How Do I Get Work?

Q:   I just started working as a stub-year associate in a major firm last week and from what I can tell, it’s pretty dead, at least for the junior associates. When I summered here last year, the firm wasn’t crazy busy, either, but I never had to worry about asking for assignments. How do I get work now? Half the people I worked with when I summered aren’t here anymore and I feel like I can’t compete with the first- and second-years who need hours to make their billables.  And I really want a stub bonus this year, if possible. [Read more]

How Do I Handle a Partner Who Reeks?

Q: I’ve spent the past three nights at the printer working with a partner who has the most foul  breath you can possibly imagine. Not exaggerating. I keep popping Listerine strips and offering him one, but he hasn’t taken the hint. Even the client seems to have noticed and I can see them looking at each other when he speaks up close sometimes and I actually feel bad for him. Should I just pull him aside and tell him (in a totally gingerly way, of course)? [Read more]

Look Everyone, Jeans!

I won’t lie—when I walked into my office this morning, I was convinced that it was shaping up to be a pretty crap day.  I had 20–30 pounds of REIT diligence waiting on my desk, had just heard that the hot, single new lateral on 55 is also the new chair of the Firm’s Gay and Lesbian Committee, and had become fairly certain that my new birth control pills are making my eyebrow hairs fall out.  But then I heard the ding of a new email hitting my inbox and all was right with the world again.  Why?  Because, friends, word’s just hit that this Friday is Jeans Day! [Read more]

Office Sex

Lots of interesting things happen when you work 90 hours a week as a Big Firm Associate.  You stop thanking God it’s Friday.  Because it’s always Monday.  You start keeping a Walgreens worth of toiletries in your office.  And sex?  Ha.  You’re too tired to even take The Rabbit out of the nightstand. And then one day when you least expect it, you find yourself having drunken, frenzied sex on the floor of your office at four in the morning with someone you barely know. [Read more]

Can I Date a Spyder?

This past weekend, my friend Hal asked me to take a detour from Big Firm life and spend a couple of days hanging around Washington Square Park as an extra in a short film he was directing. Even though I did little more than sweat my ass off on a park bench for twenty hours, I had a blast—and developed a crush on a scruffy, skinny gaffer. I’m not sure what that is, exactly, but he’s cute. And there’s a decent chance he thinks I am, too. Or at least that’s what he suggested the other night after four margaritas when he asked if I “want to maybe hang or something…or I don’t know, whatever.” Not exactly a poet, this one, but I smiled and gave him my card.

It’s been three days and still no word—not that I really care or anything. Truth is, I’m having second thoughts—and it has nothing to do with the fact that he’s maybe blowing me off. As a card-carrying BFA, I’m having a bigger problem getting past one very significant issue: his name. [Read more]

Step It Up

This one’s for the guys.

I’ve noticed a disturbing social catastrophe among male associates unraveling at law firms from coast to coast, and it needs to end. The veil of uncomfortable silence needs to be lifted. So boys, on behalf of lady lawyers everywhere—nay, ladies, period—please know: It’s bad enough having to spend eighteen hours a day with your mangy ass, but if we have to look at your tattered, chunky, third-rate shoes one more time, we are actually going to vomit. Time to step up the footwear, guys. [Read more]

The Perfect Mentor

You have to give the Firm credit for trying.  We were just told that effective this week, all junior associates will be assigned formal, volunteer mentors to “cultivate intellectual curiosity and professional development in an informal, social context.” The general impression among the junior ranks is that the actual idea is to cultivate some asskissery for the senior associates looking to impress the partners with their commitment to Firm citizenship.  The $100-a-month per-pair budget “to be used to for events pertinent to the mentor-mentee dynamic” may also have had some motivational pull.  Truth is, I was ambivalent about the whole thing.  Until I found out who my mentor was. [Read more]

Mental Breakdown 101

You’re not really a rock star until a member of your band o.d.’s face down in a hotel bathtub somewhere between L.A. and Detroit.  Does the same logic hold, then, that you’re not really a Big Firm Associate until you witness a fellow associate having a full-out foaming-at-the mouth mental breakdown at 3 a.m. just outside your office?  I think, for better or worse, that it does.

My initiation began as most do: waiting outside my office in the middle of the night with another junior associate for a new set of redlines to print out.  The associate, Pete, and I stood by the printer when we heard familiar footsteps coming at us.  Had to be Dave, our senior associate supervisor on the deal.  A recent lateral and brand-new dad, Dave had been pulling 400-hour months, grown a Unabomber beard, and long stopped eating anything that wasn’t Red Bull or jerky-based.  I had the under on when he’d get a divorce; Pete had the over (the official line was two years).  We stood and braced ourselves for whatever wild-goose-chase bullshit research project Dave was inevitably coming to pull on us.  What we didn’t expect, however, was what came next. [Read more]

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