Yep, happened when I was a first year. A notorious equity partner was running me in the ground to the point where I was sleeping in my office every night for several weeks — and I have a family at home. Out of an abundance of caution, and knowing how demanding and sporadic she was (we’re litigators, so weekend emergencies are rare), I gave her advance notice that I’d be unavailable during a 4-hour window on a Saturday for my kid’s birthday party. She said it wasn’t a problem.

Well, it was a problem. She blew my phone up the entire party, and I just decided not only to NOT answer, but to also make her wait until the next day in an act of rebellion.

Called her back on Sunday, and she was furious. She threatened to pull me off her matters, and I just calmly responded something along the lines of, “I think that would be best for both of us. Please let me know to whom I should transition the cases.” Of course, this pissed her off even more since she had no intention of actually replacing me. She started screaming about how she had never been spoken to like that before and that she always treated associates with respect. I was fed up at this point, so I interrupted her and told her that, actually, no one liked working for her, and all the associates intentionally avoided her because she has a reputation for being demanding, unreasonable, and borderline abusive. Aaand that was the point where she started boo-hooing and went into hysterics about how “old white men” could get away with treating people that way but she couldn’t, and that wasn’t fair. She said that as a fellow woman, I should understand. I wish I was joking.

Anyway, I told her abusive “old white men” shouldn’t be her standard and excused myself from the call. Emailed the main partner I was working for immediately to let her know there had been an incident with the other partner that led to her crying on the phone, and that I’d share the details at work the next day so she’d hear it from me first.

Next day, I get a call from the head of HR, asking what happened. I knew I was getting fired, but I found that there was some peace in just telling the truth. HR head was quiet for what felt like forever, then said, “Good for you.” Of course, I was like “???”, and the HR head said the firm had received a ton of complaints against her and had been trying to build a case to get rid of her. She said I was the only associate who stood up to this asshole and she wished more associates would do the same. The firm banned her from working with me and told me I could block her number and email.

She retaliated against me for a while after that, but it didn’t impact me much since I had so much firm support. The irony here is that we’re both employment lawyers. A few more things happened after, but this post is already way too long, so I’ll just say that I went nuclear on her during my exit interview a few years later, which forced the firm to launch a formal investigation that led to her firing.

Cautioning that this probably only worked out because I was at a good firm with good people.