Managing Your Manager - The Baby Lawyer
This blog series has been prepared using content from The Support Staff Community’s Managing Your Manager seminar on 7 November 2019.
Managing Upwards
Harvard Business Review describes managing upwards as “the process of consciously working with your superior to obtain the best possible results for you, your boss, and the company”.
It effectively means being aware of and working in a way that supports your manager’s working style and professional goals, which may mean adapting your own working style to suit them.
Learning how to “manage your manager”, or manage upwards, will make your working life a lot easier. By managing upwards, you will build a more meaningful working relationship with your manager which will lead to improving your communication and processes.
On the other hand, working against your lawyer's style and in a way that does not support them will only create friction within your working relationship and make your day to day working life more difficult.
There are many different working styles and personalities that you may come across during your career in legal support. As a legal support professional, you may often be working for lawyers that have characteristics that present certain challenges. To work effectively with your lawyer, it will be helpful to identify these characteristics and learn how to manage them.
In this post, we will be identifying the Lifestyle Lawyer and addressing some of the challenges that come with working for one of these types of lawyers.
The Baby Lawyer
How to recognise them:
The baby lawyer is a graduate solicitor or junior lawyer who is fresh out of law school. They will have under 3 years experience and be extremely unsure about themselves. They will often ask you questions about procedural aspects of the law, and may not be confident in managing you as their PA, unsure on what work to allocate and how to give clear instructions.
How to manage them:
Challenge 1: Lack of experience or skills in your area of law
Ideally, a baby lawyer will be paired with an assistant who has a mid to high level of experience in the area of law in which they practice. The assistant will then be able to draw upon their own experience to assist the lawyer with any procedural questions that they might have.
Don’t let them rely on your knowledge and do all of the work though! It is especially important for these lawyers in the first years of practice to become familiar with these procedural aspects of law – make sure that you help your lawyer by answering their questions, rather than doing the job for them.
If you don’t have a lot of experience, this can also be a learning experience for you! When your lawyer is unsure of anything and you can’t answer their questions, you could use this as an opportunity to do some research and find the answer. It might be helpful to refer to Court websites, which often contain information brochures and research databases such as CCH which often contain commentary and guidelines on certain procedures.
Challenge 2: Lack of management skills
A baby lawyer may struggle with delegating work to a PA because they have not been required to manage a PA previously. They may struggle with allocating work to you and providing accurate instructions in order for you to complete a task. This is something that a junior lawyer will need to become comfortable with. This will usually just take time, but you might be able to assist them in this regard by:
Regularly approaching them to ask if there is anything you can assist with;
Setting out for them what kind of tasks you can and can't assist them with; and
Clarifying their instructions and detailing for them what information you need to be provided in order to complete a task from start to finish.
Stay tuned for further blog posts addressing other lawyer types, such as the anxious lawyer, the absent lawyer, the micromanaging lawyer and more!
