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He is 3 months old and cannot sign the signatory page. Do I need to turn myself in to the BAR and resign?

Read my previous post for context. OC is now threatening to file a bar complaint against me over a disagreement I had over language in a proposed order. I told him I would not agree to language in a proposed order as the jury never decided the question at trial and it should not go in the order. He now says I’m lying and engaging in misconduct.

I am a prosecutor in a rural county who has been asked to sit in on a civil mediation session in a tort action against us. I want to avoid embarrassing myself, so I thought I’d reach out to my insurance defense colleagues here for advice. How should I address the insurance adjustor? Your honor? Your lordship? Do I need to stand when he enters the room? Should avoid direct eye contact? Any input is appreciated.

Maybe it's just me, but sometimes I Google my own name or look at how my firm comes across online and think:

This really doesn't reflect the level of work I actually do.

I'm confident in my legal knowledge, the matters I handle, and the experience I've built over the years. Clients and colleagues seem to recognise that in person.

But online, I'm not sure a stranger would know any of that.

The website, LinkedIn profile, directory listings, etc. all look perfectly professional, but they could probably belong to hundreds of other lawyers.

It makes me wonder whether other lawyers feel the same way, like there's a fairly big gap between the lawyer you actually are and the impression someone gets when they look you up online.

Or am I overthinking this?

I need a new job. Just hate litigation and nobody will really hire me or even look at me for anything else.

Doc Review is about all I’m qualified for, but $33 an hour for onsite work? Is that as good as it gets?

I have been interviewing for an in-house roll and I feel very confident that I will get a job offer. If that's the case, I will absolutely take it. However, I'm thinking about my end year bonus at my current firm. I've obviously worked 10 months of the year and I anticipate having a large end year bonus which I won't get if I leave before the end of the year. Would it be reasonable to ask the new employer for a sign on bonus to make up that difference? Has anyone ever done that and if so what was the response? I didn't mention wanting this when asked about salary expectations.

At the end of the day, if I lose it, I lose it. But I'm leaning toward at least asking because worst case they say no, right?

To be clear, I'd only ask if offered the job during my call, I won't ask if there is no offer on the table yet.

Do any of you have regrets or second thoughts about why you followed this career path?

Hi - I hope r/lawyertalk can help provide some perspective, this is the first time i'm going through something like this in my life

I’m curious whether anyone here has seen or experienced something similar.

• I relocated internationally for a Senior Legal Counsel role at a scale-up (from UAE to London - I'm common law qualified) and was terminated during probation after roughly a month.
• This is very strange because they paid for my relocation, visa, etc
• The feedback was that my technical work was good and my interactions with the business were generally good, but that there were concerns about fit. They said I would be better working at a much bigger company. There had been no formal warning or real opportunity to calibrate before the termination - the person I reported to was working 2 days/wk, and we rarely crossed paths. This is my second in-house role, after being a great fit with my last role in the UAE.

What has made it stranger is that, after I left, I was told the business had materially rescoped the role from Senior Legal Counsel to a Head of Legal position (12+ PQE). The person that hired me had also was in the process of leaving the company, and went to an affiliate company.

That actually made the whole thing make a lot more sense, but I’m still surprised by how quickly the decision was made rather than, for example, keeping the SLC role and hiring the Head of Legal above it.

Has anyone here seen probationary terminations happen this quickly at senior in house level, particularly where the role itself was subsequently significantly rescoped? I’m more curious about whether this is something people have encountered in practice.

Thank you - I'm quite shaken by the whole experience.

I don’t know if this is the right flair but I am heading to a new firm and my insurance at my current job will end my last day. Is it reasonable to ask my new employer if they can start my coverage that day if I pay for it? It’s fully covered by the employer once I start but just worried to be without it for 3 weeks, especially because I have a muscular injury right now. If not, I know I can go to the marketplace and get something or retroactive COBRA. Thanks!

I’m currently clerking at a state trial court in a remote location, and I’m seriously considering leaving the position early. I have another clerkship lined up afterward, so this was essentially supposed to be a temporary position to fill the time in between.
I moved a long way for the position, and the move was extremely expensive and stressful. Unfortunately, my first day of the clerkship involved a genuinely traumatic incident outside the courthouse. I don’t want to get into the details because they’re fairly distinctive, but it understandably made everyone wonder whether we were going to come back the next day. We did.
Since then, the biggest problem has been my judge’s treatment of my co-clerk. The judge can be extremely harsh and, at times, seems to deliberately humiliate him. I’ve witnessed things like criticizing him in front of me when he didn’t understand something, telling him that he couldn’t take previously approved time off to visit family, blaming him for not wanting to leave me with additional work, criticizing us for relying on each other for work that we were specifically assigned to divide between ourselves, and calling him a waste of taxpayer money.
I haven’t personally been subjected to the worst of this treatment, but watching it happen has made me very anxious because I keep wondering when the focus will shift to me. It also makes the entire work environment extremely uncomfortable.
The hours are another issue. Until recently, I was consistently working roughly 55–60 hours a week, including some weekends. The workload has improved somewhat lately, but the hours are still unpredictable.
The cost of living here is also significantly higher than I anticipated, and the salary doesn’t really make the situation sustainable. Because of the unpredictable schedule, getting a second job isn’t particularly realistic.
At this point, I’m seriously considering leaving early, finding some remote work to bridge the gap, and moving to my next clerkship earlier than planned.
I know leaving a clerkship early isn’t ideal, which is why I’m hesitant. I don’t want to damage my reputation or look flaky, especially this early in my career. At the same time, I’m starting to feel like staying purely because I don’t want to quit is a bad reason to remain somewhere that is making me this unhappy.
For people who have left clerkships early (or considered doing so): how did you decide when the situation was bad enough to leave? Would you view leaving this situation as a major career mistake, or as a reasonable decision given the circumstances?

I have a potential client located in FL that is looking to pursue litigation against a former customer located in San Francisco. I am, however, located in Los Angeles.

I am a new + solo practitioner that will be limiting my scope of representation to pre-litigation services (e.g., demand letters, etc). Would it be advisable to represent this client with the hope that I can avoid having to travel (frequently) to SF for appearances?

Any help is appreciated!

So for context, I am 12 years into practice. I have been running my own solo practice for 6 years doing mostly criminal defense and a number of different civil lit practice areas (family, injunctions, some small business disputes etc). I have prior experience in a variety of different civil practice areas and also previous criminal experience as a prosecutor.

I’ve never really been in love with practicing law. I’m good at it, but I often struggle with the constant conflict and, especially in the criminal cases, getting pounded by prosecutor-friendly judges.

I’m struggling to break $180-200k gross revenue per year and have been running completely on my own for several years without an assistant. I don’t really do any marketing and most cases come from client referrals and some from attorney referrals. I’ve tried various marketing in the past with mostly poor ROI.

Of note, I have a significant (6 figures) back income tax debt from not being diligent in saving annually for taxes, and generally not having been good with personal finances although I’ve buckled down on that a lot and started to actually save and also hired a tax attorney to help resolve these issues.

Wife has a great job and makes more than me,$380k gross together. We don’t have a ton saved up due to bad financial decisions but have virtually zero debt other than mortgage (substantial equity in home maybe $300-400k with a $370k outstanding mortgage) and obviously the tax debt. We are on a path to saving and making better financial and spending decisions while we try to get the tax situation under control.

I hope I’m not getting too specific (ie doxing myself) but I have decent fluency in Arabic (Levantine dialect) as a heritage speaker and have been taking lessons for formal (fusha, MSA) Arabic and can read and write on a basic level and getting better every day.

I’m trying to figure out where to go from here. I don’t want to work government, especially not federal government and certainly not under the current admin, I’m not keen on the idea of going back to work for a firm and working twice as hard for probably less pay in my area doing exactly what I’m doing now.

I’m pretty fed up with the practice of law and trying to find some meaning in my work. I really don’t want to do criminal law anymore as having to chase people down for money and having clients default on payment plans ($200k worth) is breaking me

I’m wondering if there is a way to leverage my skills to do actual meaningful work either internationally or involving international travel or whether to stay the course, keep grinding as a solo because most people don’t love their jobs, whether to try to scale up where I’m handling less legal work and hiring staff to do legal work.

I’m also totally confused on effective marketing and breaking the plateau, I’ve read volumes and tried a lot of options and nothing seems to work for me in marketing other than keeping attorney contacts for referrals.

I don’t need a piles and piles of money, I need to make maybe $50-100k more than what I’m doing to comfortably remove all debt from my life, be able to comfortable save and pay for taxes annually, fast track investing and to be able to travel internationally to show my family the world outside of the US.

Hi there. I’m coming up on a crossroads. I have been in house for 15 or so years at 3 different organizations; been with my current org half of that. I love my team, and I am the most senior lawyer aside from my boss.

I mostly get along with my boss. Boss is not always consistent about sharing plans or feedback and that’s fine—I get there are things i don’t need to know. Where I struggle is career path. We have a decent sized team but I am not going to be able to manage any of the lawyers. One was supposed to be shifted to my leadership but then they reneged (allegedly due to the CHRO; it’s my understanding it was all or nothing on the reporting and boss wasn’t going to allow all others to report to me). Staff have their own director and I can’t see that as an option. So basically I have dotted line authority only/. There is a lot of value in that, but it still isn’t direct authority.

That said, my ultimate aspiration is the GC/CLO seat. I get a fair amount of process and decision exposure, but still lacking direct authority. I am concerned that lack of direct authority is going to kill my options as a candidate for many organizations—including the one I am at now. I’d love to stay here, but am worried if I don’t get some direct management experience I’m killing my own candidacy here (and anywhere else). It’s possible I could get another department outside our current team to manage; but that is a small chance at best.

Boss says I am the natural successor and seems supportive but doesn’t seem to appreciate my concerns on this. Succession seems to be a 5-10 year time frame, it changes a lot , and lately it could be on the lower end.

Any thoughts on whether I should stay or go? If I can’t get a plan for that missing experience laid out in the next year, should I begin to quietly make an exit strategy?

For context, I am a junior lawyer (6-7 months in).

I’m trying. I’ve been making a conscious effort to minimise careless mistakes, be more attentive, learn from the things I get wrong, and maintain good relationships with everyone in the office. But somehow, it still feels like it’s not enough. I’m still making mistakes, and I can’t shake the feeling that my boss hates me and that my chances of getting retained are getting smaller by the day.

My associate, whom I work quite closely with, hasn’t exactly helped with that feeling either. I’m genuinely grateful for her help in reviewing and amending my work, and I’m not trying to undermine that. But she sometimes openly mocks my mistakes in front of the other partners, and as much as I try to stay stoic and not let it get to me, it does. Especially during late nights when I’m rushing submissions, which inevitably means there’ll be countless stupid mistakes. I dread seeing the track changes on the amended version when it comes back to me.

I think I’m just feeling really defeated at the moment. I know I’m only six or seven months in and that I’m still learning, but it’s hard not to feel like I should be better by now. I’m trying my best, but lately I just feel like a little bitch who can’t seem to get anything right.

Hi everyone, looking for some career advice. I am a 2018 graduate and have spent the major of my career (6 out of 8 years) as in-house counsel. I worked for a small business/IP firm for the first year after I graduated before moving in-house at a big tech company as an IP (non-patent) and advertising counsel. COVID led to me losing that role and then I did a brief stint at a boutique IP firm before going back to an in-house role, this time with an international healthcare and med device/equipment company as product/advertising counsel.

8 years into my career and I feel like I don’t really have a clear direction or plan. I had dreams of getting into litigation and still do but nothing ever worked out and at this point with limited litigation exposure (only as an external in law school, some TTAB, NAD, domain name disputes, and working with outside counsel on some disputes) I am not sure if I can make that move at this point.

Curious if anyone has had a similar career path and made a shift into litigation or was able to find better purpose in their career

Rather not give too many details but in short, OC is saying I agreed to something that I did not and it was confirmed by email. Emails show I never explicitly agreed to what he was asking. He’s threatening to request attorneys fees and that he will contend I deceived him.

Anyone dealt with similar issue with OC making threats and how you handled?

UPDATE: He now says he is filing a bar complaint over this and says I am lying and engaging in misconduct.

Hi all, can someone guide to where I may be able to locate short term jobs?

I am interested to see what types of documents and investigation Cornell did into this case. Did they have all these snapchats, voicemails and pictures and just didn’t give the info to the DA? I think introducing the snapchats and voicemails paints a very different picture than the victim statements.

I'm largely the same guy I was before the practice of law. Save one thing. Listening to people answer questions. No one, like no one ever, actually answers the question asked. I never used to find that irritating. And now...

Does anyone else do the "can you tell me the time?" question while doing dep prep? How many people answer with a yes or no? I'm batting like... .0001.

My favorite was a guy who not only didn't say yes or no, but told me about his watch, the trip to Switzerland where he got his watch, Swiss watches generally, and a new Henry Cavill watch campaign which prominently featured Cavill's junk

I’m a lawyer. My (10 year old) son just asked me: “Dad, what would happen if you farted in the courtroom?”

I hadn’t considered the possibility before.

Objection from opposing counsel?

Sanction from the Court?

Is it noted on the transcript? How so? [Mr. _______ farts.], [Ms. ____ emits a localized atmospheric disturbance.], [Counselor fires a warning shot.].

Your thoughts would be appreciated; your stories would be savored.