Have a case where the wreck report is silent about the defendant being arrested on the scene for DUI, but there’s a criminal court case where the guy pleaded guilty to a DUI from an arrest on the same night. Different officers on the wreck report and criminal case, and there’s a time listed on the criminal case that suggests he might have been arrested for DUI two hours later, and maybe even one street over. So it’s actually very possible that he rear-ended someone, then got drunk, then got pulled over and arrested for DUI at basically the same spot. Maybe because his front headlights were damaged from wreck earlier or something. I have no idea, but the defense lawyer was not understanding that I’ll get to ask about it either way at trial.
Anyone have their staff fill out self evaluations on their performance and where they think the firm can improve?
we do. also areas we could help them etc. annual evals. staff really likes them. probably helps for retention and morale . always get comments that other firms they've worked for don't take the time to do such things. goes over well.
Some of these doctors are so fucking shameless. Ordered records and bills and affidavits and paid them a $40 notary fee. They sent us everything but not notarized. Staff called and was like ….what’s the deal. he said he hasn’t had a notary since 2020, that we could just notarize them, and that it was too big of a hassle for him to reimburse us.
How common is that for businesses that are not banks or law firms? I am a notary and I fairly regularly notarize things for non-lawyer, non-banker friends. First thing I ever notarized were the divorce papers for a couple whose wedding I was a groomsman in. Top 5 most awkward moment of my life telling her "you can rip this up before it's filed with the court," etc.
I’ve never worked at a business that didn’t have at least one employee registered as a notary. Mind you were only talking 3 jobs but from different industries.
No. My staff likes to tell me on a daily basis what they would like for us to do. Unless their suggestions are to stop talking to me so much, to get off facebook, and actually do what I asked them to do, I don't really care at this point.
So I’m on the way back to the office from Rotary Club lunch and get a message from a secretary in the firm group chat that they used the one remaining bathroom (the rest are shut down during the renovations ) and they couldn’t flush. Around this time I feel a diarrhea shit coming on. Get to the office , walk to the bathroom and sure enough the water isn’t working. Talk to the construction foreman and he says yah the plumber is here doing something with installing hot water heaters and has no idea how long the water will be off for. By now I’m about to shit myself. There’s a planet fitness near my office. I figure if I’m a member I should be able to use their bathroom. Run up in there not dressed at all to work out , go straight to the bathoom, and blow it up That was dicey.
dude sometimes i hate the fuck out of my staff. slip and fall at kfc. liability is not great but whatever. 30k in meds. my legal assistant drug her feet on filing the lawsuit and before she did she asked both me and my associate if we should even do it or if we should just take a 5k nuisance offer. 45k initial offer from the post lit adjuster.
That is not on your staff. I've straight turned down premises cases that my parnters have taken and gotten $300k settlement on. Premises is very hit or miss and carriers will sometimes pay crazy amounts on cases that would likely result in MSJ. I've gotten carriers to pay $250k etc on premises liability cases where I was hanging on by the skin of my teeth from MSJ and there was no way I'd win at trial. At this point in my career I'm not taking one unless I think I can win on the merits and win at trial. It's way too much work to take an iffy one AND they won't settle for good money and instead they call your bluff . Then you are paying tons of experts and briefing the hell out of something only to probably lose on MSJ and the appellate courts will affirm.
So over the last two months of 2024 I'll get about $400K in fees for the firm. Was a little bit slow starting out, then a bit of a bottleneck, but things are rolling now. But, apparently I'm "too brash" with the staff. Managing partner is perfectly happy with everything, but a bunch of the staff get mad at me because I'm not diplomatic about roles and get a lot of snarky emails about "that's not my job," or sending stuff to the wrong paralegal/wrong assistant. After getting a few of these emails I adopted the habit of just copying basically all staff (it's a small office, 5 lawyers and probably 8-9 staff) and tell them, "I don't care who does this, please just get it done." I'm certainly not friendly about it, but I don't think I'm a jerk, either -- just very straightforward. Fucking office politics.
I thought I was being nice about it by letting them figure it out on their own! Lotta babysitting. Cheese n rice
$400k in 2 months is killing it. Obviously heavily loaded on a few big cases but still. Handling the staff is tricky. The problem is there are a bunch of unreasonable, dramatic, incompetent, and terrible ppl out there. If you’re dealing with incompetent asshats then there’s not much you can do on this front. Assuming they are reasonable and competent people: if you’re too nice and friendly with them they’ll walk all over you and try to get away with murder. If you’re too harsh they’ll revolt , start stabbing you in the back, and it will ultimately bite you in the ass. If you treat them like decent human beings and be level and reason with them it will work its way out.
At the time, the Client responded to my email above saying they'd pay their invoices. Never heard anything more. Fast forward to an hour ago. The guys just reached out for 2 "urgent" matters (raising money and using it to make a growth equity investment). I just checked, and they never paid the above invoices. Part of me is shocked by the request, but part of me is kind of impressed by the gall.
Our worst assistant quit today. She’s been dragging down the pre-suit portion of our firm for months. Just barely even attempting to do the job. For example on Monday while we were at the court house trying to get our case settled, a needy client called my partner. We responded via text that this assistant will call her back. Quickly texted the assistant to call her back. She didn’t. This has happened numerous times. Held an all staff meeting via zoom Tuesday to discuss the issue of missed calls for like the tenth time in the last 6 months. I admittedly lost my temper after working non-stop from Thursday-Monday and she couldn’t even be bothered to return a phone call. yesterday we told the staff that year end evaluations would be the week after thanksgiving and for them to tell us when they wanted to meet for our end of year meeting. she didn’t like that we were doing in person evaluations so she called my partner and turned in her two weeks notice. This is what she’s sacrificing by quitting now. 1) her end of year bonus (admittedly she was getting the smallest one because she was our worst employee but she was still getting a decent chunk of change for the holiday season. (My partner still wants to give her a little bit of money as a severance bonus, but I’m pretty much done with her) 2) a free cruise. (Our office Christmas party is a 5 night cruise)
Sounds like you should have copied all the staff on one email and told em to just make sure it gets done rather than relying on her
There’s no expectation of spending time with coworkers. Everyone is on the ship but free to do whatever they want outside of one dinner. and since I’m getting dunked on. We gave everyone the option of going on the cruise or taking the cost of the room as an additional bonus. She had chosen cruise.
It was her department and it was sent in a firmwide text chain. Others didn’t pick up the slack because it’s not their job.
when I become president I will unleash the full might of the United States Navy on our one true enemy: cruise lines and people who enjoy them
I wonder if you’ve interviewed people and they didn’t take the job when you mentioned that the Christmas party is a 5 day cruise with coworkers
It’s not something that’s come up. It’s year one. We tried to do something different that they’d enjoy. If it’s a swing and a miss, we don’t do it again.
I usually go by this rule when trying to do something nice for my employees Would the event take place when the office is generally open: go for it would the event take place when the office is generally closed: no one wants to do that
I thank the Flying Spaghetti Monster above daily that our office is 300 lawyers which naturally prevents anyone from suggesting we make everyone do Guantanamo-On-A-Boat for five days
Our “Christmas party” is taking me taking them to a steakhouse at noon for a boozy lunch where I pay for them to Uber black to and from work.
One time I went on a morgan and morgan cruise and it was the worst 3 days of my life. that was the first and last firm cruise for a variety of reasons.
On a Friday a few weeks before Christmas, all the law firms in New Orleans have lunch at various restaurants in the Quarter, and it turns into an all afternoon party on and around Bourbon Street. Except for the fact it's a shit ton of dorky lawyers, it's a lot of fun.
Was out super late last night, woke up hungover, fell back asleep on the couch. Just woke up to a call from Def Counsel in a case I haven't touched in months ready to tender their $100K policy.
I hate firm events that take place outside of office hours. We do our Christmas party at night on a Friday which I think we should change to a lunch like GK said. We at least give them pretty much the whole afternoon off that day to "get ready." That's the only firm event we do outside of firm hours. Honestly I think a boozy lunch and ubering them to and from would be much better.
Just filed my first ever lawsuit in AL through my partner who is licensed there. Commercial vehicle case. Litigating in Alabama is a new frontier. Hopefully we don't fuck it up! Jk going to get referral counsel if they don't settle quickly.
Our firm does a holiday party for all offices to somewhere on the west coast (California-based firm with offices in Vegas, Arizona, Texas, Florida). Last year was Palm Springs, year before Lake Tahoe, this year Phoenix. Partner meeting Saturday, formal dinner Saturday night, do whatever you want the rest of the time.
this is kind of what we were going off of. My wife's accounting firm did something similar a few years ago and it was a great time. The only firm related thing we did was a single post dinner ra-ra party and the rest of the time we were free to do whatever we wanted. Was a great time.