Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Must Read for All Attorneys, Especially Those Practicing in the "Big" Firm, October 13, 2006
I don't know Mark Herrmann, but I feel his pain. Every attorney over 40 will recognize him/herself in Mark's curmudgeonly advice to the next generation. Hopefully, every attorney under 30 will take heed and follow unless they have a better mousetrap to offer (and those of us over 50 shouldn't doubt that they do!). In the absence of that mousetrap, no young attorney could go wrong picking up this book and heeding the advice from a very successful (and funny!) lawyer in his, ahem, middle years; one who is generous enough to donate the proceeds from the sale of this book to the American Bar Association.
That said, here are my favorite "bits."
THE C: Rule No. 10 from "How to Fail as an Associate" -- So long as it's clearly marked "DRAFT," no one will care if its incomprehensible
MY COMMENT: Nor, may I add, spell-checked. A memorable moment in one of my own associate's short careers was this response to "why are there so many spelling errors in this?" "Because," the associate replied, "I knew you'd revise it anyway so why should I bother?"
THE C: "What They Didn't Tell You in Law School" -- To be on the wire is life; the rest is waiting.
MY COMMENT: And don't think this applies only to the law. One of America's finest poets, W.S. Merwin, passes along the following advice from one of his mentors, the great John Berryman:
he suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literally . . . .
I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can't
you can't you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don't write
W.S. Merwin, Berryman, from Flower & Hand
THE C: The Curmudgeon's Law Dictionary: Objection -- An attorney-client communication made during a deposition for the purpose of ensuring favorable testimony.
THE C: Seven Hours Locked in a Room: Beginning lawyers also sometimes worry about how they will work with exhibits when taking depositions. This is the process. Mark. Identify. Authenticate. Then, ask whatever the heck you want.
MY COMMENT: And if you don't know how to authenticate a document, look it up! It's right there in the Evidence Code. Take a cheat sheet with the statutory language to the deposition with you. If you manage to properly authenticate all exhibits to a deposition, you'll be better than 99.9% of the lawyers taking pre-trial testimony every day of the week. If you also establish the business records exception to the hearsay rule, you might achieve associate heaven -- the partner in charge of your case will be so delighted with your work that he'll excuse you from spending four weeks in a storage shed in Plano, Texas, reviewing documents.
THE C: The Curmudgeon Argues -- If the judge poses a question to you, there's one rule: Answer it. Answer it directly, in a single word, if possible. "yes" or "no" are fine candidates.
MY COMMENT: In the old days, when they used to let associates do scary things like argue appeals, one of three appellate judges leaned over the bench with a look you'll eventually come to recognize -- he's about to pull your intestines out through your throat.
"Ms. Pynchon," he said, much too sweetly, perhaps sensing the truth -- I was a first year associate and this was my first appellate argument -- "doesn't your argument require us to split a cause of action?"
SPLIT A CAUSE OF ACTION??? I'd never heard of such a thing in my entire life. My civil procedure professor had never mentioned it and the term appeared in neither party's briefs. SPLIT A CAUSE OF ACTION??? OMIGOD. I felt nauseated; faint, even; the room actually began to grow dark around the Judge's (now sinister) face.
Then I recalled something my boss told me just a few weeks earlier. "If you don't know the answer to the question, don't 'wing' it and for god's sake don't avoid it. Admit you don't know the answer and offer to brief the issue. When the Court asks questions, it's not testing you; it really needs to know. You do the entire panel a favor by offering to file a post-argument brief."
So that's what I did. I said, "I'm sorry; I don't know the answer. I'd be happy to brief it for you." I watched a cloud of disappointment cross the old Judge's face. I'm certain I ruined his moment, if not his entire day, by not properly playing my role -- young, dumb and female. I hadn't dodged, shifted or weaved. Most importantly, I no longer felt nauseated or faint. I won that appeal, but could just as easily have lost. I assure you, I'll never forget the lesson learned nor what it means to split a cause of action.
THE C: How to Enter Time So Clients Will Pay It -- Record your time promptly.
MY COMMENT: Anything else is just suffering. The second best thing about being a mediator is no time keeping. Why do we hate it so much? I don't know. But I do know that I've spent agonized hours trying to reconstruct a day during which I know I worked non-stop for at least ten hours but could only recall two that were billable. Don't do it. Don't put it off. Do it, in fact, now. Why are you reading this blog when you should be billing your time??????
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20 of 21 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Succinct, valuable insights for any young law student or lawyer, April 12, 2007
Mark Herrmann has provided an extraordinary gift to the legal community. The Curmudgeon's guide is well written and precise in its well-informed commentary. The author, a partner at Jones Day, has a sense of humor and a gift for succinct, valuable insights, the likes of which professors and senior lawyers rarely divulge. To read this book is to stumble on such secrets of the temple as to refashion the mind of a young law student or lawyer. To give but one example, I had wondered, during my summer, why, when I had provided my partner with some useful and succinct legal analysis and fact finding, I was rewarded with a terse "Good work," and a lot more work and why, when I had rushed through a job and provided him with a rambling memo, I would not hear from him for a week. Now I know. Feedback on assignments is so scarce in law firms, it is difficult to parse the code that your superiors traffic in. Curmudgeon resolved my confusion immediately: he notes that when he gets good product from associates, he rewards them with more and better work. When he doesn't, he simply ignores them. Work is the life blood of a lawyer, and the better quality work you can get assigned, the better your work experience and your career will be. Curmudgeon's guide resolves so many questions before they are asked, it really should be a bible for anyone starting their legal career. I am certain that the great lack that this book meets is the result of a lack of time and not malicious intent on the part of our would be mentors, but it doesn't undercut the extraordinary generosity of this tough love book. The tone may be grumpy, but an avuncular grumpiness that is very welcome. Please read this concise tome of invaluable wisdom. Or don't. My own career is not established, so I can ill-afford the informed competition that the reader of this book would present. But if you do read it, you'll find it useful, fun, and too damn short.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Practical, To-the-Point, Real-World Advice, February 11, 2007
The Curmudgeon gives the kind of advice that a new attorney would (or, at least, should) want to receive from someone who's been successful in the field for a long time. One of the most helpful chapters involves the "real world" approach to writing briefs or memos--and it's not the way you're taught in law school. The Curmudgeon does not pretend that Law Review or Moot Court mean much in his world, and instead focuses on the core traits a new attorney is expected to perfect to be useful to his or her colleagues and clients. Another helpful chapter is written from the legal assistant's point of view. This is a rarely addressed area that new attorneys are usually left to tackle all by themselves, but the attorney-assistant dynamic is vital, and the "Listen up kid, I'll tell it like it is" approach that The Curmudgeon takes to addressing it is realistic, practical, and helpful.
Reading this book felt like having a conversation with a mentor of whom I wasn't afraid to ask any question, and who wasn't afraid to tell me exactly what he thought. It felt like a glimpse into the mind of a senior partner. Of course, no opinion in the legal world is unanimous, and the advice in this book is no different. But following the advice of The Curmudgeon is certainly a great way to get off on the right foot, and you can always tailor the advice he gives to best fit the office in which you wind up working.
(Actually, an excerpt from this book was discussed at my firm's orientation meeting, and it was suggested that we read the book as a good jumping-off point to start adjusting from law school to real-world.)
The book is a fast read, but it's one that can be read many times over, with new points being caught during each read.
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