Law Firms are not complex organizations. Lawyers come in essentially two flavors: associate and partner. Associates, office space and furniture, cases, clients and profits (in reverse order of importance) belong to partners and the more you have of each the more important you are. Everyone else, secretaries, paralegals, tech guys and contractors are chattel, somewhere between a chair and a mule, with of counsels being an anomoly (think talking Donkey). Other offices are more complicated.

I think the biggest difference between a law firm and a regular office is the frequency of disputes with no clear winner. Even first year associates have different leverage walking in on day one and if a dispute occurs (usually over a hook-up that shouldn’t have happened) prior connections or the female associate’s willingness to sleep around quickly determine who has the upperhand.

In a large corporate office an upcoming energetic manager with good client relationships and charisma might be up against an old-school senior manager who doesnt burn the midnight oil anymore but with three decades worth of favors to call-in. Subject Matter Experts compete with Jack-of-all-Trades types for the same promotion. Also not all conflicts come to a head. People get moved to different projects or switch admin teams. When this happens an entirely different group of people hold that person’s advancement fate in their hands.

There is also an administrative process for reporting misconduct and ethics violations that as near as I can tell isn’t a joke (which explains the dirty looks when I kept laughing during that portion of orientation).

Oh and did I mention that almost nobody has any student debt? Yeah now you’re listening. More on that later.