McStabbington
2015-03-07, 03:10 PM
Operative Questions:
1) Am I right in thinking, given the information I include below, that I'm being sandbagged at work in preparation for a pending termination?
2) If the answer to Question 1 is yes, then what exactly do I do?
Okay, so background information. I was one of those young J.D.'s who came out of the Great Recession during the period when the supply of young attorneys vastly exceeded the demand. I will edit for concision, and simply say that I went through a period of extended unemployment, during which I was looking for any job whatsoever, but because I was a licensed attorney with a list of academic accomplishments the length of my leg, I could not get a job to save my life because everyone who read my resume automatically assumed that I would just jump ship the first chance I got and tossed the document. So in the meantime, I lost all my assets, lost my home, and only managed to keep a roof over my head because I had one family member who offered to let me move in with her, despite the fact that she was across the country and would force me to abandon my license in the state I was in, and the town she was in was a town of 10,000 with about 25 attorneys in it, 24 of whom are employed in some capacity by a state or municipal government in the area.
So there was a bit of good news, in that I finally, finally got a job as a legal secretary for that 25th attorney. In the entrance interview, I explained my situation, said that eventually I would probably be moving on to become an attorney on my own, but that I would need time to rebuild my finances, pay my debts and restore my credit before I could even think about taking the bar exam and starting my own firm. They hired me the next day, and at the beginning of the next month, moved me to full-time status. My job responsibilities were to essentially do the paperwork that the attorney needed done, first in the criminal files, and then civil files. Now I'm not going to say that I was an ideal candidate from the get-go. There were a lot of hiccups while I learned what I was actually looking at when I saw certain documents, and I still tend to move very slowly and carefully when I'm dealing with something unfamiliar, because I want to make certain I make no mistakes and absorb the process.
But now, here, today, I do a pretty good job of my work. I had to completely rip out a lot of the methods that the Office Manager had taught me and replace them with my own, but in the last nine months I have never failed to log a court date, never had a document I had seen go missing or unscanned for more than a half hour (with the number of documents I can't find instantly in that time numbering at four) and never failed to resolve a court conflict in timely fashion. Clerks of the Court and Prosecutor's Office of five counties know me on a first name basis because they all know that when I call, I'm calling to smooth out a potential scheduling snafu that will cause them headaches in a week or two, but that I am resolving here and now. And in terms of earning billable items, at the time of my nine-month performance evaluation I was averaging twenty billable items per day, which based on how our billing system works means that even if all those billable items were for the minimum possible billable time (5 minutes), I was still earning my firm about two hundred dollars per day over and above my wage.
So what's the problem?
Well, the problem goes back to that original statement that eventually, I was going to move on and start my own firm part, with the fulcrum being my nine-month performance review At that nine-month performance evaluation, when the attorney asked me again, with what in retrospect seemed a bit too much eagerness, whether or not I could sit for the next bar exam, I said that it would probably exhaust all of my savings to do so, but I thought that I could do it. When I asked whether or not he'd be willing to write a recommendation for the bar exam I would be applying for in a week, he said he would. The exact words that he and the Office Manager used to describe my work were "great" and "no complaints." Oh, and by the way, the Attorney and the Office Manager said offhand, they would be hiring on a new worker, but they assured me that my job and hours were not in danger. The new hire was only to help supplement me because we had been so busy.
Two days after that nine-month performance evaluation, my duties were cut to take away the civil files I had been managing. A week after that, and exactly two days before I was going to spend every last dime of my accumulated savings for the bar exam and test prep materials, my hours were cut 20%. The Office Manager, in announcing this, explicitly told me that "we only need you for the criminal files now", so I was only needed on a part-time basis.
Two days after that, I started getting impossible assignments. Allow me to explain what I mean by impossible: the first such assignment was the attorney asking me to write a brief for him for a case I know nothing about, over a law I didn't know, for which the Attorney had done nothing to prepare for but find a few cases that were factually similar but in other states. Attorneys know this as "persuasive case law", which is to say that it means absolutely nothing in telling a judge what he needs to do to uphold the law in his own state. In law school, briefs were usually the end-of-semester project that determined our grade, they covered only material presented in class, and we had 72 hours to complete them. My attorney required the brief by the end of the next business day. I completed the brief in the time allotted anyway.
The Attorney took the document home and reviewed it over the weekend. On the next Tuesday, the Attorney asked me to re-write the brief. On Wednesday, the Attorney asked me to prepare Interrogatories for a client in a Civil Asset Forfeiture case. Interrogatories are a series of questions asked of a client by the opposing party, and have to be done in a certain amount of time. The amount of time in this case was fine; well over three weeks till the final due date, which was good because the client lived 80 miles from our office. And hadn't brought in any documents that the prosecution requested. And didn't speak the same language as me. The Attorney gave me five days.
I did it in five days.
Or perhaps let me be more specific. I arranged for the client to come in with a bilingual friend and work with me for four hours on day four, which should have been enough. On day three, the client called in and rescheduled to day five, cutting my available time to work directly with them to 90 minutes. I got the questions 80% answered, with the remainder being incomplete because they didn't have the documentation with them needed to finish it. And in the meantime, on days one and two I finished re-writing the brief and caught back up with my daily schedule.
As it turns out, the attorney had only two things to say to me regarding the interrogatory. One was to complain how much time I was taking on it, as it wasn't worth that much to the firm. The other was to say that the finished product, turned in five days before the deadline and, to that point, not seen nor touched by the Attorney, was a "Good Job!" Which should explain why, upon timely submission of the Interrogatories to the Prosecution, the Prosecution dismissed the case entirely and returned the assets they had seized to the client.
After this, the massive tasks with the arbitrary deadlines subsided somewhat, but cutting my wages cut out the money I was planning on saving to, well, do things like eat and pay rent when I went to part-time for the bar prep period. But it also made me take a step back and realize, terrible businessman that I am, that I didn't just need to save for the bar. I also needed to save for the business I was going to build after that. Which I hadn't done. So after getting my wages cut, I decided not to spend all my savings on taking the bar.
This decision didn't go over well at the 12-month performance evaluation, which focused entirely on the fact that the Attorney and the Office Manager thought that I was going to sit for the next bar exam. I explained as best I could that I had wanted to do so, but I re-thought my financial position once my wages were cut, and terrible business man that I am, only then realized that starting a new business with $0 savings, bad credit, and absolutely no setup like an office space, client base, or car meant that I really should rethink my choice to spend absolutely all of my money, especially when returning to the point at which I could be homeless or unable to eat again was a very real possibility with me changing jobs. The Attorney spent the entirety of the time trying to argue that there must be some way to reduce my expenses (there isn't; bar prep can't be purchased ala carte because the test isn't performed ala carte), and spent the next few days telling me that I should look into the requirements for having my license in another state apply here (I already have; you need 3 years of active work for reciprocity, which I am precisely 3 years short of meeting the requirements for).
Cut to the approaching 15-month performance evaluation. Between having my hours cut and approximately three weeks ago, the Office Manager spoke with me at a rate of approximately one word per day. In the last three weeks, I've started seeing civil matters turn up in my inbox. No explanation, no description of what needs to be done, no notes. So I do the best I can, which is mainly just scan them in and then turn them over to the new hire who is the one who primarily works on those cases. The Office Manager has then talked to me about me "doing what needs to be done" whenever the attorney puts stuff in my box.
In the past two weeks, the Office Manager has started making me scan, file and mail all the immigration files handled by the OM and another legal secretary on top of my usual duties. I have never handled immigration files before, and much of the work is very time-sensitive, meaning that doing this on time often means prioritizing filing and mailing over the documents I prepare in the criminal files.
In the last week, the Office Manager has spoken with me three or four times a day, at length, about new procedures that I am to perform when carrying out my duties, all ostensibly about reducing inter-office paperwork, but mostly involve me saving files electronically and e-mailing the attorney to say that something is in the file rather than making a paper copy and handing it to attorney to read, which is actually slower and increases the risk of a document slipping past the attorney.
Three days ago, the Office Manager rather loudly discussed renting out an office space with another attorney; the only office available is either mine or another attorney with a rental agreement whom has shown no sign of moving out.
Yesterday, the Office Manager handed me a certificate of completion for a client with a note that said that the attorney had already filled out documents necessary to re-enter an old case for a client, and that all I needed to do was turn in the certificate to the prosecutor.
Because it's my job, and because it was unusual in the extreme for a criminal file to go through the Office Manager to me rather than come from the attorney directly, I looked at the file, and the court repository, and talked with the prosecutor. No such documents had been submitted, and if they weren't submitted by the next business day, which would be Monday, the client would have a warrant sworn out on him for failure to appear for court. Needless to say, the documents have already been submitted. Because that's my job. I should add that since my hours were reduced, we've had two occasions where warrants were sworn out on clients because I was not handed any documents saying that we were involved in a case, and therefore could not submit the appropriate documents, something that never happened prior to my hours being cut, even when I was a fresh hire who didn't have the first clue what I was doing.
So I apologize for the length of this post, and I realize that some of this is me venting. But given these facts, am I right in thinking that, at minimum, my Office Manager (if not the Attorney) is trying to sandbag me in preparation for a termination? I cannot believe that anyone would go to the point of either deliberately screwing up a client's case to pin me for having a warrant sworn out, or at least interfering in such a way that, had I taken the OM's word for it, would have resulted in such an occurrence, but looking at that note, it's incredibly hard to come to any other conclusion.
If so, what exactly do I do? I do have some options. One of the advantages of being conservative with my money in preparation for starting my own business is, quite obviously, that I have savings that I can draw on. And I've paid off my credit card, as well as every loan I could and establishing a regular payment schedule on my student loans. Long story short, I could survive a move to another location and probably about three months of unemployment. But this is obviously not ideal, nor is it good for my reputation, which is vital for an attorney just starting out. So if I've got a firing coming, what do I do to preserve my reputation and jump to a better location, since I still obviously will need another job similar to the one I have for the years I need to save up?
1) Am I right in thinking, given the information I include below, that I'm being sandbagged at work in preparation for a pending termination?
2) If the answer to Question 1 is yes, then what exactly do I do?
Okay, so background information. I was one of those young J.D.'s who came out of the Great Recession during the period when the supply of young attorneys vastly exceeded the demand. I will edit for concision, and simply say that I went through a period of extended unemployment, during which I was looking for any job whatsoever, but because I was a licensed attorney with a list of academic accomplishments the length of my leg, I could not get a job to save my life because everyone who read my resume automatically assumed that I would just jump ship the first chance I got and tossed the document. So in the meantime, I lost all my assets, lost my home, and only managed to keep a roof over my head because I had one family member who offered to let me move in with her, despite the fact that she was across the country and would force me to abandon my license in the state I was in, and the town she was in was a town of 10,000 with about 25 attorneys in it, 24 of whom are employed in some capacity by a state or municipal government in the area.
So there was a bit of good news, in that I finally, finally got a job as a legal secretary for that 25th attorney. In the entrance interview, I explained my situation, said that eventually I would probably be moving on to become an attorney on my own, but that I would need time to rebuild my finances, pay my debts and restore my credit before I could even think about taking the bar exam and starting my own firm. They hired me the next day, and at the beginning of the next month, moved me to full-time status. My job responsibilities were to essentially do the paperwork that the attorney needed done, first in the criminal files, and then civil files. Now I'm not going to say that I was an ideal candidate from the get-go. There were a lot of hiccups while I learned what I was actually looking at when I saw certain documents, and I still tend to move very slowly and carefully when I'm dealing with something unfamiliar, because I want to make certain I make no mistakes and absorb the process.
But now, here, today, I do a pretty good job of my work. I had to completely rip out a lot of the methods that the Office Manager had taught me and replace them with my own, but in the last nine months I have never failed to log a court date, never had a document I had seen go missing or unscanned for more than a half hour (with the number of documents I can't find instantly in that time numbering at four) and never failed to resolve a court conflict in timely fashion. Clerks of the Court and Prosecutor's Office of five counties know me on a first name basis because they all know that when I call, I'm calling to smooth out a potential scheduling snafu that will cause them headaches in a week or two, but that I am resolving here and now. And in terms of earning billable items, at the time of my nine-month performance evaluation I was averaging twenty billable items per day, which based on how our billing system works means that even if all those billable items were for the minimum possible billable time (5 minutes), I was still earning my firm about two hundred dollars per day over and above my wage.
So what's the problem?
Well, the problem goes back to that original statement that eventually, I was going to move on and start my own firm part, with the fulcrum being my nine-month performance review At that nine-month performance evaluation, when the attorney asked me again, with what in retrospect seemed a bit too much eagerness, whether or not I could sit for the next bar exam, I said that it would probably exhaust all of my savings to do so, but I thought that I could do it. When I asked whether or not he'd be willing to write a recommendation for the bar exam I would be applying for in a week, he said he would. The exact words that he and the Office Manager used to describe my work were "great" and "no complaints." Oh, and by the way, the Attorney and the Office Manager said offhand, they would be hiring on a new worker, but they assured me that my job and hours were not in danger. The new hire was only to help supplement me because we had been so busy.
Two days after that nine-month performance evaluation, my duties were cut to take away the civil files I had been managing. A week after that, and exactly two days before I was going to spend every last dime of my accumulated savings for the bar exam and test prep materials, my hours were cut 20%. The Office Manager, in announcing this, explicitly told me that "we only need you for the criminal files now", so I was only needed on a part-time basis.
Two days after that, I started getting impossible assignments. Allow me to explain what I mean by impossible: the first such assignment was the attorney asking me to write a brief for him for a case I know nothing about, over a law I didn't know, for which the Attorney had done nothing to prepare for but find a few cases that were factually similar but in other states. Attorneys know this as "persuasive case law", which is to say that it means absolutely nothing in telling a judge what he needs to do to uphold the law in his own state. In law school, briefs were usually the end-of-semester project that determined our grade, they covered only material presented in class, and we had 72 hours to complete them. My attorney required the brief by the end of the next business day. I completed the brief in the time allotted anyway.
The Attorney took the document home and reviewed it over the weekend. On the next Tuesday, the Attorney asked me to re-write the brief. On Wednesday, the Attorney asked me to prepare Interrogatories for a client in a Civil Asset Forfeiture case. Interrogatories are a series of questions asked of a client by the opposing party, and have to be done in a certain amount of time. The amount of time in this case was fine; well over three weeks till the final due date, which was good because the client lived 80 miles from our office. And hadn't brought in any documents that the prosecution requested. And didn't speak the same language as me. The Attorney gave me five days.
I did it in five days.
Or perhaps let me be more specific. I arranged for the client to come in with a bilingual friend and work with me for four hours on day four, which should have been enough. On day three, the client called in and rescheduled to day five, cutting my available time to work directly with them to 90 minutes. I got the questions 80% answered, with the remainder being incomplete because they didn't have the documentation with them needed to finish it. And in the meantime, on days one and two I finished re-writing the brief and caught back up with my daily schedule.
As it turns out, the attorney had only two things to say to me regarding the interrogatory. One was to complain how much time I was taking on it, as it wasn't worth that much to the firm. The other was to say that the finished product, turned in five days before the deadline and, to that point, not seen nor touched by the Attorney, was a "Good Job!" Which should explain why, upon timely submission of the Interrogatories to the Prosecution, the Prosecution dismissed the case entirely and returned the assets they had seized to the client.
After this, the massive tasks with the arbitrary deadlines subsided somewhat, but cutting my wages cut out the money I was planning on saving to, well, do things like eat and pay rent when I went to part-time for the bar prep period. But it also made me take a step back and realize, terrible businessman that I am, that I didn't just need to save for the bar. I also needed to save for the business I was going to build after that. Which I hadn't done. So after getting my wages cut, I decided not to spend all my savings on taking the bar.
This decision didn't go over well at the 12-month performance evaluation, which focused entirely on the fact that the Attorney and the Office Manager thought that I was going to sit for the next bar exam. I explained as best I could that I had wanted to do so, but I re-thought my financial position once my wages were cut, and terrible business man that I am, only then realized that starting a new business with $0 savings, bad credit, and absolutely no setup like an office space, client base, or car meant that I really should rethink my choice to spend absolutely all of my money, especially when returning to the point at which I could be homeless or unable to eat again was a very real possibility with me changing jobs. The Attorney spent the entirety of the time trying to argue that there must be some way to reduce my expenses (there isn't; bar prep can't be purchased ala carte because the test isn't performed ala carte), and spent the next few days telling me that I should look into the requirements for having my license in another state apply here (I already have; you need 3 years of active work for reciprocity, which I am precisely 3 years short of meeting the requirements for).
Cut to the approaching 15-month performance evaluation. Between having my hours cut and approximately three weeks ago, the Office Manager spoke with me at a rate of approximately one word per day. In the last three weeks, I've started seeing civil matters turn up in my inbox. No explanation, no description of what needs to be done, no notes. So I do the best I can, which is mainly just scan them in and then turn them over to the new hire who is the one who primarily works on those cases. The Office Manager has then talked to me about me "doing what needs to be done" whenever the attorney puts stuff in my box.
In the past two weeks, the Office Manager has started making me scan, file and mail all the immigration files handled by the OM and another legal secretary on top of my usual duties. I have never handled immigration files before, and much of the work is very time-sensitive, meaning that doing this on time often means prioritizing filing and mailing over the documents I prepare in the criminal files.
In the last week, the Office Manager has spoken with me three or four times a day, at length, about new procedures that I am to perform when carrying out my duties, all ostensibly about reducing inter-office paperwork, but mostly involve me saving files electronically and e-mailing the attorney to say that something is in the file rather than making a paper copy and handing it to attorney to read, which is actually slower and increases the risk of a document slipping past the attorney.
Three days ago, the Office Manager rather loudly discussed renting out an office space with another attorney; the only office available is either mine or another attorney with a rental agreement whom has shown no sign of moving out.
Yesterday, the Office Manager handed me a certificate of completion for a client with a note that said that the attorney had already filled out documents necessary to re-enter an old case for a client, and that all I needed to do was turn in the certificate to the prosecutor.
Because it's my job, and because it was unusual in the extreme for a criminal file to go through the Office Manager to me rather than come from the attorney directly, I looked at the file, and the court repository, and talked with the prosecutor. No such documents had been submitted, and if they weren't submitted by the next business day, which would be Monday, the client would have a warrant sworn out on him for failure to appear for court. Needless to say, the documents have already been submitted. Because that's my job. I should add that since my hours were reduced, we've had two occasions where warrants were sworn out on clients because I was not handed any documents saying that we were involved in a case, and therefore could not submit the appropriate documents, something that never happened prior to my hours being cut, even when I was a fresh hire who didn't have the first clue what I was doing.
So I apologize for the length of this post, and I realize that some of this is me venting. But given these facts, am I right in thinking that, at minimum, my Office Manager (if not the Attorney) is trying to sandbag me in preparation for a termination? I cannot believe that anyone would go to the point of either deliberately screwing up a client's case to pin me for having a warrant sworn out, or at least interfering in such a way that, had I taken the OM's word for it, would have resulted in such an occurrence, but looking at that note, it's incredibly hard to come to any other conclusion.
If so, what exactly do I do? I do have some options. One of the advantages of being conservative with my money in preparation for starting my own business is, quite obviously, that I have savings that I can draw on. And I've paid off my credit card, as well as every loan I could and establishing a regular payment schedule on my student loans. Long story short, I could survive a move to another location and probably about three months of unemployment. But this is obviously not ideal, nor is it good for my reputation, which is vital for an attorney just starting out. So if I've got a firing coming, what do I do to preserve my reputation and jump to a better location, since I still obviously will need another job similar to the one I have for the years I need to save up?