Don’t Stand So Close To Me: Navigating The Physical Hazards Of Being An In-House Counsel

What’s the big deal about touching in the workplace?

I love art. I love standing in front of vast, colorful masterpieces and wondering where the artist started on the canvas. Was it the main event like the toothsome predator in Copley’s “Watson and the Shark,” or something more subtle, more personal, like Rembrandt’s shoulder swag in his self-portrait? I could spend hours staring at paintings, their textures and messages changing with the shifting light. But you know what I never do? Touch them.

Why? Maybe it’s my aversion to being manhandled by museum guards. Maybe it’s out of a profound respect for not spoiling the medium with my grubby mitts. Or maybe, you know, it’s because you’re not supposed to.

My stint in Biglaw proved that most attorneys adhere to the “no touching unless there’s a medical emergency and even then” rule. I can count the number non-handshake touches I received from partners. Even at my going away shebang, only a few younger associates dared come in for the awkward back-pat, coworker half-hug. I let this slide since we’d all been in the trenches together. Once you watch the sun rise in your office with someone while waiting for pages to come back from the printer, boundaries naturally erode.

This luxurious personal space concept left me ill-prepared to go in-house. Going in-house should really come with a warning label and a manual or a pamphlet or something (because who has time for manuals) and one of the salient warnings in bold should be “EXPECT TO BE TOUCHED. A LOT.”

To be clear, I’m not talking about “this is clearly unwanted touching that amounts to harassment, let’s go have a meaningful conversation with HR present” stuff. That’s not funny in the slightest. And if this is happening, then by all means, report them and get their asses fired if you can.

I’m talking about the random gray area of touching, which rises to the level of weird and annoying, but not harassment territory touching. And just like bullshit, everybody’s tolerance for it is a little different.

My company is overwhelmingly male, from entry-level to C-suite and there are times I feel like I’ve stumbled into some sort of bizarre sporting event, only everybody is wearing business casual and coming to term with male pattern baldness of some sort of another. I am a routine recipient of back slaps, shoulder squeezes, arm stroking, and even the occasional head pat. Yes, that’s right. I once had a VP pat me on the head while I was seated at my desk as he told me to keep up the good work. I think it’s worth pointing out that I’m still here and he’s not.

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In my experience, I find business people to be natural pushers of boundaries, whether it’s our company’s risk profile or standard procedures and practices they find too cumbersome to bother following, so I can’t say that I’m entirely surprised that they would be routine and shameless invaders of personal space.

I’ve actually spent a lot of time thinking about what spurs people to touch one another in a professional environment. Is it just the boundary thing? Or is it a lady parts thing? I think it must be some of column A and some of column B to be sure, but I think it’s something more than that. I think attorneys are inherently unknown quantities to business people and they’re looking for reassurance, whether they’re consciously aware of it or not.

Remember when you touched that snake during the zoo demonstration in the third grade, you bad ass? That feeling of cool dry scales over your fingertips? You wanted to know that you could do it.  That there was nothing to be afraid of. Well, I think we’re the snakes in this analogy.

I often find touching paired with searching questions from business people. “Are we good, Kay?”  “Is this going to come back and bite us in the ass?” “I think it was a good deal, right?” That pat on the arm and the shoulder squeeze is a touch point. I get it. I don’t like it and I feel absolutely no qualms about mocking anyone who touches me, but I think I get it.

That doesn’t mean that when touching feels particularly egregious, I ignore it. My preferred response is when someone lays hands on me, I look slowly at the offending digits and then drag my eyes up the business person, giving them the blank stare of the carrion crow and perhaps, the eyebrow arch. I find this non-verbal particularly effective because it leaves the business partner to wonder what I would have done if the touching had continued. Nothing good, I can assure you.

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Occasionally, when I feel like someone has really crossed the line (recent example, a senior manager who insisted on clasping my hand as he told me that “I’d find a way to get this deal done” and he wasn’t talking about time constraints, but risk tolerance concerns), I will have a private, closed-door conversation with the business partner and woe to the guy who has a kid that I know about or have glimpsed in a picture frame on the desk, because nothing creates that look of dumbstruck horror when you ask a father how they would feel if a teacher or a coach put their hands on little Brantley. I know, it’s a cheap shot, but an instructive one I take to stop the behavior because really, if we’ve gotten this far on my annoyance scale, we’re in HR territory.

So what’s the big deal about touching in the workplace? I harken back to the concept of tolerance. I have a pretty high threshold for a lot of things, you have to when you’re juggling shifting priorities and deadlines and the occasional less than truthful business partner. But touching throws me off my game. As reassuring as it might be for a partner to clasp their hand on my shoulder, I find it unsettling. I never have the urge to touch anyone at work. And while I’ll generally give a business partner the benefit of the doubt (it’s just a reassurance thing, right?), I do sometimes wonder if it’s an attempt to assert control over someone else, mainly me. And if that’s the case, then as my grandma used to say, that really frosts my pumpkin.

For me, people who invade my personal space are slightly worse than people who cut the line, but less annoying than those who insist that Jimi Hendrix wrote “All Along the Watchtower.” (Try again, children. Bob Dylan. Scout’s honor. And while I’m on the lyrical soap box, Cat Stevens didn’t write “Cat’s Cradle.” Harry Chapin did. So there.) But again, like the half-truths and fictitious deadlines our business partners try to con us into on a regular basis, everyone must decide for themselves what their tolerance level is.  And for me, I readily admit that I am the freaking Mona Lisa of attorneys. Keep your grubby mitts off.


Kay Thrace (not her real name) is a harried in-house counsel at a well-known company that everyone loves to hate. When not scuffing dirt on the sacrosanct line between business and the law, Kay enjoys pub trivia domination and eradicating incorrect usage of the Oxford comma. You can contact her by email at KayThraceATL@gmail.com or follow her on Twitter @KayThrace.