Reply to Law Firm - How to Handle "Temp Number" Abuse

Forum Index » Jobs and Careers

Reply to "Law Firm - How to Handle "Temp Number" Abuse"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP here. These comments are really helpful. I am going to talk to an equity partner (although in a different office) about this soon.

While a minor version of this situation happens a lot, it's usually just a few hours. This situation has several aggregating factors. For instance, it's been going on for months, has been a lot of substantive work, and is about to resolve favorably for the client. All signs point to this being a "favor" representation that the partner was never going to bill for.

Several comments mentioned that I should have mentors who I should have asked. I do, and I have asked. Unfortunately the advice I got was that the partner would open the matter eventually. All signs point to that advice being wrong.[/quote]

If that’s what you’re hearing from your mentors, it sounds like this may be just a one-off bad situation that isn’t that likely to recur and isn’t going to have any long-term consequence for you. These things do occasionally happen through no fault of the associate—when I was an associate I got stuck with a $100k write-off because the partner simply didn’t feel like ever asking the client to pay the bill.  (Wouldn’t fly today but things were squishy then — ultimately when I was up for partner my mentor read them the riot act and the receivable got collected based on one phone call, but that was at a critical moment where the economics really mattered, usually it wouldn’t have been that big a deal).  The key for you is to make sure you don’t get screwed if the 100 or so hours is material to a bonus calculation, while at the same time making it clear that you are cool about it and willing to play ball.  Sounds like you’re playing this correctly.[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics