GeekLawyer’s Blog

The Times recently ran a piece discussing things that, as a lawyer, one should not do:

• Piss off ones secretary

There is the legendary story of the secretary who spilled ‘ketchup’ on her partner’s trousers and for which he attempted to reclaim the piffling £4 in cleaning costs. One wonders if ketchup is a euphemism for semen in office sex circles. But anyway, he was earning £100k a year and she £25k. Moral if you must have a Monika Lewinsky moment or even if you earn more than your secretary don’t hassle the poor cow into paying for the privilege, it’ll just backfire.

• Beware of email: it ain’t just electrons, it bites

Claire Swire, secretary at a law firm, has a Lewinsky moment with her boyfriend, a lawyer at the same firm. Since he was a solicitor he was inevitably somewhat the cad. When she complimented him on the taste of his semen he circulated it to his friends and they to theirs until some 20 million people had seen it.

Moral to girls: if you must swallow then do it with a barrister. Geeklawyer is a barrister. He will happily give advice on this matter to pretty young girls who are encouraged to seek an immediate conference with him.

• Beware substances

Geeklawyer reckons that most things are acceptable in moderation: half a dozen whiskeys at lunch, a bottle of shampoo in the evening, a couple of lines of coke before an application hearing, 3 or 4 E’s at a rave with a spliff chaser. If only others were so abstemious as Geeklawyer; some people go too far and their careers spontaneously ignite as a result. While no-one cares much when this happens to nurses, doctors, charity workers, war heroes or the sick frail and vulnerable, substance abuse writes its most poignant epitaph on the tombs of those heros of the modern age: the lawyers. Worst of all is the lethal allure of chocolate.

• lose documents

This ranges from having the wind blow away the settlement cheque that was to be paid into court on the final day at the last possible moment right down to the banality of leaving stuff on a bus. Geeklawyer did once leave a deeply confidential opinion in a Tesco’s supermarket so, although he got away with it, he can’t sneer, unfortunately.

The article tells of one hapless trainee who was nervous and disorganised and when he couldn’t cope and things got difficult he took files home and hid them under his bed. He was eventually discovered and a partner at the firm had to go and recover them. Geeklawyer thought that this was a reasonable approach that failed only because of a lack of resolve on the trainee’s part: had he stuck doggedly to his line and perhaps set up a friend at his firm to take the rap he would have survived. As a prospective lawyer his failure was not in being unable to cope, but being unable to shift the blame competently; it was for that alone that he deserved to fail.

• abuse others

This category rather mystified Geeklawyer. Apparently “there is rarely going to be a good reason for starting correspondence: ‘Dear Taffy bastard …’”. Well, this is clearly wrong on several levels. If one’s correspondent is Welsh then being addressed as ‘Taffy Bastard‘ is positively flirtatious: the Welsh are barely human let alone deserving of civility. But in any event if ones opponent is a cunt then, frankly, saying so is entirely fair if not always politic.