Jagged Rocks of Wisdom: Professional Advice for the New Attorney - Softcover

Lund, Morten

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1888960078 ISBN 13: 9781888960075

Publisher: The Fine Print Press, Ltd., 2007

Synopsis

A new job is scary for anyone. A new job as an attorney is scary times two: the challenges are both substantive (as in actually knowing the law), as well as procedural (as in knowing how to act like an attorney). In this professional transition, many new attorneys fall by the wayside. This book is a guide to keep the new attorney on track. It includes advice for the new law firm associate, written by a Yale Law School graduate who made partner in a national law firm. Written in a first- and second-person tense and filled with no-nonsense guidance from someone actually in the mentorship role in a real-world law firm.

This is the first book in a Jagged Rocks of Wisdom series to help the new attorney. The second book, Jagged Rocks of Wisdom-The Memo: Mastering the Legal Memorandum, focuses on the many challenges of one of the major task for a new attorney - the law memo - for the highly demanding world of partners and clients. A third book, Jagged Rocks of Wisdom -Negotiation, is expected in 2011.

About this title

About the Author

Morten Lund is a partner in the Energy and Telecommunications group of Stoel Rives LLP, where his practice focuses on the development and finance of renewable energy projects. Previously, Lund was a partner at Foley & Lardner, LLP. Born in Oslo, Norway, Lund is a graduate of Yale Law School. Thane Messinger is an attorney, an adjunct professor of business law, and an author of The Young Lawyer's Jungle Book: A Survival Guide; Law School: Getting In, Getting Good, Getting the Gold; and Con Law: Avoiding...or Beating...the Scam of the Century (The Real Student's Guide to Law School and the Legal Profession).

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Rule Number 3Everything is Your FaultThis rule is my personal favorite. Imagine: You are working on a memo, and you hand your secretary a heavy markup. She makes the changes and hands the document to the partner, who is not pleased with the number of typos in the document. Whose fault is it? Yours.You are sending documents to the copy shop for reproduction and binding. The documents come back out of order, and the client is upset because the documents are not the way they are supposed to be. Whose fault is it? Yours.You are working on a brief, and the filing deadline is tomorrow. Suddenly your computer crashes, and your document is lost. The filing deadline is missed, and the suit dismissed. Whose fault is it? Yours.An earthquake collapses your office building, burying your entire office. Your document is lost. Whose fault is it?Okay, maybe not this one. But just about everything short of earthquake is your fault. No ifs, no ands, no buts. Your fault. Every time. Law firms function on strict liability. If you touched a project, and anything goes wrong with that project, it is your fault. Causality is irrelevant. Actually, perhaps “fault” is the wrong word. Maybe “responsibility” is better. The reason for this rule is quite simple. If your task is to get me “A”, then your task is to get me “A”. Not to try for “A”, not to see if you can accomplish “A”, but simply to get “A”. At that point the universe is divided in two: “A”, and “not-A”. Anything that isn’t “A” is “not-A”, and will not make me happy. I don’t care why you gave me “not-A”, all I know is that I now have “not-A” when I specifically asked for “A”. Reasons, causes, excuses, good intentions—all are irrelevant and uninteresting to me. Get me “A”.

Edition details

• Publisher: The Fine Print Press, Ltd.
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1888960078
• ISBN 13: 9781888960075
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 94