INTRODUCTION AT A GLANCE

Law firms are villages. Some are hamlets and some seem as large as small towns with distant suburbs, but they all have the village mentality. Villagers are all intensely interested in the goings on of other villagers: how much they earn, their promotion prospects, and their relationships - particularly their flirtatious ones. Villages are hotbeds of gossip and law firms are no different. Villages have histories, usually retained and frequently embroidered in the minds of the oldest inhabitants, and law firms are the same. Villagers bear grudges against other villagers, some of which involve other villages, and lawyers are the same.

In passing the time of day in a village you can often pick up useful information and you can do the same in a law firm. But remember that in a village and in a law firm anything that you say and do can be relayed to other people very quickly. Law firms have the added spice that they are connected by other networks so that things that you say and do, if of interest, may rapidly become the common currency of other firms way beyond the boundaries of your own.

Some years ago one married partner was conducting an affair with one of the secretaries in his firm. She sent him a salacious email, he thought that he was deleting it, but instead he pressed the print button, and by the time he realised what he had done the email had been printed out at the printer outside his office, been picked up by one of the other secretaries, become the subject of gossip and was subsequently reported in the legal press.

One of the very over-used words in this book will be the word 'remember'. This is not just because you need to remember things but because other people remember them as well. So, remember that the memory of the funny, silly, incompetent, rude, negligent, arrogant things that you do is likely to live on in the corporate folk memory much longer than the recollection of the clever ones. But if you do make mistakes, remember that other people make them as well.