree with how a partner intends to handle a situation. You can, and should, offer your opinion on how best to deal with a problem. But once you’ve offered your opinion, be quiet. (There are very limited exceptions to this piece of advice, mostly dealing with ethical requirements; but if ethics aren’t implicated—and they are not in the vast majority of instances—then say your opinion once and then let it go.) Nobody wants the know-it-all associate to constantly repeat his or her opinions.
Make Partners Look Good. We’ve heard it been said that, as an associate, your clients are the partners. There’s a lot of truth to that. One of the main reasons for your existence is to make partners look good—good in front of clients, the court, opposing counsel, etc. Don’t feed them factual or legal information that is wrong, because it’s unlikely that they’ll have time to check your work product. Be available whenever you are needed. Take charge of the case, and follow the other tips in this post. Doing so will help both yourself and the partners you’re working for.
Don’t Expect the Work to be Glamorous, But Learn From The Work You’re Tasked With. In The Karate Kid, Mr. Miyagi agrees to teach Daniel-san karate. Mr. Miyagi tells Daniel-san, “We make sacred pact. I promise teach karate to you, you promise learn. I say, you do, no questions.” Mr. Miyagi then assigns Daniel-san to a series of seemingly meaningless, mundane tasks—sanding the floor, painting the fence, painting the house, and waxing cars—that take Daniel-san four full days to complete. Daniel-san eventually has enough, and confronts Mr. Miyagi, accusing Mr. Miyagi of not teaching karate but of making Daniel-san a slave. Mr. Miyagi then tells Daniel-san to “show me wax-on wax-off” and Mr. Miyagi throws punches at Daniel-san, which Daniel-san expertly fends off with the “wax-on wax-off” technique that Mr. Miyagi had taught him to wax cars with. Mr. Miyagi then does the same thing with “paint the fence,” “sand the floor,” etc., and Daniel-san comes to the realization that Mr. Miyagi has taught him a whole lot of karate over the four days. (Clip of the movie available here.)
The practice of law is a lot like The Karate Kid. Although it’s a shame to say, when you graduate from law school after paying well-over $100,000, you don’t have the slightest clue about how to practice law. (Personally, we believe that a lot of this is attributable to the fact that approximately half of all law school professors never practiced law at all, and nearly all of them are not currently practicing. Could you imagine if you were taught in medical school by a professor who had never stepped foot inside of a hospital?) You’ll be assigned a bunch of projects by the partners at your firm, and hardly any of them will be glamorous. For example, you could be assigned to draft and have a subpoena served on a third party witness. And you won’t have the slightest clue about how to go about doing this, because law school doesn’t teach you such things. But you’ll read Rule 45, find the correct form, fill it out, find a process server, and arrange for service. And then, from that point on, you’ll be an expert at serving subpoenas.
After performing hundreds of tasks like this (e.g., answering complaints, drafting expert reports, researching arcane questions of law, drafting 30(b)(6) notices, interviewing witnesses, taking depositions, drafting declarations, filing motions in limine, etc.), you’ll be well on your way to being a “real” lawyer and knowing how to practice law and run a case from its beginning, through trial and appeal. And if you learn from all of the projects you are assigned, you’ll be able to best the Cobra Kai at the All Valley Championship with a crane kick.
Don’t Be Schlocky. “Schlockiness” is caused by incompetence, laziness, or both. Things that make you look schlocky (and that we see all of the time) include, but are not limited to, the following:
- Filing a brief with missing citations (e.g., “Smith Decl. at ¶ __.”).
- Not using proper Bluebook citation form.
- Not pinpointing your case cites.
- Fully justifying the body of your brief, but not the footnotes (or vice versa).
- “Replying all” when you really only meant to hit “reply.” (Sending an “internal” communication to opposing counsel is the worst form of this.)
- Sending an e-mail saying, “Attached please find . . .” but forgetting to attach the attachment.
- Attaching the wrong attachment.
- Putting a method of service in your certificate of service that won’t be used (e.g., “the foregoing document was served by first class mail on any counsel who is not registered on ECF”).
- When electronically signing your name (i.e., “/s/ John Doe”) having two lines underneath a portion of the signature instead of one.
- Using the wrong date on your letters, briefs or discovery materials.
- Sending out discovery without changing names from prior cases (i.e., “Party A requests that you produce your documents in 30 days” when you represented Party A two years ago and represent Party B in this case.
- Sending a 10+MB scanned document by e-mail when it could’ve been made much smaller by printing the document to pdf.