Associate Advice

Summer Fashion Tips

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Image from The Ladders' Summer Fashion article

This month’s heat wave forced professional types to start desperately thinking about whether spaghetti straps and speedos are appropriate attire for the office. (Hint: they’re not.)

Many offices do go casual over the summer, though. At Weil Gotshal, for example, you can buy your way into a pair of jeans on Friday. Says a tipster (with some high-rise excitement):

did you hear that weil is starting jeans fridays for july and august as a test run and potentially forever! in order to participate, we must pay $5 to go to a designated charity each month. we have had these $5 jeans fridays in the past maybe every other month… but now it’s every friday!

The downside: Those who don’t turn up in jeans on Fridays are revealed as either ridiculously stuffy or too cheap to give to charity.

Need help with clothing choices this summer? A recent career newsletter from The Ladders had a useful feature on summer fashion, including dos and don’ts. The photo at right is among those featured. Is it a fashion do or a don’t?

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Pls Hndle Thx: Ticking Time Bomb

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Ed. note: Have a question for next week? Send it in to advice@abovethelaw.com.

ATL,

I have a pet peeve.  When scheduling conference calls, certain people, particularly associates at firms representing codefendants, frequently identify the time zone as ”EST” or “PST” when we’re on daylight savings time.  Of course the writer means “EDT” or “PDT,” and everyone acts as if they wrote that.  But it bugs me.  And I have reason to think that some people see it as a sign of sloppy work.  Is it appropriate to point out this mistake (privately, of course)?

– Timed Out

Dear Timed Out,

You are absolutely right: typos such as confusing EST with EDT are indicative of sloppy work and its first cousin, sloppy thought. Frankly, they’re inexcusable when clients pay lawyers like yourself thousands of dollars to fight their battles – not “they’re batles.”

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Revenge of the Laid Off Associate

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If you were friends with somebody who was laid off from Biglaw during the past 18 months, you probably tried to cheer your friend up with some sort of platitude. You probably told your friend, “It’s their loss,” or perhaps, “[The firm] will be sorry.”

You probably didn’t believe it when you said it, and neither did your friend. The sad reality is that for every associate fired, law schools produce ten more that are dying to replace them. It’s hard for individual associates to make their former employers “pay” for giving them the axe. The revenge quest becomes even harder when you take into account the fact that being laid off in this market was a career killer for most of those involuntarily kicked off the Biglaw bandwagon.

But at least one laid-off lawyer has been able to get a small measure of revenge against his former employer. The associate brings a message of hope to the fallen associates who walk the earth with cold dishes to serve their old employers…

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Career Center: Five Tips for a Convincing Legal Résumé

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In today’s Career Center post, we’ve decided to take a short break from the updates on the results of our Associate Satisfaction Survey to share with you the latest career development article featured in the Associate Resources section of the Career Center, powered by Lateral Link.  This article, along with the others in this section, provides practical advice on advancing your career.

The last several weeks have seen a surge of new lateral associate openings at law firms across the country.  Even with the surge in openings, however, competition remains fierce for associate positions. In fact, employers have reported receiving upwards of 100 résumés for a single position. That means that it is more important than ever for your résumé to stand out from the competition. Fair or not, often the best résumés – and not the best candidates – generate interviews.

How can you develop a convincing legal résumé? Here are five tips….

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In-House Counseling: I ♥ Law!

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Ed. note: This post is written by Will Meyerhofer, a Biglaw attorney turned psychotherapist, whom we profiled. A former Sullivan & Cromwell associate, he holds degrees from Harvard, NYU Law, and The Hunter College School of Social Work. He blogs at The People’s Therapist.

I feel self-conscious sometimes about the pessimism of this column with regard to law as a career path. That pessimism reflects what I see every day in my practice – miserable lawyers.

My experiences might be skewed as a result of self-selection. It makes sense that unhappy lawyers would seek a psychotherapist who is a former lawyer and writes a column like mine, and it makes sense that these same unhappy lawyers would write me letters and post comments on my site about their (mostly unhappy) experiences.

Also, in fairness, the country is in the midst of a deep recession. It’s hard to be happy at any career when you can’t find a job, or half the offices on your floor are empty and there isn’t enough work to go around and you’re worrying about whether you’ll have a job next week. I see clients from other industries who are also affected by the economic downturn, such as folks in the fashion and retail world, many of whom are struggling with long-term unemployment, and even bankruptcy and foreclosure. They’re not exactly brimming with high-spirited fun either.

The difference is that those people love what they do. They’re just out of work.

With lawyers, even the ones who have well-paid jobs seem – mostly – unhappy.

Nevertheless, in keeping with this week’s theme of cheerful good times, we’re going to ignore them – and talk about happy lawyers. Bouncy, perky, downright merry, good-time lawyers.

I have seen a few happy lawyers. They exist, and they tend to fall into two groups.

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Pls Hndle Thx: The Most Insane Question You’ve Ever Read, Guaranteed

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Ed. note: Have a question for next week? Send it in to advice@abovethelaw.com

Ed. note II: Holy s**t.

Dear ATL,

I was a summer associate at a mid-sized AmLaw 100 firm in ’07, where I was assigned a mentor (hereinafter “Mentor”) who was a junior associate that summer.  I am now a junior-ish associate at the firm, and Mentor is a mid-level in my department. Mentor continues to be a good friend, and we often hang out outside of work.  At work, Mentor is responsible for channeling a lot of work my way and is my go-to person for questions and review.  Partners and other associates widely regard Mentor as the rising star in our department….

UPDATE: What follows contains adult content. There are no images, but there is description of sexual activity. We’ve placed the rest of the discussion after the jump; if you think you might be offended, stop reading here.

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Pls Hndle Thx: Eyes Are the Window to Flex Spending Accounts

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Ed. note: Have a question for next week? Send it in to advice@abovethelaw.com.

Dear ATL,

I work in Manhattan and it’s time for me to get a new prescription for my glasses. Some of my friends are saying that I should trade in the glasses for contacts, to make me look young (I’m on the wrong side of 30). But others contend that glasses give me a distinguished look which will help my career. Still others suggest Lasik — though I’m not wild about shooting laser beams into my eyeballs.

What should I do? I’ve been delaying going to the optometrist for weeks while I ponder my options.

Four Eyes

The optician isn’t a needle exchange… you don’t have to surrender your old, dirty glasses in order to procure a clean set of contacts. This is America, you can have both, especially if you have a Flex Spending account.  The real question is whether you should roll up to work in glasses or contacts. Lasik only makes sense if you like paying money for permanent broken blood vessels and blurry night vision.

Gender plays a large role in the answer…

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Pls Hndle Thx: The FAQs

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Ed. note: Have a question for next week? Send it in to advice@abovethelaw.com.

Here at the Pls Hndle Thx factory located in my parents’ basement, we receive hundreds of emails a week begging us for advice.  And by “hundreds of emails,” I mean two, one of which I’m pretty confident Elie writes and sends from secret email accounts because he knows that my health insurance doesn’t cover mental health benefits and doesn’t want me to feel like a complete failure.

Anyway, each week, the two emails that we receive inevitably ask the same old questions: Should I apply to law school? Should I drop out of law school? Will I be fired?  Help, I’ve been fired, now what?

The best advice I can give you people is simply this: learn to read. We’ve answered all your FAQs before. But if you don’t remember what we said and/or don’t feel like scrolling back through the archive, here are the Pls Hndle Thx FAQs along with our sage advice….

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Unbillable Hours: A True Story

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Ian Graham is the author of Unbillable Hours: A True Story, which was published earlier this month. The book is a memoir of Graham’s time at Latham & Watkins, where he spent about five years as a litigation associate.

Unbillable Hours is not, however, a Latham exposé (which I’d eagerly read, by the way). Rather, the book centers on Graham’s work on a major pro bono case. The book’s publisher describes it as follows:

Landing a job at a prestigious L.A. law firm, complete with a six figure income, signaled the beginning of the good life for Ian Graham. But the harsh reality of life as an associate quickly became evident. The work was grueling and boring, the days were impossibly long, and Graham’s main goal was to rack up billable hours.

But when he took an unpaid pro bono case to escape the drudgery, Graham found the meaning in his work that he’d been looking for. As he worked to free Mario Rocha, a gifted young Latino who had been wrongly convicted at 16 and sentenced to life without parole, the shocking contrast between the quest for money and power and Mario’s desperate struggle for freedom led Graham to look long and hard at his future as a corporate lawyer.

Yesterday I chatted with Ian Graham about his book, his time at Latham, and how he made the transition from a legal career to a writing career.

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Swimming Lessons for Baby Sharks

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Grover Cleveland is the author of Swimming Lessons for Baby Sharks: The Essential Guide to Thriving as a New Lawyer, an advice book for attorneys published earlier this year. As a partner at Foster Pepper PLC, one of the Northwest’s largest law firms, he helped many new attorneys learn how to practice law. While at Foster Pepper, he was named a Rising Star for three years in a row by Washington Law and Politics magazine.

Grover now holds an environmental policy position in Seattle. In this role, he has seen the world from the client’s perspective. This broad range of experience both as a supervising attorney and as a client gives him a unique perspective on the skills new lawyers need to succeed. (Swimming Lessons for Baby Sharks also incorporates the wisdom of dozens of other lawyers that he interviewed in the course of his research.)

Earlier this week, we chatted with Grover about his book, advice he offers to young lawyers, and the state of the law firm economy, among other topics.

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