How do you deal with some of the truly horrible people who work in law?
I had an awful experience at my first firm out of law school. Two things contributed to this. 1. I found out I was unexpectedly pregnant after only working there for a month (and still waiting on bar results). 2. It was a small firm. Under 10 employees. I began working for multiple partners and the original partner who had hired me got pissed. This turned into an entire situation with this partner. He and his wife (his legal assistant) began excluding me from everything, constantly complaining to the other partners about me (and not telling the truth), and actively ignoring me in the really small office.
I got another job and told them before I had my baby that when I left for maternity leave (completely expecting them not to pay me), I wouldn’t be coming back. Completely on my own terms. The area I work in is a midsize county, but the legal community is small. This partner began telling people in the community that he was going to fire me and that’s why I quit. His wife began telling people around the office “oh she was going to get fired anyways”. I confronted the managing partner about this, and he said it was completely untrue. Even while pregnant, I was collecting over $20k a month as a first year associate, and I never called in sick although I was miserable.
I thought that leaving and not exposing all the mistreatment was the right way to go. But now, I’m finding out even more about what was going on. This partner was telling the managing partner that I wasn’t producing, and the managing partner took his word for it without even investigating. This partner would send out emails to the entire office calling me out for stupid things that he hadn’t even approached me about. All the while, he would actively ignore me in the office and not once confront me about any issues.
At an event, for example, he referred to me as “the pregnant girl” and not my name when someone brought me up. He also made a comment recently about not hiring anymore young female associates when he thought one of the other associates was pregnant.
It’s just so frustrating because I have about to start my new job and I have a pit in my stomach because this man and his wife are truly awful people, but I will likely be at events with them or on cases against them. Do people like this get their karma? Apparently, I am far from the first person they’ve done this to. This 60 year old man and his wife actively tried to ruin my career as a 25 year old, pregnant, first year associate. Who does that?! And now I’m sure I’m the only one losing sleep about it. To make matters worse, because my life was so miserable for those ten months at the firm, I completely resented my baby while I was pregnant. I just kept thinking that if I wouldn’t have gotten pregnant, none of this would have happened. But after meeting him, I am obsessed with my baby, and the fact that they ever made me feel like that makes me insanely guilty.
I just don’t understand. How do you deal with truly terrible people? I’m making myself sick as I learn more and hear about everything that was going on behind my back. I was very close with another of the partners (one of the reasons the asshole partner got mad), and he tried to shield me from it due to stress. I would still cry usually daily and had my baby early due to preeclampsia likely brought on by stress. This is a horrible ramble session. But I guess my entire point is, why do people suck?