Getting Juniors to be responsive Forum

[Anonymous User]

Why should I spend my valuable time training third rate juniors when the people running the firm treat everyone else like trash? The juniors are welcome to review the redlines on their own. This isn't some warm happy family - biglaw is all about the benjamins, and you should do whatever maximizes your benjamins, not whatever makes juniors feel warm and fuzzy inside.

"My valuable time" get over yourself bro (I assume this is redline psycho back for another ass whooping). I wish I could take myself half as seriously as you do yourself. K&E must be the home of fragile egos and small...

Literally everybody in this thread has answered your question like 10x. You just refuse to see it peaking out from behind the view of the shit stains from your own asshole.

Is redline psycho at K&E? I got the impression that he was pointing to both STB and K&E as examples of places that are “even more intense” than his firm, and using them as an example to drive home his point.

Which (as someone who is actually at K&E) is silly. Also, to redline psycho: I have criticized your weird “senior” bullshit ITT and also worked with Andy Calder; no nervous breakdowns here bro. Trying use him as a sort of weird bogeyman to scare juniors into dealing with your nonsense reveals how fucking dumb and asocial you are. It also proves to me that you’re projecting all sorts of super weird stuff onto SPs that isn’t accurate (because you named someone I’ve personally worked with) and then using it to justify your own bad behavior. Psycho stuff my friend.

Oh boy, the K&E recruiting team has made their obligatory appearance. We talking about the same Andy Calder? The Andy Calder of this "sign up for bankruptcy work or get fired" email blast? https://abovethelaw.com/2020/05/partner ... ne-at-all/ - "the math is not going to work out well for you at the end of the year" "That doesn't mean you have an annuity here" "This isn't a gravy train where you can just chill and be along for the ride".

I mean, I have a lot of complaints about horror show partners at STB/DPW/CSM, but this one takes the cake. A pathetic, disgraceful email like that would mean the end of your career at STB/DPW/CSM. At Kirkland? A promotion.

This isn't to excuse the partners at these other top firms - see prior threads on this board for lurid details, like locking M&A associates in a conference room for 75+ hours a week, or running groups with 90% annual attrition rates, and basically every associate on some type of anti-anxiety/anti-depressant medication, and still undergoing insomnia and nervous breakdowns.

So imagine dealing with all that as a senior, dealing with partners divorced three times who never see their kids, partners bitter about devoting their life to work and having no spouse or kids, partners on who knows what medications/stimulants, partners who are self selected to have incredibly difficult and nitpicky personalities, and who are eager to turn you into a workaholic with no hobbies and no life. So imagine dealing with all of that, on a daily basis, and then having juniors who get a very simple term sheet with instructions to incorporate into a precedent document, who then put the interest rate at 14% rather than 5%, who fail to change the party names, who fail to include key terms from the term sheet, who make utterly asinine edits rather than reaching out with questions, and who generally do a terrible half-hearted job. You then stay up all night fixing the horror show, and send them a redline against their version with instructions to review. Even a five year old would notice the red markings all over, examine the changes, compare to the term sheet, and realize that they failed the task spectacularly. Obviously and apology is in order. Obviously the need for desperate improvement ASAP is clear. But now imagine...crickets...no apology...no promise to do better next time...no apparent realization that their work is hilariously sub-par. Just really clear the associate is there to cruise for a couple of years, pay back some loans and do the bare minimum work. No interest in the job, the firm, the clients, the work, how to be a better lawyer, how to be a good team member, or basically anything. Just pure apathy and indifference.

And so a senior associate who is barely treading water as is should try to "train" and "mentor" these completely unmotivated juniors, who will be gone within 2 years anyway, instead of cutting them off from billables and finding juniors who actually care?

Alice in Wonderland indeed.

lol I forgot that implying something even vaguely positive about K&E is illegal here. All I said is that I’ve worked with Andy and not had a nervous breakdown like you said someone criticizing you would. You are using a firm you don’t work at, and a partner you’ve never worked with, to justify the way you treat juniors. Whatever other flaws K&E may have, I just came here to say that you can’t validly point to K&E or Calder with your bogeyman bullshit to say “my crazy work style and attitude are correct, just look at K&E and Calder - they’re even worse!!!!”

Nope. Neither of those things are worse than you. In fact, reading this thread makes me grateful that (for all their other imperfections) the seniors and partners I work with here at K&E are not as psycho as you. I hope you never lateral here.

Always amazing how you can tell a KE bro from a mile away. Something in the water?

We provided you with very specific direct, and absolutely horrible, quotes from your buddy Andy. A more horrific email could scantly be imagined.

And maybe I'm a bit confused about the way I "treat" juniors. I send them redlines and ask them to review. I give them a couple of chances to improve, and if they don't then I find someone else to work with. I don't berate them, I don't yell at them, I don't call them into my office and tell them they are on the road to getting fired, I don't reduce them to tears, or anything horrible of that sort. Can your buddy Andy Calder say the same? The same guy threatening to fire people for not doing bankruptcy work? As an aside, no one "trained" or "mentored" me, I would just run redlines on my own (gasp!), note what changes were made, and improve my future work product accordingly.

But hey, I get it, Kirkland has absolute bottom of the barrel recruiting standards, and anyone with a pulse is welcome at this point (and for laterals throw in huge signing bonuses to boot). You are going to have a very weak pool of junior associates, and perhaps you do need extensive training to get them to any kind of adequate standard (though given the recent work product I have received from Kirkland, it isn't working). That also explains why working at Kirkland is such a poor choice if you want to get promoted to SP, and why you constantly need to poach partners from other firms to get decent SPs. It's just good business sense, Kirkland knows how much fundamentally better people trained at other firms are relative to the homegrown folk.

But hey, good luck lasting on the gravy train for as long as you can.

Simpon attacking other firms on recruiting standards? That's a new one.

[Anonymous User]

Simpon attacking other firms on recruiting standards? That's a new one.

Right, but also LOL at anybody acting as if the marginal difference in any recruitment standards 1) is determinative of whether someone can learn from a redline or 2) justifies treating said recruits like crap.

It's not like our jobs are that hard. The biggest difference between a good associate and a bad one is motivation. Redlines don't motivate people; people motivate people.

[BrowsingTLS]

Simpon attacking other firms on recruiting standards? That's a new one.

Right, but also LOL at anybody acting as if the marginal difference in any recruitment standards 1) is determinative of whether someone can learn from a redline or 2) justifies treating said recruits like crap.

It's not like our jobs are that hard. The biggest difference between a good associate and a bad one is motivation. Redlines don't motivate people; people motivate people.

Redlines don't motivate people; people might motivate people; money motivates people.

[Anonymous User]

Simpon attacking other firms on recruiting standards? That's a new one.

Right, but also LOL at anybody acting as if the marginal difference in any recruitment standards 1) is determinative of whether someone can learn from a redline or 2) justifies treating said recruits like crap.

It's not like our jobs are that hard. The biggest difference between a good associate and a bad one is motivation. Redlines don't motivate people; people motivate people.

Redlines don't motivate people; people might motivate people; money motivates people.

Sure, but psycho redline bro has no control over the purse, so all he has in his arsenal his admittedly useless redlines or actual management. Up to him if he wants to keep living in misery surrounded by incompetence of his own making.

[Anonymous User]

Simpon attacking other firms on recruiting standards? That's a new one.

Right, but also LOL at anybody acting as if the marginal difference in any recruitment standards 1) is determinative of whether someone can learn from a redline or 2) justifies treating said recruits like crap.

It's not like our jobs are that hard. The biggest difference between a good associate and a bad one is motivation. Redlines don't motivate people; people motivate people.

Redlines don't motivate people; people might motivate people; money motivates people.

Sure, but psycho redline bro has no control over the purse, so all he has in his arsenal his admittedly useless redlines or actual management. Up to him if he wants to keep living in misery surrounded by incompetence of his own making.

Not sure I see the misery really? Just not giving work to unmotivated juniors, and instead finding better ones to work with, hardly seems miserable. Much more miserable to spend time training people who either don't care or can't cut it, me thinks.

[Anonymous User]

Simpon attacking other firms on recruiting standards? That's a new one.

Right, but also LOL at anybody acting as if the marginal difference in any recruitment standards 1) is determinative of whether someone can learn from a redline or 2) justifies treating said recruits like crap.

It's not like our jobs are that hard. The biggest difference between a good associate and a bad one is motivation. Redlines don't motivate people; people motivate people.

Redlines don't motivate people; people might motivate people; money motivates people.

Sure, but psycho redline bro has no control over the purse, so all he has in his arsenal his admittedly useless redlines or actual management. Up to him if he wants to keep living in misery surrounded by incompetence of his own making.

Not sure I see the misery really? Just not giving work to unmotivated juniors, and instead finding better ones to work with, hardly seems miserable. Much more miserable to spend time training people who either don't care or can't cut it, me thinks.

Have you not read psycho's posts about juniors!? There's some serious anger built up in that redline freak. Like rage from the fires of hell type anger. Unless redline fetishist can avoid apparently incompetent juniors on all maters, something is going to cause that ticking timebomb to go off and light the building on fire.

[Anonymous User]

As a biglaw partner (different from the other/others referenced in this thread), I’ve really enjoyed the takes by the psychos on managing juniors. You would not make partner at my firm.

Also, while it is different for every firm, most firms place significant emphasis on associate retention and training. Partners care about having competent associates in the practice group and will work behind the scenes to get associates training and try to make them happy. Our lives are exponentially more difficult without good associates. The notion that we don’t care about these things is false.