There comes a time in every managing attorney’s life when they have to decide exactly when the associate counsels they hired fresh out of law school are ready to give a case a go on their own.
Starting as young apprentices, you have taken them under your wing, trained them, and nurtured them into the Jedis they are today. But the question of when they are ready for their lightsaber is more art than science.
Some enter the workforce with a natural knack and are able to handle their own caseload after a short training period. Others may take a bit longer. And all the while your role is to monitor their growth and make the ultimate call when you are comfortable with them representing your firm or company to the public at large.
Working in-house for a large hospital network, one of the most common cases our attorneys handle are medical malpractice claims.
When we send an attorney off on his or her own, we do so with an appreciation of the fact they are defending two of our most precious commodities, our physicians and our reputation. The loss of either is catastrophic to a hospital.
I recently had a case that I tasked one of our newish attorneys with handling on her own. She had great academic credentials, was a quick study on our workplace, and I was confident she would represent us, and our doctor, well.
As I typically do, I accompanied the attorney to her first meeting with our doctor and quickly realized our doctor did not share my confidence. While the attorney was young with the majority of her professional career ahead of her, our pulmonologist had been with our system for over 30 years and was staring at the twilight of his career.
It became clear he disagreed with my choice of counsel and was worried his representation would not be adequate.
I quickly doubled down and reminded him he was always free to retain his own counsel, but that I was standing by my attorney as the right choice for his case. As you might imagine, when faced with the choice between thousands in out-of-pocket legal fees or our offer of counsel, he quickly relented.
Exactly as I knew she would, our attorney dove into the case with gusto over the following weeks and put in enough hours that would make even the grumpiest of Biglaw partners proud. As the day of her first hearing approached, I had no doubt she would excel, but I was still anxious about the final verdict. The one I would receive back from the pulmonologist, that is.
On the day of the hearing, I kept my phone at the ready knowing I would receive a call from our doctor as soon as they had finished.
When the call finally came in, I excused myself from a meeting, stepped into the hallway, and held the phone a solid six inches from my ear expecting nothing but yelling to come from the other end.
But to my surprise, he launched in straight away with a full-fledged endorsement of his counsel and went so far as to thank me for forcing him to stick with her. As expected, the young Jedi had knocked it out of the park.
While knowing when a counsel is ready to venture on their own can be a difficult judgment call, it is also the most rewarding.
I now have an extra set of dependable hands in the understaffed in-house world, and almost as important, I have a happy doctor. Which in the world of in-house for a hospital, is a rare commodity.
Stephen R. Williams is in-house counsel with a multi-facility hospital network in the Midwest. His column focuses on a little talked about area of the in-house life, management. You can reach Stephen at stephenwilliamsjd@gmail.com.
When It’s Time To Let Your Associate Counsels Shine curated from Above the Law
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