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Now, with ubiquitous computers and tablets, with editable Word documents that can quickly be duped and revised, cut and pasted by the attorneys themselves, documents have doubled and tripled in length, and the complexity has increased correspondingly. With e-mail and texts, documents can be zipped around the world in different time zones with the click of a Send key, so the turnaround time for large corporate deals has shrunken to sometimes 60 days or fewer. And now with ubiquitous WIFI and cellular hotspots, you can work anywhere, on a plane, in your car, on a dock by the bay—so clients, with compressed deal times, expect you to. Frequently, you’ll see a client’s name pop up on your office phone. When you don’t answer, your cell phone will ring. When you don’t answer that, they text you. The expectation is that you’re always available. If you’re on vacation, great — but that just means that they expect you to get the document out before your wife and kids get up for breakfast. And if you’re not willing to be always accessible, you’ll lose the client to another lawyer who will.
We’re all in a race to the bottom to ruin our lives. And by the way, partners expect associates to be always on, too, so if a client needs something at 10:00 pm on a Sunday night, the partner expects the associate to hop right on it. We don’t care where the associate is. We’re feeling heat from the client, so we need always-on responsiveness from the junior attorney. So, we drink to calm down at the end of the day. For some of us, every day. For senior attorneys who are in the later stages of our careers and are making a bunch of money, we can look at our brokerage statements and gut it out for the five or six years to retirement—as we grind the junior attorneys who work for us. For the junior attorneys who work for us, life is miserable—and they’re looking at a long career of misery in front of them, so I can understand why they are likely depressed or have substance abuse problems. But we don’t give much thought to that (and, at mid-sized or smaller firms, are not trained to look out for or give any thought
to it). As noted above, clients are bombarding me with demands 24/7/365. I need my associates to be responsive in the same timeframe. If they are slow in responding or are slow in turning workaround, or turn in inadequate work, I don’t have time to counsel them. I move on to another associate. Too much emphasis on billing and collecting to add counseling services to the mix. It’s very Darwinian. There you have it. It’s anecdotal, but don’t kid yourself. It’s not an outlier. Those who advocate are doing great in getting the message those in the rarified air of Biglaw. We have a lot of work to do below that, where the majority of the profession resides. Brian Cuban (@bcuban) is The Addicted Lawyer. Brian is the author of the Amazon best-selling book, The Addicted Lawyer: Tales Of The Bar, Booze, Blow & Redemption. A graduate of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law, he somehow made it through as an alcoholic then added cocaine to his resume as a practicing attorney. He went into recovery April 8, 2007. JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2020