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Trainees: know your place!
Posted 24/04/2008 by Investment Banker
Some regular readers of legalweek.com will be familiar with some of my contributions to Career Clinic.
Some of you may think I am blunt and cut-throat and not 'nice'. Yet the workplace is not a 'nice' place - harden up, softies! Who gives a toss whether you are nice or not? As long as you perform, that's all that matters. Performance - and not how nice you are - is rewarded by respect. If anything, being nice is a sign of weakness. With that out of the way, let's turn to the subject matter of this blog entry: misguided trainees.
There was a thread posted by a prospective trainee solicitor that wanted to choose seats that offered good client contact and work life balance. I'm sorry but this is just the wrong attitude. This is all graduate recruitment-speak and we all know that anyone working in graduate recruitment/HR are either cop-outs or couldn't hack it in law (or elsewhere) so whatever they have to say shouldn't be relied on. Stop being delusional; the real world doesn't work this way.
Incidentally, it just makes me cringe to see GR/HR devise all these nonsensical questions/exercises to justify their pay-cheque, using ridiculous questions on applications to assess potential candidates, and it makes me depressed when I see trainees actually buying into that. Check out the video profiles on the graduate recruitment website of Wragge & Co for a few examples.
In my opinion, using your connections and/or the Slaughters way is still the best. The last time I checked, Slaughters just tell people to send in their CV - that to me speaks more about a candidate than their ability to recall 'the last time they made a difference to a team project'. Laughable junk, really.
Anyway, back to the topic. At the end of the day, what fee earners are looking for in trainees is a willingness to do the work they don't want to do. Sure, it's crap work, but you weren't hired to advise a senior partner how to do his/her work. Trainees need to just go with the flow and stop being so concerned with client contact or work-life balance. To answer the former, it will come in due time, and as for the latter, now is the time to work your pants off, not to leave work on time to catch Deal Or No Deal.
Any law firm offering client contact and a work-life balance to trainees should raise alarm bells for an ambitious lawyer. I spent my entire traineeship proof-reading and doing V-notes, which was a sign I was at a proper law firm. In the end I quit my law firm because I believed I was bigger than the law firm and all the individuals in it, but that's a blog for next time. Nowadays, at the bank the only occasions I speak to trainees over the phone is when they need to confirm the address to send documents to (or if I have met them over client drinks and she was attractive, to check her availability for that evening).
I have never dealt with a lawyer below three years' PQE on legal/commercial points (then again, I can only speak for my current employer as a global investment bank and the law firms that we use, which are magic circle/top 10 firms, but the principle is universal).
So my message to junior lawyers: know your place in the law firm and the sooner you realise you are no more important to the law firm than the messenger, the quicker you'll become a fine lawyer.
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RSSRecent Posts
- Cravath hires strategy director, for some reason or other30/04/2008
- Trainees: know your place!24/04/2008
- A feast in every sense22/04/2008
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Comments
Helen, the very fact that your supervisor's colleagues/partners made no arrangements for someone else to take over her work and left it to an unsupervised trainee is exactly where the Magic Circle gets its dog-eat -dog reputation. And yes, your story has "indefensible negligence claim" written all over it.
I proofread and photocopied my way through two years at Linklaters (often at 3am) with a smile. It was rare to be known by any other name than "X's trainee". But hey, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, and sure looks good on the CV when, inevitably, you get the h*ll outta there.
Posted by Prof Neg Lawyer | 15/05/2008
Helen, that sounds like fun; but it also sounds like negligence...
Posted by Bob | 8/05/2008
IB - didn't you serve me at a branch of Halifax last week?
Posted by JG - trainee | 7/05/2008
don't be lawyers
Posted by dont be lawyers | 25/04/2008
The blogger's attitude is precisely why people train at mid-sized firms and not MC firms. What a load of drivel.
Posted by Richard | 25/04/2008
IB seemed to have had his brain addled with convention and practice. If you treat your trainees like verification monkeys, they will perform to that level. If, however, you give them more elevated and interesting tasks to do (and projects to manage) they generally rise to the challenge. Now to the economics of it all. If, like IB, you don't give a sh*t about the cost of capital for your poor clients, and you can stuff them with the bill for expensive verification done by legions of bored MC trainees (all paid huge amounts by the way), then good luck to you. Would it not be more effective to deal with these types of exercises more cost-effectively? Outsource them to a lower-cost jurisdiction? Use the expensive legal resources you have in a more enlightened fashion, and you might well get a better product for your clients and produce more competent (and interested) lawyers rather earlier than many firms do at present? I'm sick of interviewing MC assistants who at 2+PQE are little use to man or beast and who can't understand one end of a deal from another. Can't you understand from the howls of protest here that our junior lawyers, and our clients, deserve better. We are hidebound by precedent; should our clients really be paying for our outmoded working practices?
Posted by City Woman | 25/04/2008
I don't think IB exists (if he did, he would have been emasculated by now by some pretty trainee) but my goodness, aren't his comments good for a laugh?
Posted by In house lawyer | 25/04/2008
I agree with the point IB is making though naturally do not endorse every aspect of his prose. A new breed of trainee seems to have evolved (in the mid-market City firms at least) which considers certain tasks to be beneath it. There is nothing wrong with ambition but the odd stint of photocopying/proof-reading or other such drudgery is precisely part of what one signs up for when one becomes a trainee. No-one should have it all the time, but neither should these work-shy trainees with delusions of their own grandeur and intellectual prowess turn their noses up at some proper bread-and-butter work. Think of it as character-building... it's a rite of passage all proper lawyers have had to endure.
Posted by Anonymous | 25/04/2008
"we are capable of just getting on with things you know, given half a chance"
Spelling is not one of them.
Posted by Dick | 24/04/2008
As a trainee I think he's actually got a valid point. All too often HR lure prospective trainees to law firms by pretending that the duration of the TC will be all rainbows and butterflies and that as "the future of this firm" they will be valued. This leads to unrealistic expectations and disillusioned trainees. Reality is once you've signed on you're just a small cog in the operation. All trainees have is potential and the only way they will realise this potential is by working hard and proving themselves on merit. Fairness is an ideal and rarely a reality. If at the end of your TC, having worked your proverbial socks off, you still think you deserve more... then leave.
Posted by SR | 24/04/2008
Nonesense as usual. This guy is saying that the later you leave exposure/training in skills like client management and advice, and the nastier your working environment, the better lawyer you'll make. Right. Well maybe you'll develop the clear lack of people skills shown here.
Posted by Banjo | 24/04/2008
Don't do down trainees, IB. When I was a trainee at a magic circle firm my superviser (when I was doing a capital markets seat) had an operation and was out of the office for 3 weeks. I covered a large amount of her work unsupervised - we are capable of just getting on with things you know, given half a chance.
Posted by Helen | 24/04/2008
I didn't realise Jeremy Blachman had a brother/sister?
Posted by Tom | 24/04/2008