OperaSoprano wrote:Lxw wrote:Potentially getting fired, or losing out on a payday because the court decided the other way can be pretty outcome determining? You could do something wrong, and everyone will know about it (e.g., an attorney filed a pretty terrible response to the patent office, news of which spread like fire through the department and one of the senior examiners was like "ok now I just lost respect for that entire firm"
Seriously?
Yep. And he was the jack-of-all-trades guy in that art unit, anytime someone had a question about something and either couldn't get in touch with the guy who did that tech or there was no expert in that tech, we went to him for advice.
Anyways I think the pressure is much less in school. You mess up once, it's ok, you still have other chances to prove yourself, and odds are you aren't going to mess up on everything--out in the real world you mess up just once and it's as if everyone knows about it, and not only that--people can and will get angry at you, and they might think you're incompetent.
Do you think the collaborative nature of the practice will make a difference, though? I mean, it's my own instinct to seek out a second opinion if I'm not sure of something, and the fact that our research can be checked and rechecked in practice would seem to make life altering errors less likely. I'm not practicing yet, obviously, so I can't say for sure, but just having other people there to consult would lower stress levels enormously for me.
Well yea, I guess instead of 'you' it becomes 'you all'
The lesson here is to triple check everything you put your name on. Little sidenote from my examining days...this newly minted lawyer came in and said "you did this rejection wrong, your reference says B, then A; not A, then B."--his entire argument was based on that. But I didn't do anything wrong because the reference did in fact say A, then B. This lawyer is no longer on that firm's personnel listing. Now I don't think the lawyer's absence was solely because of such an oversight, but I wouldn't be surprised if it were (the firm's founding partners signed every piece of paper that left their office)
