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Artificial Deadlines Are One Of The Worst Parts About Working At A Law Firm

Artificial deadlines are unreasonable and do not create a congenial work environment.

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As covered at length by this website, there are a number of reasons why people hate working at law firms.  For one, time entry is a tedious chore that annoys even the most patient among us.  Also, constant tension with adversaries can wear down even the most dedicated attorney.  However, to me, one of the worst parts about working for a law firm, and perhaps one of the most avoidable nuisances of being an attorney, are artificial deadlines.

As many people who work in law firms are aware, managers oftentimes require associates to complete assignments on timeframes that have almost no bearing on when a particular task actually needs to be accomplished.  At times, bosses seem to pull a deadline out of thin air, and hold associates accountable if they fail to complete a given task by that deadline.  It does not matter if the associate needs to work on nights or weekends to complete an assignment by this time period, what matters is not whether a hard deadline will be met, but if the manager’s artificial timeframe will be satisfied.

Time and again during my career working for both small and large law firms, I have been forced to churn out assignments according to a partner’s unreasonably tight timeframe when the actual filing deadline was weeks or even months in the future.  One example sticks out in my mind as a particularly egregious example of a partner setting a completely artificial deadline that seemingly had no use other than to force me to work needlessly over a weekend.

Several years ago, I was working on a case in which a summary judgment motion needed to be filed within 120 days of an event that just occurred in the matter.  Despite the fact that we had nearly four months to write and file the summary judgment motion, a partner told me on a Wednesday that he wanted to see a draft of the summary judgment by Monday, five days from that date.  Since I was busy with court appearances and other obligations that week, I did not begin to draft the summary judgment motion until Friday.

In order to meet the partner’s deadline, I worked much of that weekend, and had to come to the office on a Sunday to get some exhibits together.  I also had to miss a baseball game that most of my brothers were attending so that I could prepare the motion by the partner’s deadline.

After I emailed the draft of the summary judgment motion to the partner that Monday, I did not hear back from the partner about the motion for weeks.  I checked our document management system, and confirmed that this partner did not even look at the draft motion for a long time after I finished writing the document.  About three weeks after I submitted the draft, the partner finally gave me his edits, and we filed the summary judgment motion well before the deadline.  However, there was absolutely no reason for the partner to create artificial time pressure and force me to work all weekend to meet a completely fabricated deadline.

Even though it seems pretty unreasonable to create artificial deadlines out of thin air, I have heard partners justify their use of artificial deadlines in a number of ways.  Some partners have told me that drafting a motion has a lot of moving parts, and it might be important for a draft to be provided well before the filing deadline to ensure that everything is ready by the time papers need to be filed.  In addition, other partners have told me that their time is more valuable than the time of an associate, so it does not matter if an associate needs to bust their butt to meet an artificial deadline.  What really matters is that the papers will ready by the time the partner is able to review the document.

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There are, of course, times when there is absolutely no need to put an associate under time pressure so that things are lined up for a motion to be filed.  In addition, it is completely unreasonable to force an associate to work under a tight timeframe so that papers can be ready for when a partner finally reviews the documents.  Although some who might think otherwise, partners are not divas who need associates to unreasonably exert themselves under tight deadlines that are not based in realty.

I am far from the first person to discuss how partners do not respect the time of associates, and sometimes it is unavoidable to have associates work under tight timeframes to serve clients.  However, artificial deadlines are unreasonable and do not create a congenial work environment.  Partners should seriously consider whether a tight timeframe is necessary before requiring associates to work nights and weekends to meet an artificial deadline.

Jordan Rothman is the founder of Student Debt Diaries, a personal finance website discussing how he paid off all $197,890.20 of his college and law school student loans over 46 months of his late 20s. You can reach him at Jordan@studentdebtdiaries.com.

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