Bad juniors Forum

[Anonymous User]

As a corporate associate, I can't think of a deadline that's OK to blow. The time frames are often tight enough as it is. If you blow my deadline, why would I trust you with anything?

Agreed with the anon who said "It is never ok to blow deadlines. It is ok to clarify/extend/negotiate deadlines with the person(s) giving the deadlines, but never ok to flat out blow them."

[Anonymous User]

lol some deadlines are absolutely bullshit and you’ll quickly learn which ones are okay to blow.

It is never ok to blow deadlines. It is ok to clarify/extend/negotiate deadlines with the person(s) giving the deadlines, but never ok to flat out blow them.

Simply not true. And there are deadlines okay to blow because nobody will care. Like I said, you’ll quickly learn when this is the case.

I don't know what law firm you're working at where it's ok to completely blow deadlines and what level you are at (your profile indicates you joined TLS in 2016), but at my firm and everywhere else I've worked (I had a previous career in a different but similar client-based field) it is/was never ok. Not meeting deadlines but giving notice/negotiating a new deadline in advance is very different from not meeting them and not even bothering to tell people you won't meet them.

There may not be any immediate repercussions (again, I don't know where you work), but it will have repercussions. Being known as the guy/gal who blows deadlines is never a good thing.

There are deadlines and there are deadlines. Don’t blow the deadline to get drafts out. Ok to blow the deadline for some dumb research question that you were told needed to be done tonight for a deal that’s barely out of the term sheet stage and said issue to be researched will be relevant in maybe 2-3 weeks. The senior/midlevel won’t notice or care.

And my career is doing just fine. Y’all are just some uptight weirdos.

That dumb research question could be dumb because it came from the client’s CEO through the client’s in-house lawyer to the partner to you. The partner could know that to this client “good client service” means turning work around quickly and that the in-house counsel complains if they don’t. It also could just be an extremely difficult partner who expects work to be completed promptly and gets ancy if they don’t get a response quickly enough, and the senior does not want to piss them off and does not want to be put in the position of blaming you for a delay. It could also be that the senior knows 10 more things are coming down the pike and does not want this to get lost in the shuffle while there’s still time to do it.

[jman77]

lol some deadlines are absolutely bullshit and you’ll quickly learn which ones are okay to blow.

It is never ok to blow deadlines. It is ok to clarify/extend/negotiate deadlines with the person(s) giving the deadlines, but never ok to flat out blow them.

Simply not true. And there are deadlines okay to blow because nobody will care. Like I said, you’ll quickly learn when this is the case.

I don't know what law firm you're working at where it's ok to completely blow deadlines and what level you are at (your profile indicates you joined TLS in 2016), but at my firm and everywhere else I've worked (I had a previous career in a different but similar client-based field) it is/was never ok. Not meeting deadlines but giving notice/negotiating a new deadline in advance is very different from not meeting them and not even bothering to tell people you won't meet them.

There may not be any immediate repercussions (again, I don't know where you work), but it will have repercussions. Being known as the guy/gal who blows deadlines is never a good thing.

There are deadlines and there are deadlines. Don’t blow the deadline to get drafts out. Ok to blow the deadline for some dumb research question that you were told needed to be done tonight for a deal that’s barely out of the term sheet stage and said issue to be researched will be relevant in maybe 2-3 weeks. The senior/midlevel won’t notice or care.

And my career is doing just fine. Y’all are just some uptight weirdos.

As a midlevel/senior associate (albeit in litigation), it is objectively correct that, with some people, there are some deadlines that you can blow without consequence. That said, it's not a good habit to develop and it's best to err on the side of not blowing deadlines.

The more accurate framing of this is they don't have any consequences... until they do. Things go on fine and dandy until one day, suddenly for whatever reason, something blows up and blame needs to be assigned somewhere or to someone. Guess where the buck is going to stop?

Maybe it takes weeks, maybe months, maybe years, but if you keep doing things the wrong way because you can get away with it, it will eventually catch up to you.

[Anonymous User]

Hi guys-- So as a midlevel ~transactional associate, most of the juniors I have worked with have been fine (serviceable work product, eagerness to learn, etc.). However, my group recently hired a junior lateral (yes, they exist), and simply put, he has been driving me nuts. He misses simple deadlines, lacks follow through, and produces bad work (not merely in an analytical sense, but I mean basic grammar and spelling). Unfortunately he is staffed on multiple deals with me, and the impression I have from the partners is that I am supposed to ~lean in and train him. I really don't want to, or have the time (billed around 250 past 2 months) to hold his hand (and his shitty attitude makes me even less willing to). It should be fine once these deals close, but the practice group is relatively small such that I won't be able to just use other people. How do I handle this without it reflecting poorly on me?

I'm on the other side of this equation in my group (honestly wondering if the OP is a very exaggerated counter-perspective on me, though I have never been criticized for bad work, AFAIK, and some other stuff doesn't necessarily seem to jive either).

If you were the opposing midlevel/senior in my situation, and you said the above to my face, this is what I'd say: I'm trying to figure out what you want. Your group runs differently than my old group did, and while I have some experience doing what you do, my experience doesn't perfectly align with yours, and the culture of lawyers I came from was also very different than this group. If you communicate clearly to me, I will try to make you happy. But if you spring stuff on me out of the blue, with insane deadlines that are suspicious, or otherwise expect me to pick things by osmosis that aren't clear, I'm going to be more reluctant to do that. And ditto if you hide the ball or aren't being honest about what's going on.

Not sure if any of that's applicable, but hey, made me feel better about my situation.

I'm another mid-level in a small group that recently hired a junior lateral who has been underperforming, so maybe the 3 of us are all in the same group or junior laterals aren't as uncommon as we thought (and maybe are all terrible?). My advice to this particular underperforming junior would be to work within your deadlines. Hit them, yes, but also don't turn in work early or rush to turn it in as soon as you receive it. Proofread. Step away from your work product and come back to it. Think about the broader context before you do something or answer a question. Don't blow deadlines, period. Our practice is very demanding and admittedly different than what you were doing before, but you can't hide behind that for long. You need to own it and work harder to bridge that gap.

I was gonna say give region to make sure this wasn’t me, but fuck it I’m just gonna work harder to bridge that gap.

[oblig.lawl.ref]

ITT bad juniors get defensive about being bad juniors. I'll tell you, folks, it's good times to be a junior associate and/or law student interviewing for jobs.

[Anonymous User]

Midlevel going on senior in lit. There are going to be some assignments (e.g. those related a motion with strict, court-imposed briefing deadlines) that have really important deadlines. Then there are going to be random, drawn-out research projects or discovery-related things that some people won't care if you miss by a little bit. I know I don't really hold it against people if they give me something a little bit late, as long as it's good (and the deadline wasn't super important). Generally speaking, though, deadlines are deadlines and it's imporant to keep them. And, really, junior associates aren't in the best place to tell what can be blown without consequence and what can be. There are also always going to be partners who care about deadlines even if it's for a research project for a hare-brained, non-billable article that one day, six months down the road, might be published on a website no one will read.

That said, when I have a "bad" junior, I try to let them know what is going wrong and how they can fix it before just not using them again. A lot of people will just silently take bad work and not say anything until giving a bad review 9 months down the road, which I think is wrong. There's no need to hand-hold, but you should at least say "fix XYZ, and don't let it happen again."