Trainee
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People Anatomy™
A spotter’s guide to the men and women of finance.
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Little basil fotherington-tomas before he is turned.
You will hear, every now and then, an anguished howl will yammer across LinkedIn emanating from some well-meaning thought leader or other — or some times posted anonymously by a self -organising autonomous collective of juniors — on the topic of working conditions for young commercial lawyers.
“It cannot be right,” they wail, “in our enlightened times, to torture out younglings so. They are not up to it. It will crush them. We must be humane.”
There will then follow a long and tiring diatribe about the fragile mental health of the junior bar, culminating in robust accord agreement that we must at every opportunity, speak loudly and at tedious length about our own mental health.
The JC will spare you his usual Nietzschean quotes about military life, though they are apposite: a good old “shoeing” at the bottom of the ruck every now and then is just what a young attorney needs. It does ones resilience a power of good that moaning about your lot on LinkedIn never will.
A better question is this: what sort of person regards the military industrial complex that is big law and feels the tiniest twinge if sympathy for any part of it? Even the cannon-fodder layer? These babes in arms are charged out, from the moment they put down their joss-sticks and hacky-sacks and throw on a suit, at five hundred bucks an hour. And they know nothing. Their work is thus triple checked by some slightly older cherub who is paid nine-hundred bucks an hour and knows barely any more. You are paying an effective rate of sixteen hundred bucks an hour a kid you wouldn't trust to wash your car if he lived on your street.