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.
Every now and then an anguished howl will yammer across LinkedIn signalscape, as some well-meaning thought leader or other — or sometimes an anonymous self -organising autonomous collective of juniors — lights touchpaper on the topic of the grisly working conditions for young commercial lawyers.
“It cannot be right,” they wail, “in our enlightened times, to torture out younglings so. Fourteen hours a day! Sometimes more! 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 that we must all 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, apposite though they are: there is nothing quite like a good old “shoeing” at the bottom of the ruck every now and then to build a young attorney’s fibre. It builds a kind of resilience that moaning about your lot on LinkedIn never will.
A better question is this: what sort of person regards any part of the big law military industrial complex and feels the tiniest twinge of sympathy? Even the cannon-fodder layer?
Have you not seen Stranger Things? What do you think happens to those cute little Kirkland & Ellis associates when they grow up?
This is not the Russian front. These poor little lambs were not conscripted, press-ganged, nor marched at gunpoint down to the recruitment office. They have spent some years clambering over each other to get that clerkship. They are motivated to this penury. It is part of their plan.
Remember, 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.
And do these people not remember their own tutelage