In-House Counsel

The Road Not Taken: The Scrooge Department

Sometimes the best gift is the one you don’t receive. Better to “do it right” than “get it done.”

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Oh! but he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner!   Charles Dickens – A Christmas Carol

At the end of the year, there are two driving forces pushing me and my colleagues at breakneck speed: (1) the end of the year;  and (2) the end of the year. The first is the push to beat the actual end of the calendar year for schedule or budget purposes. The second is the practical obstacles of coordinating colleagues during the holiday season.  

Unlike at law firms where lawyers are hustling to grab the remaining billable hours left in the year, when a lawyer is in-house things naturally slow down because your colleagues in other departments take time off, but the end of the calendar year is a real deadline. Therefore, to get their projects completed before everyone else is visited by their own three ghosts, the business teams have to hustle. Because my legal team supports the business teams, we have to hustle too.

And thus, when the tinsel adorns the cubicle walls, I start hearing the edict of, “Get it done.” Sometimes it is further clarified with, “I don’t care how, get it done.” But really, nobody means this when they say it (although the speaker may think he does). What is meant is, “Do this. Do it now. But do it right.”

It’s that “do it right” portion that makes the order difficult to follow and turns the Legal Department into the Scrooge Department. “Do it right” isn’t said, it’s never said, but it is there. Because we all know that if quality weren’t an issue, we could “get it done” before noon, go home early, and take the rest of the week off. The instruction is clear and manageable, it’s the part that is unsaid that makes it a near impossible task.

And so, we sit with the easy instruction of “get it done” with the qualifier of “but do it right” hanging in the air behind the words. The problem with those important yet unsaid words for a legal department is that lawyers can’t ignore “but do it right.” Colleagues in other departments may be able to cut corners, or pull in favors, but lawyers have professional and ethical obligations to “do it right.” These obligations can lead to tension with our colleagues who are being pushed to “get it done” by the end of the calendar year.   

“Doing it right” when my business colleagues are trying to “get it done” frustrates and infuriates my colleagues who are watching the end of the calendar year continue its march onward without regard to the deals that are in work. Unfortunately, my business colleagues’ feelings are well-placed.

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It is a bittersweet gift to give at the end of the year. Yes, it is a terrible gift of obstruction and disappointment, but it is also the invaluable gift of being the adult in the room preventing an unnecessarily risky arrangement merely because of an arbitrary date on the calendar. If the opportunity is real, it should still be there in the new year (although new budgets or organizational changes could make that a risky bet). If the opportunity is less than ideal, the pause over the holidays provides some valuable time to reflect on what we’d actually be signing up for if we were to just “get it done.” Indeed, this time of year puts into practice the question of that solitary Englishman, “Are these the shadows of the things that will be, or are they shadows of the things that may be only?”

It’s a lawyer joke that writes itself and is reminiscent of something Scrooge would have said before his three visitors changed his spirit, but there is truth in it: Sometimes the best gift is the one you don’t receive. Better to “do it right” than “get it done.”

Humbug.

Celeste Harrison Forst has practiced in small and mid-sized firms and is now in-house at a large manufacturing and technology company where she receives daily hugs from her colleagues. You can reach Celeste directly at [email protected].

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