Page 428 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
Department, which was a very small part of the remainder of Rosen- man, was irrational as a career move. Litigation was a natural field for me. I had been honing my skills by battling my whole life with my mother (a natural litigator if ever there was one), my teachers had told me that I could write, virtually all of law school was taught from a litiga- tion point of view (using, as it did, the case method of instruction), and I was a moot court champion, for crying out loud. Plus, almost nothing in my past related to or demonstrated an aptitude for real estate. So, the move was manifestly unrelated to my experience and what I viewed as my talents.
Further, as received wisdom had it, the move was ill-judged and would be ill-timed: Max, who was the most powerful partner in the firm and ran the Litigation Department with an iron fist, had just forced it to be split operationally into four “teams” of attorneys. Those teams of partners and associates would, in the name of efficiency, function together for the next two years before the lineups would be shaken up, at least as the memo announcing the reconfiguration had it. Guess whose team I had been assigned to. Judging from the four lineups, it was pretty clear that my assignment to Team Freund was quite a compliment and was pretty good evidence that I was doing well—in fact, very well. It institutionalized the assignment pattern that I had experienced over the preceding two years, and according to those wizened veterans whom I consulted, it was evidence that I was clearly on a track to attaining the highest award that could be bestowed on an associate, one that brought the ultimate in status, security, and money: BECOMING A PARTNER! That would happen, if at all, at the end of about eight years. Why squan- der three apparently solid years in the department that had hired me, with the hope that in a mere five years in a field in which I had no expe- rience, I would manage to earn my spurs? Why indeed? So, the move was also ridiculous in terms of customary career goals.
But I was not an associate who was paralyzed by the partnership carrot. I was not even sure that I liked the law, and big firm litigation practice seemed to hold nothing for me but long stretches of long hours on big cases, subject to the will of others. In addition, I perceived that if
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