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[quote=Anonymous]Purely curious..... I'm a partner in big law about 18 years out of law school, I work primarily with another partner in his 60s. Super busy (isn't everyone).  We've hired two junior/mid laterals in the last 4 years. One was appalling and we let her go. The latest has been with us for over a year and showed moderate promise to start, but has not performed well in the long term. Some work product is fine/good-ish, but some of it has very serious problems.

Is this an "us" thing, that we are doing an absolutely terrible job training up associates? Or in this economy, is any 2nd or 4th year lateral at best a 50/50 toss up on whether they even know how to run a redline or send an attachment by email? Granted, we don't spend a ton of time training - but a lot of these challenges seem like things that shouldn't require training for people who are 30 years old and making $260-$350k before bonuses.  Our firm culture is very good, i'm very nice to them, and i'm not overloading them with work (our current associate only does 10-6 during his RTO days, and is well below billable targets - i guess just because he doesn't want to work more than that?), when there is a novel assignment, i always take a long time to walk through it by phone -- and the current associate has thanked me for taking that time.   I also work with associates who came to our firm right out of law school, and never seem to have these issues.

I appreciate that the quality of biglaw associates is way down these days, but is being 0/2 on laterals (like, probably both leaving within 2 years) par for the course? [/quote]

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