Should I Ask this Senior Associate Why They Hate Me? Forum

[Anonymous User]

How big is the firm? If there are other practice groups looking for juniors then ask to transfer. Go find yourself a new group.

[Anonymous User]

Genuine question from a 2L with work experience: Why does there seem to be so much resistance to actually addressing issues/conflict? Are law firms somehow very different from other industries in that regard? It seems nuts to me not to at least try to sort out the problem.

[objctnyrhnr]

Genuine question from a 2L with work experience: Why does there seem to be so much resistance to actually addressing issues/conflict? Are law firms somehow very different from other industries in that regard? It seems nuts to me not to at least try to sort out the problem.

It’s not unique to the legal industry. In high level white collar gigs, it’s particularly un-ideal to risk being viewed as dramatic/a pain in the ass/bad team player. Conversely, being “a good soldier” as they say is valued very highly—particularly at the lower ranks.

Sucks but that’s it.

[Anonymous User]

Only posting to say that this situation sucks—I’m sorry, OP. FWIW, the whole “I know they’re busy” thing isn’t a good excuse. Lots of people are busy, and plenty of them manage to still be nice (or at least not mean) to their coworkers.

Idk how much this will help, but my advice would be to realize that they’re just another person. Sure, they’re more senior to you at the firm. So what? They’re an asshole, and being senior doesn’t make them better than you or mean that you should lose any sleep over them.

I know it seems tough, but I’d bet things will improve. And if even they don’t, eventually you’ll be in a spot where you can just refuse to work directly with this person.

[Anonymous User]

Genuine question from a 2L with work experience: Why does there seem to be so much resistance to actually addressing issues/conflict? Are law firms somehow very different from other industries in that regard? It seems nuts to me not to at least try to sort out the problem.

is this a legitimate issue/conflict? seems to me more like the senior is just an asshole to people below them in the pecking order. in what industry is it easy to handle or resolve a supervisor like that?

[Anonymous User]

How big is the firm? If there are other practice groups looking for juniors then ask to transfer. Go find yourself a new group.

Big firm, small office. Practice groups are basically "litigation" or "corporate," although other offices have different groups. I basically got railroaded into litigation, but they're not going to let me switch, since again, I'm the only junior in the group. I wish this was more of an option.

[Anonymous User]

Genuine question from a 2L with work experience: Why does there seem to be so much resistance to actually addressing issues/conflict? Are law firms somehow very different from other industries in that regard? It seems nuts to me not to at least try to sort out the problem.

You don't seem to understand what the job of a biglaw junior is. It's not to provide service to the client, though that presumably gets done incidentally to doing the main job, which is to make life easier for the more senior members of the team. That's it. You're there for their convenience, doing the things they don't have time to do, or don't want to do, in the way they want you to do them, when they want you to do them. If you're pushing back against them or telling them to change what they're doing or how they're doing it, then you're not doing your job.

Yes, that makes it very different from a real job. That's one reason why I left biglaw for in-house, which much more resembles a regular white collar gig, where the goal is add value to the overall business. I have a boss but my job isn't solely to eat the shit sandwiches they don't want to eat. In biglaw, it's shit sandwich buffet. Telling them you don't like how rudely they're serving you those shit sandwiches is a good way to get branded a bad associate with a bad attitude, delay how soon you get more substantive work since they don't want to spend the time explaining it to you, get frozen out of desired work going forward, and it won't change a thing about how they interact with you.

[veers]

Honestly, if the senior hasn't told you why he/she is unhappy with you, it likely means they have written you off as hopeless and given up on you entirely. A confrontational conversation will just antagonize them further and certainly not make things better. In biglaw if your boss thinks you don't "get it" then there really isn't any hope, and you should look to switch practice groups or lateral ASAP.

[objctnyrhnr]

Honestly, if the senior hasn't told you why he/she is unhappy with you, it likely means they have written you off as hopeless and given up on you entirely. A confrontational conversation will just antagonize them further and certainly not make things better. In biglaw if your boss thinks you don't "get it" then there really isn't any hope, and you should look to switch practice groups or lateral ASAP.

This is a good take, generally speaking.

If that senior associate is as much a staple in the group as it sounds like they are, and if things are really making you this miserable, I agree—lateral.

[Anonymous User]

On the posts above to lateral, I both agree and don't. Anon for obvious reasons.

I struggled a fair bit at my first firm and got several comments about how I didn't have the right "instincts" for litigation and approached things too much like law school -- issue spotting without thinking through how it would play out or what the next steps would be, intermediate steps to accomplish whatever goal we had, etc. Now that I supervise juniors I think many have that tendency and I was made to internalize more of this as personal failure than was probably fair, but either way I definitely felt "written off" by some of the partners I worked with. But I think it would have been a mistake to lateral right away. The situation ultimately proved unsalvageable after 4-5 years, though I left on my own accord. But in the meantime I figured my shit out and got good, or got at least serviceable as a midlevel associate. That meant that one, I had seniors/partners who DID think highly of my work that I could use as references down the line, and two, I knew my head from my ass when I did switch firms and markets, and could impress and hit the ground running.

I think whether to lateral know or give it a couple years depends on the experience you're getting. If you can't avoid doing lots of work with this senior and aren't getting experience to develop as an attorney as a result, then yes, I'd look to lateral sooner rather than later. If you can shift more of your work to the other senior and partner or either way you are still getting experience to set you up down the line, I would keep plugging away. I think one of the worst possible outcomes here is that you lateral, end up in a similar situation, and have significantly less runway because you're a lateral rather than homegrown junior. (That has absolutely been a thing at both of my firms -- laterals who don't work out tend to leave much faster.)

Of course it's also relevant whether you can tolerate this situation for that long. If you can't, get out. I was able to work with other partners after the rocky start and my experience improved a lot.

[target_corp]

Genuine question from a 2L with work experience: Why does there seem to be so much resistance to actually addressing issues/conflict? Are law firms somehow very different from other industries in that regard? It seems nuts to me not to at least try to sort out the problem.

You don't seem to understand what the job of a biglaw junior is. It's not to provide service to the client, though that presumably gets done incidentally to doing the main job, which is to make life easier for the more senior members of the team. That's it. You're there for their convenience, doing the things they don't have time to do, or don't want to do, in the way they want you to do them, when they want you to do them. If you're pushing back against them or telling them to change what they're doing or how they're doing it, then you're not doing your job.

Yes, that makes it very different from a real job. That's one reason why I left biglaw for in-house, which much more resembles a regular white collar gig, where the goal is add value to the overall business. I have a boss but my job isn't solely to eat the shit sandwiches they don't want to eat. In biglaw, it's shit sandwich buffet. Telling them you don't like how rudely they're serving you those shit sandwiches is a good way to get branded a bad associate with a bad attitude, delay how soon you get more substantive work since they don't want to spend the time explaining it to you, get frozen out of desired work going forward, and it won't change a thing about how they interact with you.

I can't tell if the above poster is merely being descriptive of the way biglaw is (vs. agreeing with it), but in any event, the above is a wildly brain-damaged view of the world that ironically proves the quoted 2L's point.

[Joachim2017]

Genuine question from a 2L with work experience: Why does there seem to be so much resistance to actually addressing issues/conflict? Are law firms somehow very different from other industries in that regard? It seems nuts to me not to at least try to sort out the problem.

You don't seem to understand what the job of a biglaw junior is. It's not to provide service to the client, though that presumably gets done incidentally to doing the main job, which is to make life easier for the more senior members of the team. That's it. You're there for their convenience, doing the things they don't have time to do, or don't want to do, in the way they want you to do them, when they want you to do them. If you're pushing back against them or telling them to change what they're doing or how they're doing it, then you're not doing your job.

Yes, that makes it very different from a real job. That's one reason why I left biglaw for in-house, which much more resembles a regular white collar gig, where the goal is add value to the overall business. I have a boss but my job isn't solely to eat the shit sandwiches they don't want to eat. In biglaw, it's shit sandwich buffet. Telling them you don't like how rudely they're serving you those shit sandwiches is a good way to get branded a bad associate with a bad attitude, delay how soon you get more substantive work since they don't want to spend the time explaining it to you, get frozen out of desired work going forward, and it won't change a thing about how they interact with you.

I can't tell if the above poster is merely being descriptive of the way biglaw is (vs. agreeing with it), but in any event, the above is a wildly brain-damaged view of the world that ironically proves the quoted 2L's point.

Tthe second Anon here -- the one who apparently thinks the primary job of a junior associate is to "eat shit sandwiches" and just make life easier for senior members of the team -- seems to have had a scarring experience, but it's far from accurate as a global description of Big Law, or even mid law or law at a boutique. It's maybe the reverse, where that's the secondary goal, but the way he's put it is is not at all a general truth about life in Big Law. I feel sorry for you because you had that experience, apparently, and it drove you out of Big Law, but please don't project, and, on top of that, speak with such dismissive and authoritative tone.

Plenty of us can attest to life in Big Law that is not nearly that ... traumatic? I don't even know the word for this outlook. It's not at all unreasonable to sometimes push back with those who are more senior to you after you've tried other strategies. You do it within reason, and use judgment, but you gotta have a spine, man.

[Anonymous User]

Original 2L here--thanks for the responses, which have led to an interesting discussion (at least in my opinion).

I totally get not wanting to be viewed as high-maintenance or whatever, but it is honestly a little difficult for me to grasp how even in a hierarchical work environment attempting to reduce friction through a 10-minute conversation about how to make asking questions more efficient or whatever is bad. It seems that an initial investment in getting on the same page about basic communication styles would be better for everyone, especially when approached as a way to make the superior's life easier.

I guess if the person is just an asshole, nothing OP can do directly, but in previous jobs, even if someone's superior really liked them, people would go to another superior who had good rapport with the protecting superior to apply pressure.

I guess it is just shocking to me that people seem to view abhorrent treatment and sociopathic behavior as intractable, especially since law firms seem like relative substitutes, so the market would favor non-psycho superiors.

[veers]

Original 2L here--thanks for the responses, which have led to an interesting discussion (at least in my opinion).

I totally get not wanting to be viewed as high-maintenance or whatever, but it is honestly a little difficult for me to grasp how even in a hierarchical work environment attempting to reduce friction through a 10-minute conversation about how to make asking questions more efficient or whatever is bad. It seems that an initial investment in getting on the same page about basic communication styles would be better for everyone, especially when approached as a way to make the superior's life easier.

I guess if the person is just an asshole, nothing OP can do directly, but in previous jobs, even if someone's superior really liked them, people would go to another superior who had good rapport with the protecting superior to apply pressure.

I guess it is just shocking to me that people seem to view abhorrent treatment and sociopathic behavior as intractable, especially since law firms seem like relative substitutes, so the market would favor non-psycho superiors.

It is important to understand the fundamentals behind biglaw. It is a pyramid structure, with the vast majority of people who come in washing out or getting forced out. To that end, as a mid/senior, you have little incentive to invest in your juniors, because there is a high probability that they will be gone in a couple of years anyway. On the flip side, it is very easy to cut them off and just give your work to other juniors (it is very common for partners to just decide that a junior is useless, and they never want to see or speak to them again. When enough partners do this, said junior's hours decline, and a firing is on the way).

If this senior wanted to work with you and help you develop, they would take the time to give constructive criticism and suggestions for improvement. The fact that they have not, and do what they can to avoid you, strongly suggests that they have given up on you, with no hope for redemption.