Lateraling As a First Year Forum

[Anonymous User]

I was in almost the exact same situation at my firm. Was basically the blackballed associate for one mistake during first few months. Got official talk at 1 year review. Play it safe and try to lateral.

[Anonymous User]

I probably could have done what I want to switch into. I actually chose my group without getting any work in it when I was a summer - was a shot in the dark.

Official talk meaning 3 mos to shop around? What'd you wind up doing.

[Anonymous User]

Let me tell you, as someone who lateraled under not the best circumstances, 3 months would not have been NEARLY enough. I do not recommend waiting until you have a narrow window to look. It took me more like 10.

[Rahviveh]

OP again - not sure if this is worth mentioning to anyone. I've had 2 opportunities to raise it, but I've only seriously considered disclosing it after realizing that the situation has harmed my ability to get my work since. Basically, because I was willing to work over Thanksgiving, I had read all the documents for a case before anyone else had so was able to get a few partners up to speed.

A third year was put on the team as well, and immediately asserted her authority. I started getting a bunch of make work that kept me there till midnight for a few weeks - basically every night I was doing the same thing over and over. When partners called to ask factual questions, she'd get upset because she was responsible for me so my instructions were to check in with her before responding. Often this seemed stupid so I would just give the answer, and not tell her somebody had called. When she found out she would get upset, and accuse me of not respecting her authority.

This cycle repeated for a few days until she started to make threats about getting me off the matter and saying negative things about me to partners if I didn't follow her exact instructions word for word so I stopped asking questions, and would do these pointless tasks all night every night and then send an e-mail about the pointless task to everyone as per her instructions.

If I responded to anything related to the matter or another matter the threats would get more severe, and insults and aggressive yelling would follow. I would try to brush it off, but it was hard because by this point that matter was basically all of my waking hours and they were in a dysfunctional relationship with somebody I had become genuinely afraid of. Somewhere along here I burnt out, and really wanted to get off the matter. At 2 AM one night, after she went through a bid on how I was a fucking idiot who has no respect for authority, I sent her intentionally poor work product, which was obviously a bad decision. However, she then forwarded it to everyone else and I was taken off the matter. She's now gone (I think voluntarily), and nothing about the fact she's crazy excuses sending intentionally poor work product, but the situation continues to haunt me and is brought up at every performance review.

I've been hesitant to bring the professional bullying up, because the whole thing was very awkward and I don't want to turn it into a big human resources thing. Would this be something I should bring up the next time it's mentioned? The way it's been interpreted is that if I work too many hours, I'll have egregiously bad judgment. Basically I put something ridiculous into a document expecting her to read it, and use it to trash me, which is what happened. I didn't put much thought into it, and didn't see it having long term consequences.

I've never mentioned the work product was intentionally poor to get me off the matter, because that would seemingly only make it worse so I've played it off as being burnt out, and not thinking things over as effectively. Would mentioning this months later only make it worse? Objectively speaking, I don't think anybody would care about it if I was billing more hours, but this has impacted my billable hours. I also don't think the fact I bore the wrath of a stressed out sociopath doesn't change the fact that I sent out incredibly poor work product - if anything saying it was intentional could make it worse so I don't know how to go about it.

Describe what this associate looked like

[Anonymous User]

I was in almost the exact same situation at my firm. Was basically the blackballed associate for one mistake during first few months. Got official talk at 1 year review. Play it safe and try to lateral.

What did the official talk consist of? I don't know if I'm actually blackballed or not. A few months later after this happened and the associate left, I saw them talking to a midlevel I had worked with. This midlevel's body language did a 180 immediately following that conversation, and I stopped getting work from them. The associate had gone so ballistic and yelled so loud that the situation was awkward for everyone, and someone told me it's not the first time this has happened. At some point people went from being extra nice to me to increasingly distant, but this only happened after the associate left.

A lot of it is my doing because I knew all the warning signs of mental illness, that this person hadn't had authority before and that I was somehow a threat, but intentionally avoided thinking about it. The idea I didn't respect their authority came up more and more each day. The more I tried to list all their respectable qualities to calm them down, the more it was perceived as placating them and talking down to them. The lesson here is that if you work with a bonafide sociopath, you have to go to HR right away or keep your wits until they turn violent. If I am being blackballed, I'd much rather say be stabbed with a pen or break my nose than have my career in jeopardy. The silver lining is that a career as an ATL columnist has never been more promising.

[kcdc1]

No one at your firm is going to directly tell you that your reputation is preventing you from getting work, or that you have no realistic chance to redeem yourself. They'd have nothing to gain by telling you so. I'd recommend pursuing all your options -- try to lateral or change practice groups, and while you're doing that, also do what you can to get work and improve your reputation in your current group. There's no point trying to figure out your exact likelihood of getting laid off or when it will happen. Focus on taking steps to improve your outlook.

[Anonymous User]

I was in almost the exact same situation at my firm. Was basically the blackballed associate for one mistake during first few months. Got official talk at 1 year review. Play it safe and try to lateral.

What did the official talk consist of? I don't know if I'm actually blackballed or not. A few months later after this happened and the associate left, I saw them talking to a midlevel I had worked with. This midlevel's body language did a 180 immediately following that conversation, and I stopped getting work from them. The associate had gone so ballistic and yelled so loud that the situation was awkward for everyone, and someone told me it's not the first time this has happened. At some point people went from being extra nice to me to increasingly distant, but this only happened after the associate left.

A lot of it is my doing because I knew all the warning signs of mental illness, that this person hadn't had authority before and that I was somehow a threat, but intentionally avoided thinking about it. The idea I didn't respect their authority came up more and more each day. The more I tried to list all their respectable qualities to calm them down, the more it was perceived as placating them and talking down to them. The lesson here is that if you work with a bonafide sociopath, you have to go to HR right away or keep your wits until they turn violent. If I am being blackballed, I'd much rather say be stabbed with a pen or break my nose than have my career in jeopardy. The silver lining is that a career as an ATL columnist has never been more promising.

It was the standard 3 month talk. They implied that they expected me to continue working for the 3 months or until I found another job although I technically didn't have to. I did not because screw them. I did not realize I had been "blackballed" until that talk, but it was clear I should have seen it coming. One partner talked to me and essentially said the powerful partner who I had make the mistake for made it clear to everyone else that they didn't want me there anymore, so that was that. I had noticed people acting different around me and not giving me as much work for the several months prior, but had just brushed it off and/or didn't really care because I was miserable there.

Best thing that ever happened to me. Working in an environment like that is awful.