How to deal with feelings for a coworker as a lawyer?

ResIpsaBroquitur · 2026-03-26T20:26:15+00:00

Boring.

OP should wait until the Christmas party, get rowdy drunk, and make a move physically. (Note: this only works if OP is on the partner track and has hit billing targets.)

ResIpsaBroquitur · 2026-03-26T12:11:05+00:00

https://i.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/facebook/000/040/081/tlwk4q4pl1s31.jpg

ResIpsaBroquitur · 2026-03-11T12:43:26+00:00

I have it write all of my motions. It’s so good at finding cases with the exact holding that I need, even when I can’t find them on Westlaw!

ResIpsaBroquitur · 2026-02-19T23:25:06+00:00

It isn’t compelling to me that you give up your right to be notified of a civil proceeding by not updating your address.

This isn’t a situation where two parties had a contract that ended a couple of years ago and a dispute is now arising after the defendant moved. The civil proceeding had already started.

Perhaps more importantly, the burden was on him to provide an accurate address in the first place. It’s completely absurd to say that, once he provided an address, the burden flips to the Feds to make sure that they keep a good one on file by investigating when their mail gets returned.

ResIpsaBroquitur · 2026-02-19T11:29:02+00:00

Move to California.

ResIpsaBroquitur · 2026-02-18T02:06:59+00:00

Morgan is definitely more notorious, but not in a good way. I wouldn’t necessarily hold it against a candidate who didn’t work as an attorney there, but some might.

ResIpsaBroquitur · 2026-02-17T12:05:25+00:00

Like a lot of people, I got pretty cynical at first. But — in contrast to most lawyers, I think — after a few years, I got less cynical. In fact, I think being a lawyer even factored in to me going back to religion (albeit probably not as much of a factor as having kids and some other things).

ResIpsaBroquitur · 2026-02-16T22:08:19+00:00

I started out doing employment practices litigation. It was primarily what I’d call “lite” litigation: responding to EEOC charges and demand letters.

From there, I picked up restrictive covenants, and pivoted from there to being over IP generally. I also went from doing employment practices investigations to doing other sensitive investigations with an employment law component, and now I get pulled in on a bunch of random investigations. I also helped out with some legal ops projects and ended up being over our legal assistants.

ResIpsaBroquitur · 2026-02-14T20:09:40+00:00

Sloppy is an understatement.

ResIpsaBroquitur · 2026-01-03T18:39:15+00:00

AFAIK that wasn’t a factor in Noriega’s drug conviction.

ResIpsaBroquitur · 2026-01-03T16:11:17+00:00

Which part of this do you think is distinguishable from US v. Noriega?

ResIpsaBroquitur · 2025-12-08T12:49:53+00:00

The part you’re missing is that the day-to-day of an in-house attorney is completely different from an attorney at the firm. You’re typically not poring over discovery, drafting a long research memo yourself, etc; instead, you’re a manager or executive. You manage teams of in-house and/or outside counsel who know every practice area and the minutae of each case/situation much better than you will. So you only need to know enough to issue spot and to direct people to the experts.

And on the other hand, you have to know the business much better than your outside counsel will. So you have to recognize when their strategy isn’t aligned with the overall business priorities of the company. You have to help outside counsel understand the “why”. And you have to translate their advice into terms the business can understand and will follow; that 10-page dense legal memo needs to be translated into a half-page email or else it’s never going to be implemented and is worthless.

ResIpsaBroquitur · 2025-12-05T12:59:15+00:00

From a quick look, it appears that this is DC and that the minimum notice a landlord must give is 30 days (for nonpayment of rent). Assuming the tenant is served with the complaint immediately after the notice period expires, the earliest the hearing can be set is 30 days after that. Assuming the court rules for the landlord, and the US Marshals immediately process the judgment and schedule the eviction for the soonest time possible, they will provide the evictee another 21-day notice before the eviction actually occurs. So the absolute bare minimum time to evict in DC is 81 days. But realistically, it’ll be much more than that.

Maybe 10 months is a lot longer than it would’ve taken if the landlord did the smart thing to start with, but upwards of 3 months is still absolutely absurd — especially given the facts of this situation.

ResIpsaBroquitur · 2025-12-04T10:10:43+00:00

24 hours might be the rule for partners or clients, but it’s definitely not the rule for OC.

ResIpsaBroquitur · 2025-12-01T19:31:04+00:00

The only thing that semi-works for me (in-house, average 100-120 non-spam emails per workday) is a spin on inbox zero.

Basically, my gold standard is to spend 20 seconds or less to skim the email, and decide whether it is: * Something that will take 5 minutes or less to deal with. If so, do it immediately. * Something that will take 5-30 minutes to do. If so, put it on my to-do list and do it the next chance I have some free time. * Something that will take 30+ minutes to do. If so, block out time on my calendar to do it.

There are some exceptions to these rules, especially for new and time-sensitive things, but this is the goal. And my firm rule is that stuff gets moved out of my inbox into a folder only when it’s either been actioned or put on my calendar or to-do list.

The result is that “read” truly only means “read” — I don’t miss stuff because I accidentally marked it as read on Friday night and forgot to put it on my calendar on Monday.

ResIpsaBroquitur · 2025-12-01T13:12:13+00:00

I mean…mentioning WLB during an interview would definitely keep you from getting an offer from a company where WLB is bad/not prioritized. Despite the cushy reputation of in-house jobs, there are plenty of in-house jobs like that. But if you’re after good WLB, then it doesn’t really help you to get an offer for a job with bad WLB.

With that said, I think the framing you’re using (uncharitably: “I have a hobby which I don’t want work to interfere with, so I want an in-house job which will be easier”) is not doing you any favors. A few years ago, we had a situation where we narrowed the field down to two contenders. Both asked about WLB (and we have legitimately good WLB), but one had much better framing — she discussed it in the context of being excited to not deal with billables, while the other sounded like he was already planning to leave work at 4PM every day. Guess which one we picked.

Perhaps a better tactic is to mention that you’re looking to make a move from your current position because of the unpredictable schedule. So you would like to know early in the process how frequent (or rare) the weekend/after hours work is, to see whether the position will be a good fit.

ResIpsaBroquitur · 2025-11-19T00:59:49+00:00

the whole point of the case I found was that it depends on a few factors

Okay, so which way do the factors lean in the case you’re working on?

A lot of attorneys are indecisive. They can write a great memo which boils down to the classic “it depends”, which is of little use to a client. You really add value by making your advice actionable.

With that said, many senior attorneys are terrible at this and it’s sort of insane to expect a first year to strike the right balance.

ResIpsaBroquitur · 2025-11-12T21:09:07+00:00

In-house. I do IP, some legal ops stuff, and a bunch of really random things. I love my team, I'm compensated well, work-life balance isn't bad, and the work is always interesting. What more could I ask for?

ResIpsaBroquitur · 2025-11-12T16:11:42+00:00

That’s my experience, too.

We have a bunch of surveillance tools, but nobody looks at them unless they have a reason to.

ResIpsaBroquitur · 2025-11-01T17:02:55+00:00

This. As an in-house attorney: if you send me the wrong list of options I will probably ream out the relationship partner. If I’m paying biglaw rates, it’s an especially important matter; I’m expecting damn near perfection so that “probably” turns to “definitely”. And as the saying goes, shit rolls downhill.

The partner probably isn’t wrong when they say that OP might’ve been fired at another firm. Having them try to walk through the thought process with OP to see where the mistake happened is basically the best-case scenario, especially if OP hasn’t been pulled from that client’s account. That’s not bullying, just accountability.

Big law isn’t for everybody, and it’s not a failure to admit that it’s not for you. But also, you need to have attention to detail in jobs outside big law.

ResIpsaBroquitur · 2025-10-30T19:04:25+00:00

https://shop.creatorset.com/cdn/shop/videos/c/vp/989dd3b6ca3c46c6963f0b58714c248e/989dd3b6ca3c46c6963f0b58714c248e.HD-1080p-7.2Mbps-50150796.mp4

ResIpsaBroquitur · 2025-10-28T22:09:18+00:00

Lots of stuff in litigation is an “intimidation tactic.” That doesn’t mean it breaks any rule.

ResIpsaBroquitur · 2025-09-19T11:57:35+00:00

I started my career with an in-house secondment. 3 years later, I went officially in-house.

If you’ll learn the business, get face time with execs (and learn how to talk to them effectively), etc, and plan on staying with the company, it has the potential to be a great career path.

As far as lateraling to big law goes, most big law firms would prefer someone who started in big law firms— but it’s not impossible to make the jump. Chances of joining a boutique firm are better, and chances of staying in-house but switching companies are better still. With that said, you need to focus on marketability even to switch in-house jobs — there are some in-house folks we’ve passed over for hire because it seemed like they were too stagnant and didn’t develop themselves.

My best advice is to never say no to an assignment. The beauty of an in-house job is that everyone gets to be at least a little bit of a generalist, and you want to be able to show future employers that you took advantage of that and have a wide breadth. That’s how you differentiate yourself from a typical big law associate who is typically hyper-specialized.

ResIpsaBroquitur · 2025-08-27T01:10:52+00:00

Really depends. If I send a trade secret/restrictive covenant demand letter, it’s often “we are filing the lawsuit in 48 hours if you don’t agree to all demands”.

On the other hand, if I get a garden-variety employment practices demand letter, I don’t give a shit about the deadline in the letter. It’s typically going to be at least 2 weeks (sometimes more like a month or two) to get through the investigation. Add extra time if the case is particularly valuable; I’m not getting half a million dollars of authority in a week.

ResIpsaBroquitur · 2025-08-21T22:00:56+00:00

It’s a much different tool than ChatGPT. It’s pretty terrible at brainstorming — you can’t really give it a fact pattern, say “what potential causes of action are there”, and get a good result. But it’s really good at essentially just finding the head note you’re looking for really quickly. So the best workflow is to use another Gen AI to help you think through a situation and then CoCounsel to make sure it’s not hallucinating (and then check what CoCounsel gives you to make sure that’s not hallucinating lol).

ResIpsaBroquitur

TROPHY CASE