"As an antidote to increased competition and falling profit margins,
all lawyers would benefit from reading this book."
--Westchester Bar Journal
More committee meetings, memos, and miscellany from the amusingly inept firm of Fairweather, Winters & Sommers. But this time, Stanley Fairweather, the mythical firm's octogenarian founder, intersperses humorous reminiscences from decades of law practice, as well as a few concerns about where the profession is headed.
The chapters range from "The No-Longer Compliant Client" and "De-Honing Legal Minds" to "Bar Hopping" and "Advice to the Lawlorn." The lies to tell when associates leave, how to best exploit the cc, and an all-male committee trying to decide what to do about women lawyers, this book's got it all.
$12.95 paper, 200 pp., ISBN 0-945774-20-6.
"I think I know how we can listen to associates' complaints without using any partner time. Our associates want senior people to listen to their problems, right? But none of our senior people work with associates anymore, so none of the associates even know what our senior people look like, right? So we go out and hire a number of retired senior citizens to play the roles of concerned senior partners. These senior citizens have never heard the complaints of our associates before, so for them it won't be such a problem to sit and listen. We pay them a few bucks (they won't want much, or they'll lose their social security benefits) and, boom, we've solved our listening problem."
"Sounds good, Frank, but there's still one problem. These senior citizens we hire aren't going to know beans about the complaints our associates bring in, so how are they going to respond to them?"
"Respond? Who needs to respond? All they're supposed to do is listen. We train them to nod their heads and say 'uh-huh,' 'I see' and 'is that so,' and we've solved our listening problem."
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