Post by tigerlily on Jan 21, 2008 0:18:46 GMT
With my thanks to the gentlemen who have commented on my earlier post.
Management skills are an important part of running a business and obtaining the best out of the people who work for you.
Solicitors are required to take at least one course in management skills in the first three years post-qualification. Most of this seems aimed at making sure future partners are able to read management accounts and so ensure they are not ripped off when deciding whether or not to accept an equity partnership in a law firm (you give them lots of money and they make you a partner, and you pay back the tens of thousands of pounds you borrowed buying into the firm out of the profit share you receive. I can’t see the point in that, myself).
Surprisingly, for a profession that requires daily interaction with people from all walks of life, many solicitors really are not good with other people. Patience is not a virtue many of my colleagues and employers have seemed to enjoy. It’s something that I’ve picked up during the interminable waiting around at police stations and courts. It’s either develop the ability to sit there quietly and just let the time drift past or else pace up and down until someone screams at you to ‘quit prowling like a caged lion and sit the %$£@ down!’
In the particular city where I spent the first three years after qualifying, there were one or two names who were legendary. Not for their legal skills, although they were not too shabby, but rather for how far outside of the law their firms had operated. I had tenuous connections with these two, not directly but rather in that I worked with or for people who had worked with them in the past.
After the joys of two years or so with my training company, I decided a life of water and sewerage-related work was not for me. I’d always had a hankering to work in criminal law or family law, but wasn’t sure which one to choose. I signed up with a couple of agencies and sat back to see what sort of firms might be interested in me.
It took very little time at all for me to get an interview with a firm in a town not that far away from where I’d trained. It was only a matter of taking a different turn in the road compared to where I trained, and maybe ten minutes’ further each way, so well within comfortable commuting range.
The firm in question was relatively new, and had been set up following the downfall of one of the two characters I alluded to at the beginning of this piece. This gentleman – I’ll call him Rick – had a fearsome reputation within legal circles in a wide part of the region where I worked. There were those poor souls who would tremble and turn pale just at the mention of his name.
While I never felt the full force of his wrath, I did suffer the ire of his protege who had trained under him and then following Rick’s downfall set up in business on his own account. Many of the people who worked at this firm had also worked for Rick, and I heard a story once that I can verify to be true because I was there at the time.
One of the fee earners at Rick’s firm had been down at the Crown Court with Rick and a client when the fire alarms went off. Just prior to the building’s evacuation, Rick had realised that the young girl in question had made a giant balls-up of something really quite important and had been about to lay into her.
Being not the fittest person, he saved his breath for running down the stairs and out of the building. The whole building was evacuated and perhaps 200 or so people were standing around outside the court building waiting for the fire brigade to give the all clear, when we became aware of a great roaring sound. There, in front of judges both high and low, barristers, solicitors, court staff and clients, stood a very dejected-looking young woman. Above her loomed an incandescent Rick, who seemed to be growing larger with each bellowed curse and imprecation flung at his cowering colleague. Ever see the genie in Disney’s Aladdin, as voiced by Robin Williams? He seems to grow larger as he billows from the lamp, and that is just how Rick appeared.
The buzz of conversation from the crowd dwindled and dropped completely. Heads turned, and soon all eyes were on Rick. A very senior judge eventually dared to interrupt the tirade, and was told to ‘eff off’ for his trouble. Rick continued to vent his spleen for a good five minutes’ more until it suddenly sunk in that he’d just told someone really rather important to go forth and multiply, whereupon he stopped for a second, took a deep breath, bowed to said judge and murmured ‘My apologies, Your Honour’. He then resumed screaming at his colleague, stopping only when the all-clear was given and we all trooped back into the court building.
Rick’s protege learned what he knew of management from Rick, and did his best to be Rick. He wasn’t, and never will be, a patch on Rick. It amuses me greatly that the girl who stood there taking the full brunt of Rick’s ire is now pretty senior in the protege’s firm. While Mr Protege takes all the glory, P is the brains behind the outfit.
The most evil thing Mr Protege ever did, in point of fact, was to go on holiday to his native Bangladesh for a couple of weeks without P, with whom he had enjoyed a lengthy relationship. He’d been back a week or two when P took a phone call for him from a friend and sometime colleague. She explained that Mr Protege wasn’t there right now, but could she take a message? ‘Yeah, I was just calling really to congratulate him on his marriage’.
P was flummoxed by this. ‘We’ve not got married...what are you talking about?’
‘No, no – his parents finally got him married off to some girl from home when he was out there a couple of weeks ago. He’s brought her back over here with him – surely he told you that?’
I’m not sure what I found saddest in all of that. Whether it was the fact that someone P considered a friend to them both rang to rub her nose in it, or the fact that she continued to love Mr Protege and to share a home with him. Apparently his wife lived with his parents and he went there as infrequently as possible. So far as they were aware, he spent most of his nights down the police station helping clients.
Last I heard, P was still working alongside Mr Protege, whose infamy continues to spread.
I moved on from there to a small firm in a town in the opposite direction to my home. This was a two-partner firm, newly set up and specialising in crime and family. I’d answered an advertisement for a criminal solicitor, but the family partner asked at interview if I’d mind helping him out. I said I’d be delighted to, and so that was how I stumbled into doing the type of work I do now.
I was hugely fond of the family partner, but the criminal partner frequently got on my nerves. He was a very charming man, and always – but always – beautifully dressed. Immaculately-cut three-piece suit, crisp shirt, silk tie, cufflinks, perfectly shined brogues. The image of a prosperous solicitor. He had been a partner in a big firm in the nearby city that had collapsed when two of the other partners ran off with a rather large quantity of clients’ money and disappeared into the ether. I shall call him ‘Mr Smooth’.
Mr Smooth’s wife had a very similar sounding name to the wife of one of the two missing former partners he’d worked alongside. Very similar sounding indeed. Which is handy when you’re having an affair with her, but not so handy for your colleagues who might happen to answer the phone and get the two names muddled up...
I think I managed to talk my way out of it, but I’m not entirely sure. I always had terrible trouble remembering if Melanie was the wife and Morven the girlfriend, or the other way around.
At one point, Mr Smooth decided he would go on holiday, two days after the family partner had left on a three-week holiday. He decided this on a Tuesday morning, and rang in to tell us he wouldn’t be in for three weeks and hoped I could cover for him.
I may be reasonably good at my job, but one thing I have never managed to master is the ability to be in three different places at once. I told him this in no uncertain terms, pointing out that not only did I have a pretty heavy workload of my own but was also holding the fort for the family partner and could not therefore carry a third person’s workload as well.
‘Well, I don’t give a bothered botty! I’m not well and I need a holiday, so I’m sanguineous well taking a holiday!’
I managed to arrange for people at other firms to deal with the court hearings I couldn’t cover, and the secretaries re-arranged the diary as best they could. I had one particular Friday where I started off in one court, drove twenty miles to another court, ten miles to another court, back to the first court I’d started off in and then back to the second court.
By the time I’d made it back to the first court, I was on my fifth hearing of the day and was starting to get a little bit frazzled. I’d been growled at by magistrates and scowled at by prosecutors and grumbled at by clients quite enough, and just wanted to go home.
One of the solicitors local to this particular court commented that I looked a bit harassed, and I explained that Mr Smooth had decided to go off on holiday at very short notice. I was a little taken aback to be asked who he’d taken with him, and mumbled that he’d have taken Melanie with him. No, not Melanie, Morven .
‘Or one of his other girlfriends!’, came the reply.
‘Girlfriends? Plural?’, I goggled, to the accompaniment of howls of laughter from the other lawyers in court.
That smart, witty, urbane, charming, well-dressed employer of mine turned out to be quite the ladies’ man!
What was slightly unnerving was the fact that the two partners from Mr Smooth's old firm who had disappeared with all the money, were rumoured to still be in touch either with Mr Smooth or whichever of the M's was his girlfriend. Both law enforcement agencies and far shadier bodies had an interest in discovering their whereabouts. Rumour always had it that Mr Smooth or the girlfriend knew exactly where they were, and that Mr Smooth's regular jaunts off 'abroad somewhere' were connected to the missing men and the money. I have no idea about that myself.
Neither Mr Protege nor Mr Smooth, though, were a patch on the Reptile.
But the Reptile is a story for another day.
Management skills are an important part of running a business and obtaining the best out of the people who work for you.
Solicitors are required to take at least one course in management skills in the first three years post-qualification. Most of this seems aimed at making sure future partners are able to read management accounts and so ensure they are not ripped off when deciding whether or not to accept an equity partnership in a law firm (you give them lots of money and they make you a partner, and you pay back the tens of thousands of pounds you borrowed buying into the firm out of the profit share you receive. I can’t see the point in that, myself).
Surprisingly, for a profession that requires daily interaction with people from all walks of life, many solicitors really are not good with other people. Patience is not a virtue many of my colleagues and employers have seemed to enjoy. It’s something that I’ve picked up during the interminable waiting around at police stations and courts. It’s either develop the ability to sit there quietly and just let the time drift past or else pace up and down until someone screams at you to ‘quit prowling like a caged lion and sit the %$£@ down!’
In the particular city where I spent the first three years after qualifying, there were one or two names who were legendary. Not for their legal skills, although they were not too shabby, but rather for how far outside of the law their firms had operated. I had tenuous connections with these two, not directly but rather in that I worked with or for people who had worked with them in the past.
After the joys of two years or so with my training company, I decided a life of water and sewerage-related work was not for me. I’d always had a hankering to work in criminal law or family law, but wasn’t sure which one to choose. I signed up with a couple of agencies and sat back to see what sort of firms might be interested in me.
It took very little time at all for me to get an interview with a firm in a town not that far away from where I’d trained. It was only a matter of taking a different turn in the road compared to where I trained, and maybe ten minutes’ further each way, so well within comfortable commuting range.
The firm in question was relatively new, and had been set up following the downfall of one of the two characters I alluded to at the beginning of this piece. This gentleman – I’ll call him Rick – had a fearsome reputation within legal circles in a wide part of the region where I worked. There were those poor souls who would tremble and turn pale just at the mention of his name.
While I never felt the full force of his wrath, I did suffer the ire of his protege who had trained under him and then following Rick’s downfall set up in business on his own account. Many of the people who worked at this firm had also worked for Rick, and I heard a story once that I can verify to be true because I was there at the time.
One of the fee earners at Rick’s firm had been down at the Crown Court with Rick and a client when the fire alarms went off. Just prior to the building’s evacuation, Rick had realised that the young girl in question had made a giant balls-up of something really quite important and had been about to lay into her.
Being not the fittest person, he saved his breath for running down the stairs and out of the building. The whole building was evacuated and perhaps 200 or so people were standing around outside the court building waiting for the fire brigade to give the all clear, when we became aware of a great roaring sound. There, in front of judges both high and low, barristers, solicitors, court staff and clients, stood a very dejected-looking young woman. Above her loomed an incandescent Rick, who seemed to be growing larger with each bellowed curse and imprecation flung at his cowering colleague. Ever see the genie in Disney’s Aladdin, as voiced by Robin Williams? He seems to grow larger as he billows from the lamp, and that is just how Rick appeared.
The buzz of conversation from the crowd dwindled and dropped completely. Heads turned, and soon all eyes were on Rick. A very senior judge eventually dared to interrupt the tirade, and was told to ‘eff off’ for his trouble. Rick continued to vent his spleen for a good five minutes’ more until it suddenly sunk in that he’d just told someone really rather important to go forth and multiply, whereupon he stopped for a second, took a deep breath, bowed to said judge and murmured ‘My apologies, Your Honour’. He then resumed screaming at his colleague, stopping only when the all-clear was given and we all trooped back into the court building.
Rick’s protege learned what he knew of management from Rick, and did his best to be Rick. He wasn’t, and never will be, a patch on Rick. It amuses me greatly that the girl who stood there taking the full brunt of Rick’s ire is now pretty senior in the protege’s firm. While Mr Protege takes all the glory, P is the brains behind the outfit.
The most evil thing Mr Protege ever did, in point of fact, was to go on holiday to his native Bangladesh for a couple of weeks without P, with whom he had enjoyed a lengthy relationship. He’d been back a week or two when P took a phone call for him from a friend and sometime colleague. She explained that Mr Protege wasn’t there right now, but could she take a message? ‘Yeah, I was just calling really to congratulate him on his marriage’.
P was flummoxed by this. ‘We’ve not got married...what are you talking about?’
‘No, no – his parents finally got him married off to some girl from home when he was out there a couple of weeks ago. He’s brought her back over here with him – surely he told you that?’
I’m not sure what I found saddest in all of that. Whether it was the fact that someone P considered a friend to them both rang to rub her nose in it, or the fact that she continued to love Mr Protege and to share a home with him. Apparently his wife lived with his parents and he went there as infrequently as possible. So far as they were aware, he spent most of his nights down the police station helping clients.
Last I heard, P was still working alongside Mr Protege, whose infamy continues to spread.
I moved on from there to a small firm in a town in the opposite direction to my home. This was a two-partner firm, newly set up and specialising in crime and family. I’d answered an advertisement for a criminal solicitor, but the family partner asked at interview if I’d mind helping him out. I said I’d be delighted to, and so that was how I stumbled into doing the type of work I do now.
I was hugely fond of the family partner, but the criminal partner frequently got on my nerves. He was a very charming man, and always – but always – beautifully dressed. Immaculately-cut three-piece suit, crisp shirt, silk tie, cufflinks, perfectly shined brogues. The image of a prosperous solicitor. He had been a partner in a big firm in the nearby city that had collapsed when two of the other partners ran off with a rather large quantity of clients’ money and disappeared into the ether. I shall call him ‘Mr Smooth’.
Mr Smooth’s wife had a very similar sounding name to the wife of one of the two missing former partners he’d worked alongside. Very similar sounding indeed. Which is handy when you’re having an affair with her, but not so handy for your colleagues who might happen to answer the phone and get the two names muddled up...
I think I managed to talk my way out of it, but I’m not entirely sure. I always had terrible trouble remembering if Melanie was the wife and Morven the girlfriend, or the other way around.
At one point, Mr Smooth decided he would go on holiday, two days after the family partner had left on a three-week holiday. He decided this on a Tuesday morning, and rang in to tell us he wouldn’t be in for three weeks and hoped I could cover for him.
I may be reasonably good at my job, but one thing I have never managed to master is the ability to be in three different places at once. I told him this in no uncertain terms, pointing out that not only did I have a pretty heavy workload of my own but was also holding the fort for the family partner and could not therefore carry a third person’s workload as well.
‘Well, I don’t give a bothered botty! I’m not well and I need a holiday, so I’m sanguineous well taking a holiday!’
I managed to arrange for people at other firms to deal with the court hearings I couldn’t cover, and the secretaries re-arranged the diary as best they could. I had one particular Friday where I started off in one court, drove twenty miles to another court, ten miles to another court, back to the first court I’d started off in and then back to the second court.
By the time I’d made it back to the first court, I was on my fifth hearing of the day and was starting to get a little bit frazzled. I’d been growled at by magistrates and scowled at by prosecutors and grumbled at by clients quite enough, and just wanted to go home.
One of the solicitors local to this particular court commented that I looked a bit harassed, and I explained that Mr Smooth had decided to go off on holiday at very short notice. I was a little taken aback to be asked who he’d taken with him, and mumbled that he’d have taken Melanie with him. No, not Melanie, Morven .
‘Or one of his other girlfriends!’, came the reply.
‘Girlfriends? Plural?’, I goggled, to the accompaniment of howls of laughter from the other lawyers in court.
That smart, witty, urbane, charming, well-dressed employer of mine turned out to be quite the ladies’ man!
What was slightly unnerving was the fact that the two partners from Mr Smooth's old firm who had disappeared with all the money, were rumoured to still be in touch either with Mr Smooth or whichever of the M's was his girlfriend. Both law enforcement agencies and far shadier bodies had an interest in discovering their whereabouts. Rumour always had it that Mr Smooth or the girlfriend knew exactly where they were, and that Mr Smooth's regular jaunts off 'abroad somewhere' were connected to the missing men and the money. I have no idea about that myself.
Neither Mr Protege nor Mr Smooth, though, were a patch on the Reptile.
But the Reptile is a story for another day.