When I was a young associate in a big law firm, I began to fear that there were unwritten rules to the game that everyone knew except me. Sometimes I wanted to cry out, “What are the rules? Just tell me what they are! I’ll follow them!”

Gradually over the years I began to figure them out, one by one, often as the result of transgressing them. Sometimes I was fortunate enough to learn a rule by merely observing the consequences of a transgression by another associate. On rare occasions a more senior associate, or even a partner, would bless me by privately advising me about one of the rules.

Law firms really do want their associates to succeed, so why do they seem to hide the rules of the game? Here are my guesses at a few possible explanations:

    1. By the time you get to high school, it is hard to remember what you didn’t know in first grade. Sometimes something seems so obvious to partners, that it never occurs to them to point it out to the associates.
    2. The rule is so patently unfair or illogical (or perhaps illegal) that it is embarrassing to admit it.
    3. The rules are not actually the same for everyone, which creates some confusion when they are applied unevenly.

Here are a dozen of the unwritten rules I have observed in some law firms, described in an admittedly jaded way. Please share with me those you’ve observed that I failed to include.

    1. Turning down work from a partner will give you a black mark. If the same partner has already filled your plate, remind her of what you already have to do and ask her to prioritize the workload. If a different partner is adding to your pile, you can tell him how delighted to work on the project you will be, and that based on your current commitments, you can get started on it in about three weeks. He’ll probably take the project elsewhere. If you really do want to work on the new project, you can ask to conference in the first partner to discuss schedules and priorities, but there is a risk of igniting a turf war.
    2. Learn as quickly as possible who the super stars are (whether partners or senior associates). Try to get work from them, and be sure to do an excellent job. Their opinions of you will carry more weight with the other partners, and they will also have the best projects with the most valuable experience. Even if you don’t get to work with them often, this will give them an opportunity to form their own opinion about you.
    3. About the only acceptable reason for not being available when requested is your commitment to other work. If you’ll be unavailable because you’re going to the school play or have front row tickets to the most important professional sports event of the season, just say your plate’s too full or you’re all booked up. Better to be mysterious than to confirm that you have a priority higher than work. Most associates have stories similar to the one told to me by an attorney who received a call from a partner while in the recovery room following surgery.
    4. You can fail to make partner by misplacing a comma. When they say “just do good work and you’ll be ok,” they mean just do perfect work. Long gone are the school days where someone feeds you the answers and you just have to remember the correct ones to regurgitate. You are expected to figure most of it out yourself, and you’ll be lucky if you get to watch someone else do it first. B+ is not an acceptable grade, and 97% is not an A.
    5. Laughing in the halls can knock you off partnership track. It’s a sign that you are not serious about your work. Someone who will never work with you may witness it, and form a nearly unshakeable opinion about you, which they will then share without remembering its genesis.
    6. Don’t believe the partner who tells you “Don’t worry about developing business. Just keep your billable hours up doing quality work.” He probably just wants to get his projects done. Your perceived ability to generate business will be an important factor in the decision about whether to let you into the partnership. The moment you make partner, you will be expected to start generating business to sustain yourself. Your billable hours may drop as partners give work to associates that they used to give to you.
    7. While many law firms today have alternative career tracks, in most, the only track that counts is the full out equity partnership track. If you choose an alternate track, be prepared to pay the price of diminished respect and lower quality work assignments that will stunt your professional growth.
    8. Each firm has its own cultural definition of how commitment to the firm and its work should be demonstrated. In some firms, lawyers demonstrate their dedication by arriving early, in others by staying late. If your natural rhythm runs against the grain, you may be judged a slacker, regardless of the volume of paper you generate or the hours you bill.
    9. Court your administrative assistant as your respected teammate and ally. An admin can protect your back or feed you to the wolves. For example, when I call lawyers in the morning, one admin might say “He hasn’t made it in yet,” while another says, “He must have stepped down the hall.”
    10. It’s virtually impossible to make it up the ladder without a mentor of some sort. You need someone to show you the ropes, warn you about the hidden booby traps, funnel the kind of work to you that will make your experience valuable, and go to bat for you during bonus and partnership discussions. Most partners don’t feel much obligation to mentor someone, even if they were formally assigned a protégé. If they do mentor someone, it is most likely to be informal and someone they see as like them—a Mini-Me. You must assertively seek out a mentor if you don’t have one.
    11. There is a good chance that you will take home less money as a first year partner than you did as a senior associate, so prepare your finances accordingly. You’ll have to start making payments on your capital account buy-in, and you’ll be responsible for self-employment tax (instead of having your employer pay half of your F.I.C.A.). You’ll also have to make estimated quarterly tax payments on income that you may not actually receive until December.
    12. Becoming partner is like graduating from middle school to high school. Just when you think you’ve made it and can stop to breathe, you discover that you’re at the bottom of a whole new totem pole.

If you know any young associates, kindly leave this article on their desks in the dark of night. You won’t have to admit whether you subscribe to the rules. Of course, the foregoing are the opinions and observations of the author (after coaching hundreds of law firm partners), and do not represent the opinions or policies of the State Bar of Texas.