r/Lawyertalk

What are the biggest red flags that tell you another lawyer is doing a poor job representing their client (without discussing any specific case)?

Mostly posting so I have something in writing when I try to chicken out. I'm a first year associate in biglaw. I never wanted this job going into law school and specifically chose my law school/scholarship so I wouldn't have to do it, but was a good student at a good school and fell into the "oh it's great training for a few years! You'd be crazy to say no, everyone wants this!" narrative. Every day I remember why I didn't want to do this in the first place. I haven't billed less than 200hrs/mo since getting staffed up, and half the time it's more like 250-275. My group is too leanly staffed to do anything about that. I don't have a goal or reason for being here anymore, and I don't aspire to be the seniors I work with. The workload is making me physically sick every day, and when I asked around for advice recently people acted like it was normal to be medicated to deal with that. It's fucked. I feel like I have freaking Stockholm syndrome for taking this long to realize it. I told someone out loud last week for the first time that I was trying to get out and it's like something clicked, so I can finally actually do it without freaking out. I'm so ready to be done. Who knows what happens next, but at least it's not this.

Anyone else had problem with hallucinations from Lexis Protege? Supposedly best in its class. It almost fooled me with this fabrication: "In Shupe v. Nelson, 254 S.C. 189, 174 S.E.2d 493 (1970), the South Carolina Court of Appeals held that an association's repeated refusal to provide insurance information required by an owner's lender constituted a breach of contract." When I tried to Sheperdize the cite, it became apparent this little nugget was cut from whole cloth.

I currently have a case where my client was garnished, but no governmental body has any accounting record (required by statute) of my client's wage garnishment. I, naturally, drafted my opening statement as:

"Your honor, this is a case about accountability. "

The judge is a rural, more traditional and conservative judge. I think it's hilarious, but I am mildly concerned that the judge won't necessarily like it.

Do any of y'all keep puns or wordplay in your statements, or do y'all cut those out upon revision?

Here's something I just read in an old 5th Circuit opinion that I found amusing:

The Longshoremen's and Harbor Workers Act "applies during the dark of night, at the break of dawn and in the twilight too. And it would be a mistake to find a new twilight zone which surrounds the United States at a distance beyond a marine league from its shores. Twilight by its definition is a time when it is difficult to see. For this limited problem the shorelines of our nation and their relation to federal and state jurisdiction are already obscure enough without our producing a new fog bank to prolong, intensify or increase the dimensions of the reduced visability. We can hope that the 1972 amendments to § 903(a) will burn away the fog." 483 F.2d 577, 884.

Just started my first lawyer job a few weeks ago... Is it normal to feel like I have no clue what I'm doing and no clue how to do anything, and no clue what's going on at my firm?

Everyone is very nice and supportive, so no one has yelled or reprimanded me in any way. Everyone seems very supportive and helpful and willing to offer a helping hand to each other, even among senior attorneys in relation to one another... Just wanted to make sure that this feeling I am feeling is normal and not a cause for concern lol

If it helps to provide context, I work in tax law with zero prior tax law experience. My job is also fully remote with no billable requirement.

More appropriate for Constitution Day (September 17), Mr. Franklin's quip has a point.

We live in a country where insurrectionists have been broadly pardoned, child rapists are protected by our Federal Department of Justice, and a sports hero has been arrested for dipping his hand in the water of the Reflecting Pool.

Have we kept our Republic?

How is your firm handling Google review requests after cases close? Both positive or negative outcomes

I am a patent litigator with only 2 years of experience in litigation, but with a background of ten years at law firms doing patent prosecution. I am considering moving from a V100 firm to a small litigation boutique to do patent litigation, or alternatively to go to an in house role at a large fortune 100 company as a senior counsel for IP. I have two young children (1 and 3) and would like to have as balanced of a life as possible, but also maximize my lifelong earnings.

Which role should I go to and why? This post is not seeking any legal advice, just career advice.

Something's been bugging me lately and I want to know if others deal with this too. when you paste work documents into chatgpt or claude , what do you actually do about sensitive client info? Like names, case numbers, dates, anything identifying? do you manually go through and delete everything before pasting? or honestly just paste and hope for the best?

the manual delete thing is annoying as hell, miss one thing and you've potentially leaked client data into some company's training pipeline. wondering if a tool that automatically scrubs that stuff locally before you copy anything into an ai and lets you swap the real info back after, would actually be useful. or is this a non-problem that people have already figured out some other way?

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?

I’m a junior lawyer working in immigration law and I would appreciate advice from those with more experience in the field. How do you personally deal with the more emotionally draining cases? And how do you handle the increasing anti-immigrant sentiment?

I often feel quite exhausted when I go read the news/go on social media and see so much negativity surrounding immigration matters, especially while I’m dealing with challenging cases at work. I don’t quite know how to process it, so I often end up doom scrolling, which I fear may not be the best coping mechanism.

The firm hired these 2 paralegals almost a year ago for some of the managing partner’s cases. I’ve been noticing they’ve been making some sloppy mistakes. For instance, I sent a defendant in a wage garnishment action a judgment debtor information sheet and I asked paralegal to draft and file a notice of service of discovery that we sent the info sheet and she filed a notice of service that we served interrogatories and requests for production of documents.

In another wage garnishment action, I filed a motion to compel an oral examination and asked her to file a proposed order and she drafted a proposed order to compel the defendant to respond to interrogatories and requests for production of documents. The court ended up ordering the defendant to answer interrogatories and requests for production of documents despite us never serving interrogatories and me never filing to compel answers to interrogatories.

I’m not sure how I should address this. There is a supervisor for the paralegals I have been considering going to. Anyone had a similar experience?

I have my first arb coming up next week for a PI matter and my office isn’t particularly known for guidance. So I am reaching out to the community to get an idea of what to expect and more importantly what to bring.

I rep the plaintiff. Intersectional accident, so I plan to focus primarily on liability and making my guy less to hopefully not at fault at all. Based on the scenario I believe we have a good shot convincing the arb panel the defendant is at fault.

I am bringing, his meds/bills as exhibits, photos of the intersection and photos of the damages. Is there anything else that I should bring with me besides the client?

Any suggestions and general tips are greatly appreciated.

Throwaway.

I'm a first-year associate at a small plaintiff-side firm, working remotely from somewhere in the Mountain West for a firm actually based in the Midwest. My boss mentored me back in undergrad, well before law school. He's a genuinely well-regarded name in this practice area. I went to a T14, worked in-house at a couple Fortune 500 companies before this, and took this job for less money because I trusted him and wanted the mentorship. That's part of why this is so hard.

My role has no PTO, health insurance, retirement, doesn't cover bar dues, doesn't cover the software I actually need to do the work, doesn't provide a phone even though clients have my personal cell number. Only thing covered is malpractice insurance. $80k salary.

He works something like 7am to midnight most days. Says he has ADHD. I've genuinely wondered once or twice what he's on something to sustain that pace at 50+

He would call me 3-4 times a day, a lot of the time just to hand me a random assignment or narrate what he's doing, which wrecks whatever work I was actually focused on. I told him I'd rather get non-urgent stuff by email.

One day I was heads-down on something time-sensitive and didn't pick up. He called six times. Next day he brought it up, and when I explained my reasoning, he went off.

Told me I'm supposed to answer the effing phone no matter how many times he calls, and that not doing so means I'm not "putting the client first." I'm already at my desk 40+ hours a week; he also expected weekends.

Another attorney at the firm told me I needed to set a boundary or he'd "take as much as you give him." So I did, told him no more weekends. Not long after that argument, with zero heads-up, he switched me from salary to hourly.

My next check came in about $1,000 short of what I expected because he based it on my billed hours.I actually sat down with the time-tracking data, I worked out that my real hourly rate, is somewhere in the high $30s/hour, but now I'm only getting paid for billable hours, not the non-billable/admin work I still do constantly, partly because I don't have a secretary when he has three. They also don't like to file for me because they also pretty senior in age and employment time. Despite being an attorney, I suspect the boomers don't want to take "orders" from a 20 something. I file most of my own stuff (90%).

My checks have been shrinking every pay period, I found around 10 hours of real logged work that just went unpaid because it wasn't billable. My most recent check came out to roughly 30% of what a normal salaried paycheck used to be.

I'm a junior, so I'm still ramping up on billables too, which doesn't help. I'm in my chair 9-to-5, 6, sometimes 7 or 8, and some weeks I've cleared 40 billable hours once in the month and a half. At this point I'm seriously weighing leaving law altogether, waiting tables or warehouse work at $20-22/hour but with actual benefits, and none of this arbitrary despot cheese. Meaning if you piss him off he will dock your pay.

My partner is studying for a state bar exam right now and so I'm supporting her a bit, we're also living with my parents.

Is any of this normal for small firms? Would you push back harder, start looking for something else in the field, or is walking away the move here? I don't fully know what I'm asking here, but any advice would help.

Practicing lawyer for almost 5 years, hung out my shingle about a month and a half ago. Exclusively in criminal defence.

I practice in a major city where there are tons of other lawyers. When I first started on my own, I had a bunch of referrals from colleagues. They're starting to dry out, and I'm not getting many cold calls.

I have a website, but can't afford to pay for marketing. I have some savings to keep me going for a few more months, but I want to treat dipping in there as a last resort.

Don't really know what I'm hoping to achieve with this post other than venting. I'm scared of flopping. Any words of wisdom or success stories to ease my mind?

...

JUDGE BREYER: Okay. Thank you very much. Juror 96, I think that you also have strong views. Could you set them aside?

JUROR 96: I believe that in a criminal trial, I would feel morally obligated to convict. However, in a civil trial, I feel I can set those views aside.

JUDGE BREYER: That's interesting.

JUROR 96: I'm happy to expand.

JUDGE BREYER: Sure.

JUROR 96: I believe it would be to the benefit of the human race were Mr. Musk to be sent to prison. However, I don't believe a loss of several hundreds of millions of dollars in a civil trial would be even a drop in the bucket to his wealth, so it doesn't really matter. Therefore, I would be able to consider the facts.

HARPER'S MAGAZINE/MAY 2026

30F, graduated last May and was admitted in January and working in “real estate” generally - but doing a little bit of everything right now it feels. I am not worried that I am undecided at this point. I know I’m not interested in family law or personal injury. My problem is that I feel like most other areas DO interest me. It’s not so much the area of law that I’m concerned with, and more with what the work involves. I feel like I could do any “area” in some ways. I like the law, I don’t mind the work. I used to be a frickin waitress so everything is better than that.

Some background: i am at a mid sized firm with a focus on business law/representing organizational clients, but it does a little of everything within that, commercial litigation, real estate, bank counsel, land use/zoning bankruptcy, t&e, transactions, corporate law etc. Very reasonable billables but I am struggling to decide what I want to do.

What I like: I like solving problems, I like niche legal issues that involve research/writing, I LOVE document review and/or looking through old files/records, although it’s rare I get to do it. Im very comfortable “helping out” senior attorneys and getting things past the finish line. I’ve done some different kinds of RE closings and I don’t mind it but I feel like my job in the realm of these kind of deals is just following up with people constantly, which is realistically what a paralegal could do (which I’m not above, I did some legal assistant work before law school). That’s fine to mix things up every once in awhile, and I like that I get to talk to people and advise, because I don’t think I could just draft motions all day, but transactional work is not super fulfilling for me in the long term. I do think I could become a competent transactional attorney bc I’m pretty organized, I don’t love the numbers but I understand them most of the time and can easily make spreadsheets for closing costs. We have in-house title work and I find title issues more interesting than other parts of a closing.

I guess I just feel lost. I have some friends who have needed help with re-organizing their business or needing to make a trust and I love being able to help with that, but I’m not sure I care to do that unless it’s for a friend. At the same time, I think there’s value in knowing how these things work bc I see the issues that come up in litigation down the road.

It’s like I don’t really know what I like bc I like most things and if I don’t know how to do something, I feel capable of learning pretty quickly. I’m sure most people’s advice is to not pigeonhole myself yet and keep trying different things, but is there anything I should be looking for??? How will I even know???

Right now I feel like I value getting in-person experience in court and having some variety in my different cases/assignments, and I don’t think I will be able to do that forever bc eventually this firm will want me to pick between their litigation department and their real estate/corporate law practice, so maybe this firm isn’t the right fit for me in the long run, but I understand that you are supposed to, eventually, specialize. I also think this firm values me enough that I could convince them to let me sort of make my own practice. They say it’s hard to find good associates who will stick around

If anyone read all this rambling … were you in similar position not feeling like you could choose? How/when did you know what worked for you? Am I being too picky about wanting to keep things interesting?? Is that not realistic?

I just would like to hear from other attorneys on their experience I guess.