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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]As a client, I find it helpful when lawyers communicate to me what their schedule patterns are or when they might be getting back to me. Like, I worked with a male partner who didn’t tend to work much past five pm or so, but he liked to wake up really early in the morning. So if I sent him a markup at four or five, or if we had a call at four or five and he said he would send me something, I knew I probably wouldn’t hear back from him that night, but I would hear back in the morning. I like to know an estimate for when I might hear back, because then I am not sitting around checking my phone. I’d rather know, ok, I can go off and do something else, because I’m not hearing from him today.[/quote]

This is important to know as a junior person, too. As another poster suggested, when I was a junior associate I tended to go the gym around 5 pm (there was a gym in the office building, very convenient!) and grab dinner afterwards to bring back up, because the senior partner I did most of my work for tended to go home around 5:30 and log back on at 8 or 9 pm. Meanwhile the junior partner, who reported to senior partner, stayed at the office until 10 pm every night, but she rarely went looking for me before 8 pm or so. So I'd do my workout and shower, bring dinner up to my office and eat it while working, and be at my desk from 7 until midnight or later. Perfect for being there when junior partner wanted to see me and perfect for responding to senior partner's night-time research demands. (Though I balked the one time he suggested I drive a pleading to him at 2 am. He wasn't very tech-savvy and didn't realize he could open it if I emailed it to him. We agreed that I'd print it out and leave it on his chair for when he came in at 6 am.)

It was an awful life but I learned a lot.

In my current life in the government I supervise 12 attorneys and 3 paralegals, and have two more senior people above me. I have to keep everyone's schedule in mind. But I notice that a lot of the attorneys who report to me don't. The ones who do, like me, were trained at law firms (big or small). The government lifers just do what they want to do and don't care if that doesn't work for their supervisors' schedule or for the paralegals' schedule (which is equally important to consider when you're in litigation!). [/quote]

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