Office Etiquette
Working with Those More Senior
An excerpt from The Modern Rules of Business Etiquette
by Donna Gerson

The Modern Rules of Business Etiquette (2008) by Donna Gerson and David Gerson is a valuable tool for all business professionals who recognize the important role interpersonal skills play in the success of their career, and their business.  Call the ABA Service Center at 1-800-285-2221 to order, or order online at www.ababooks.org. 

As you prepare for your summer job or your first job as a lawyer, it’s essential that you know the rules of business etiquette, especially for working with those senior to yourself

The text of this article is excerpted from the ABA’s newly published, The Modern Rules of Business Etiquette, by Donna Gerson, contributing editor of Student Lawyer, and her husband, David Gerson, a partner at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius. The book also features etiquette rules for interviewing, changing jobs, office events after working hours, and working with peers, support staff, clients, opposing counsel, and others.

Law is a service business, within which our highest priority is to serve our clients. That priority extends from the most senior lawyer in each attorney-client relationship through the people in the mail room, and embraces everyone in between. Every successful lawyer recognizes that, while technical brilliance can carry you far down the field, service excellence enables you to cross the goal line.

The junior lawyer, especially when working in a larger, institutional setting, may be tempted at first to see clients as remote, other-worldly beings. In fact, though, clients are all around them; clients are behind the memos they write, the depositions they attend, the due diligence documents they review; clients are the recipients of the timesheet entries they compose; ultimately, clients are writing the paychecks they cash (and then promptly use to pay their law school debt). More immediately, junior lawyers have a separate, often insistent set of clients readily at hand: as a junior lawyer, the more senior lawyers with whom you work are your clients.
As with external clients, your primary goal in working with those more senior than you should be to make the job of the more senior attorney easier, by being eager, appropriate, honest, timely, available, and responsive; the etiquette of working with more senior lawyers revolves around each of those specific behaviors. If you can master not just the substance, but also the style, of serving in a more junior role, then you’ll truly squeeze the most out of each experience, quickly assume the higher levels of responsibility you seek, and at the same time gain valuable insights into how to manage client relationships and entire matters, and how to supervise more junior attorneys yourself someday.

Let’s look at some specific situations in which junior lawyers often find themselves, and try to discern some of the “do’s and don’ts” of working in a more junior role.

The importance of being earnest
Imagine that you’re a junior attorney, recently embarked upon your career, sitting at your desk and waiting for the phone to ring (perhaps dreading that it will). When the call does come, don’t answer with trepidation or resignation; put a smile on your face and a song in your heart, and say, “I’m happy to help in any way; I’ll be right down.” Come prepared; bring a pad and a pen at all times. Sit up in your chair. Look the assigning attorney in the eye. Pay rapt attention, look eager, and take good notes as the assignment is given.

Wait until the assignment has been laid out, then ask any questions that have occurred to you during the assignment meeting; there really are “no stupid questions,” and you’ll show respect for the external client by seeking to be efficient in resolving the obvious issues upfront. Before leaving, be sure to ask when the assignment is due, and when before then the assigning attorney wants you to check back with a preliminary report. Finally, tell the assigning attorney, “I’m sure I’ll have additional questions as I get under way; what’s the best time and way to reach you for clarification or guidance?”
In all of the foregoing behaviors—each of which is its own, self-contained little rule of etiquette—you’ll convey the earnestness that says to a more senior attorney, “This person is on the ball; I’m in good hands.”

Do you have a second?
So, now it’s a day or two later, and you’re in the heart of the assignment, when suddenly you hit a brick wall; you need guidance in order to go on. Trotting down to the assigning attorney’s office, you find a scene of loosely organized madness; a secretary is putting one caller on hold while the second line rings, there’s a fresh six-inch stack of papers in the “in” box; hand-marked documents are strewn across the assigner’s desk in various stages of completion; and the assigning attorney is hunched over a keyboard, clearly enrapt in tapping out an e-mail.

In other words, you arrive in medias res; you’re about to interrupt. In so doing, you’re about to take the assigning attorney out of what he or she was doing—out of a particular frame of mind, thought process, and state of knowledge— and ask him or her to shift gears in order to re-enter your project, get up to speed on where you started and where you are now, understand the obstacle you’re facing, and help guide you forward; in short, to switch gears completely, and at high speed.

Consider, instead, asking the secretary how you can secure a moment of the assigning attorney’s time to help resolve an issue in your project. That gives the assigner the chance to resolve his or her crises in an orderly fashion, and devote more complete and thoughtful attention to yours.

You’ll likely get a clearer, more helpful response, while at the same time not adding to the pressures on the more senior attorney. (Of course, if you’re truly in meltdown mode, or up against a critical deadline, then interruption may be appropriate.)

The rule of etiquette here is not to presume that your own issue takes precedence, but to defer where possible to the more senior attorneys to prioritize the challenges they face—including the challenges you face on their behalf—in the way that most efficiently and effectively serves their external clients.

“Mr. Corleone insists . . .”
What happens when the conclusion you reach appears to be different from the one that the assigning attorney expected? That happens; after all, if all of the answers were known or preordained, there would be no real reason to occupy you with finding them anew. Still, it can be disturbing, even terrifying, to feel as though you’re about to deliver a different answer than was anticipated. What if you’ve uncovered something that causes a whole case or deal to move into uncharted territory? Worse yet, what if you’re wrong? It’s enough to make you want to sit in your office with the door closed, either staring at the phone or updating your résumé, and many a junior attorney does just that.

In the classic film, The Godfather, the Don’s consigliere, attorney Tom Hagen, tells someone who has failed to accede to the Don’s wishes, “Mr. Corleone is a man who insists on hearing bad news immediately.” Similarly, your rule of etiquette when you have bad news to deliver should be to do so immediately, and preferably in person. This is an instance where interruption is appropriate; moreover, it’s one in which your ability to look the assigner in the eye and lay out your case can be critical in conveying the importance of what you have to say, and in helping the assigning attorney to access both your verbal and nonverbal cues in order to integrate the news and decide how to proceed.

At the very least, convey your conclusion by phone, if a face-to-face meeting isn’t possible for some reason. Try to stay away from voice mail messages of bad news, and avoid e-mail except as a last resort; as a communication medium, e-mail lacks the ability to convey tone and nuance, and is thus uncommonly prone to misunderstanding at a time when concision and content are key.

Better late than never . . . NOT
A handy guideline for both assigning attorneys, and those who work for them, is that everything takes longer than you think it will. When an assigning attorney says, “This should take you an hour or two,” plan for more like four or six; if you finish early, then more’s the better. (Note, though, that this is different from an assigning attorney saying, “Spend an hour on this and then report back.” In that case, an hour means an hour, either because there’s a looming deadline or a budget consideration—or both—and you should adhere to the restriction.)

Still, sometimes work really does expand beyond the time available for its completion, and, despite your best efforts, you’re about to run late or, worse yet, you actually blow clean past the deadline. Many junior attorneys are tempted to conclude that, “If they aren’t screaming for it, they must not need it,” and to keep working—or just hide— until the project is finally done, or escape is impossible.

The rule of etiquette in this situation, however, is precisely the opposite: as soon as you perceive that a deadline won’t be met, inform the supervising attorney immediately, and work out a new timeline. Hiding under your desk with a blanket, a flashlight, and a three-day supply of crackers will not avail you in these circumstances. While you’re busy assuming that the assigning attorney really didn’t need this when he said he did, he’s busy assuming that you have it all taken care of, and what falls through the gap between those two assumptions is the interest of the external client, who may be prejudiced (or simply annoyed) by not receiving an answer when she wanted it.

Is anybody out there?
Let’s shift our scene somewhat, and enter the office of the more senior attorney. Amidst the tumult of her day, a thought comes into her mind, of her more junior colleague, toiling away on a project assigned to him earlier, and the thought is one that requires outreach—perhaps a status check, possibly a new fact that might be of help to the more junior attorney, maybe a change in the timetable for completion. The senior attorney sends a message, by e-mail or voice mail, and receives back . . . nothing. No acknowledgment of receipt, no reply, just the sound of one hand clapping, and that hand is not attached to the arm of the more junior colleague.

What do you do when a more senior attorney (or anyone, for that matter, from the partner in charge to the peanut vendor) reaches out for you? The rule of etiquette is, “respond.” A simple “got it” will serve, in many circumstances. When an attorney leading a project communicates with you as a team member, he’s creating in his head a mental checklist item; by acknowledging the communication, and, if possible, reporting status, you allow the supervisor to tick off that item and move on to the next, thereby keeping the entire project on track. Silence here is not golden, it’s merely unhelpful.

Where’s Waldo?
Staying with our theme of the more senior attorney searching out the more junior colleague, hardly anything can be more frustrating to a project leader than being unable to locate a team member when needed. This doesn’t mean that you need to chain yourself to your desk, or take your BlackBerry to bed with you, but it does mean that you need to be capable of being located when you’re likely to be needed. The rule of etiquette, then, is to let someone know how to reach you when you’re away from your desk during normal business hours, or, outside business hours, when you would be expected to be reachable.

If you’re going to lunch, tell your secretary, and give a sense of when you expect to be back; if you’ll be in a meeting, let your assistant know whether you can be disturbed, and, if so, then for whom you must be disturbed; if you will be in the bathroom, washing your feet in the sink (a true story, but one for another chapter, or perhaps another book altogether), then either return quickly or leave a trail of bread crumbs so that you can be found in a pinch. In all events, accept that you’re a part of a collaborative effort—and a key part, no matter how junior you may think you are—and accord your teammates the courtesy of being able to be located when required.

The Golden Rules of Etiquette
We would like to leave you with a set of guidelines to help you know what to do in almost any situation, or to know why you should act in a particular way, so that you can deduce the appropriate behavior yourself. We call these the “Golden Rules of Etiquette.”

Etiquette is empathy
The first and most important Golden Rule of Etiquette is the “golden rule” itself: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Whether you learned this principle from its Old Testament origins, from its New Testament revival, from another of the many religious and secular sources that incorporate this notion, or just from plain old-fashioned common sense, if you can internalize this fundamental concept, then you’re already more than halfway to your destination in any situation that demands a well-mannered response or behavior.

All we’re really encouraging is that each of us take the time to place ourselves in the shoes of another (the colleague with whom we’re working on a case, the client who’s waiting for an answer, the opposing counsel who’s across the table from us in a deal, the stranger in the elevator), and then act in a way that makes the person comfortable, as we ourselves would want to be comfortable in those circumstances. Most questions of etiquette truly can be resolved by making them into simple questions of empathy, without knowing a single other “rule.”

Etiquette is also respect
Our empathic approach presumes that we would want to be treated in the shoes of another with respect—not for our position, rank, seniority, wealth, status, or caste, but rather for ourselves as a fellow human being. The notion of etiquette would be turned on its head, if we were to imagine etiquette as a set of behaviors founded on the notion that the way people want to be treated is with contempt, derision, or dismissiveness.

Etiquette as respect does not attach merely to people, but also to everything about their situation: their time, their responsibilities, the competing demands to which they are subject, their role within an organization or a community or a family.

Etiquette is a social lubricant
Etiquette makes it possible for people who don’t have their own independent relationships of trust and respect with one another to nonetheless interact with a minimum of friction because they each do what’s more or less expected in any given circumstance. Such a lubricant can help lead to true respect, and later to actual trust, as the parties build confidence in one another over a longer course of interaction. Without etiquette (even the ad hoc variety based on empathy without set rules), our mercurial natures could easily undermine confidence and leave us isolated and ineffective.

Etiquette disarms
Etiquette makes it more difficult for counterparties to summon outrage or anger or raised voices in service of their argument. A polite and quiet approach to tense interactions can create either an induced sense of complacency or intense frustration and disorientation on the other side of the interchange; either can create opportunities to turn a situation to the benefit of the more well-behaved party.

Etiquette conveys forethought
We all look smarter than we are when that extra instant taken to manage an interaction with a modicum of grace suggests that we know what we’re doing, what effect we’re having on others, and that we’re mature and careful enough to handle anything that comes our way. Etiquette can help us not merely rise to the occasion, but also to create occasions that rise to us.

Etiquette is not an altruistic behavior
In fact, it’s just as much about self-interest as it is concerned with anyone else. Because etiquette comforts the recipient of well-mannered behavior, eases the path, and builds confidence, its application necessarily benefits the practitioner.

—Excerpted from The Modern Rules of Business Etiquette, Chapter 12, by Donna Gerson and David Gerson (ABA Publishing, 2008)

"Office Etiquette: Working with Those More Senior" by Donna Gerson and David Gerson, published in Student Lawyer, Volume 36, No. 8, April 2008.  ©by the American Bar Association.  Reprinted with permission.

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