Sell the Fake

You have to sell the fake. It's a sports term. It's when you want your opponent to think you're going one direction when you're really going the other. The only difference between selling the fake on the football field and in the firm, is that a charming smile won't keep a middle linebacker from breaking a few of your ribs.

I talked about how one of the partners handed me a project to work on this morning. It turns out one of our clients may be going to litigation which involves research and preparation in the event the partners cannot reach a settlement. My job is to actually conduct the research, do some mild analysis, and hand the finished product up to the partners so they can make informed decisions on the direction of the case (i.e. which prostitute they'll invite into the their Mercedes later that night). Much of the time this is an exercise in busy work. You learn in your first day of Civil Procedure that only 3% of all cases actually go to trial. To me, that means 97% of all the work I could "potentially" do will be thrown out. That being so, I've learned not to give a shit about many of the projects I get and pass them off to people that actually DO give a shit. Associates. Associates are hungry. Hungry for billable hours. If you have something for them to bill, they'll take it, even if that means not leaving the office until 11 o'clock that night. That's their problem. I leave at 6 everyday, happy hour waits for no one.

So today I handed the project off to this associate Joanne. Why Joanne? She's perfect. She's quiet, hard working, and very self conscious. What's even more perfect is that she's on the other side of the firm from John so they won't bump into each other. I had no problem selling the fake to her this morning. I told her that John had me working a transcript while he wanted her to research the case law. I also told her that when she completed the research to hand it over to me so that I can look for any "smoking guns" in the transcript.

I had covered all my basis. I gave her a reason why I wasn't working on the project myself, a reason why she needed to hand the finished memo to me, and a reason for me to take a 2 hour lunch....