My Last Day...

Today is my last day as an associate at Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP.   It’s a custom at the firm for each departing associate to write a short email that’s sent around to the entire firm describing what the departing associate plans on doing after he or she leaves the firm and thanking his collogues for their mentorship and friendship.  I’ll post a draft of my departure memorandum here when it becomes available, but I wanted to provide some more thoughtful comments on my last day at STB.

Simpson is an amazing place to work.  Never in my life did I think I could be surrounded by hundreds of such talented, brilliant and hard-working people as I have been for the past 2.5 years.   I saw partners and associates routinely out-class and out-wit partners and associates at other law firms and at investment banks. I saw a senior associate work from Saturday morning until Monday at 5 p.m., with nothing but a 30-minute nap during the entire period. As a junior associate, I did the same.   Most importantly though, I saw attorney’s take ownership of work product and care about what they were doing.  In my Corporations class at HLS, we learned about the concept of agency costs.  At Simpson, we never had any.  The clients of Simpson are incredibly lucky.

At the same time, I think there are some things that could really improve the quality of life at Simpson for attorneys.  When you’re being recruited to big law firms, you hear things like “resources of a big firm.”  I never really understood what that meant until I started working at STB.  We do have incredible resources; a strong bank of precedents, incredibly smart people that you can reach with a quick phone call, and the word processing and technological developments you would expect from a firm that generates nearly $1 billion in revenue annually.   What we don’t have is smart staffing, smart technology or smart forms.  

Smart Staffing 

Smart staffing is more generalist staffing.  When I was a junior associate in the Credit group, our Securities group was slammed with work.   Even when I didn’t have much to do in the Credit group, I would never be staffed to the Securities group, even to do something routine.  Part of the resources of a big firm are people, and we should have more generalist staffing for junior associates.  Junior’s should “concentrate” on their group while they are rotating, but they shouldn’t be pigeon-hold there as they are currently.  As a Credit junior associate, I could perform Securities or M&A diligence as quickly and expertly as Securities or M&A junior associates.  Similarly, as an M&A junior, I could create officer’s certificates as easily as a Credit or Securities junior.  This became even more true after I rotated through those groups.  By the time I was in M&A, I had already rotated through Securities and Credit and could certainly perform diligence or draft officer’s certificates as well juniors in those groups. 

This isn’t to say that this should always happen or that we should have 4 juniors staffed to every deal like Cahill Gordon.  This isn’t to say that people should never have to work past 6 p.m.  This is only to say that it doesn’t make sense for some junior associates to have to work until 4 a.m. while others aren’t during anything even during normal business hours.   By staffing slow junior corporate associates to matters outside the group in which they are currently rotating, we’ll improve the quality of our work product, provide more experience to slow junior associates and improve associate morale.

I don’t think we could have “smart staffing” after the rotation process, as attorneys tend to specialize and the work becomes less routine.  During the rotation process, though, smart staffing makes sense.   

Smart Technology 

Smart technology is so simple and so time saving, it blows my mind that we haven’t implemented it.  It should be designed by someone who uses it all the time (an attorney!) and be frictionless. 

First, we should have a bank of precedents that’s incredibly easy to access.   Want a purchase agreement from Goldman Sachs?  You should be able to access our precedents bank, scroll down to “Purchase Agreements” and refine that search by scrolling to “Goldman Sachs.”  Then, you should chronologically be able to access the purchase agreements Goldman Sachs has agreed to and know who represented Goldman in each of those cases.  Want the form opinion for Cravath?  Go to “Opinions” and “Cravath”.  Anything more difficult then this is shameful.  When I was leaving Simpson, I was billing out at something like $500/hour.  It shouldn’t take me 15 minutes and cost a client $125 to find a precedent.  Instead, it should take 10 seconds to find 125 precedents. 

Second, we should make redlining easier.  I shouldn’t have to save a document, close it, highlight two documents, right click, select “Deltaview”, hit “continue and then wait for a redline to appear.  I should just hit a single button while in Microsoft Word that automatically does all this for me, and allows me to keep the document I’m working on open.  On average, I bet that this would save every corporate associate 9 minutes per day.  That’s a lot of minutes.

Third, we should just have better hardware.  I’m pretty sure that the computer in my office was meant to run Windows 95, not Windows 7.  We ask corporate associates to bring in their own second monitors rather than providing one, even though this should be standard procedure.  Lets be more considerate as a law firm and improve the quality of our hardware.

Smart Forms

If you’ve ever seen the form Simpson Opinion, enough said.  If you haven’t, I hope you never have to. 

I started at Simpson on 9/21/2009.  I can still remember my first day of orientation  as a summer associate, and as a first-year associate.  I can remember walking into 425 Lexington Avenue with pride.  Walking out on February 6, 2012, for the last time, I leave proud.  Best of luck to you all...