One of our legal assistants has repeatedly complained about me to my boss, and each time my boss has met with me about it. The first complaint was because I made a copy of a document and wrote notes on the copy in pencil. The second was because I wrote a note in pencil on a manila folder. Most recently, she complained because I was unable to have someone served when they did not appear in court to be served. I haven't been in trouble for anything else. What would you do in my situation?

Change my mind. Most First-Year Associate mistakes are 100% the fault of the partner who gave the vague assignment. Stop berating juniors for failing to capture the strategy when your entire instruction was a 30-second voice note saying look into the liability issue on this case. If you don't provide context, templates, or a clear scope of work, you’re just setting up an over-stressed kid to fail so you can feel superior when you rewrite it.

Ugh hate being a W2 employee. The thought that I'm losing 200k/year in taxes is wild. They've made it really darn hard to retire early by putting extremely high tax loads on people making under 1m/year

Lateral/Conflicts question— my spouse is lateraling to a new firm. This is the first time either one of us has lateraled as we’ve been at our firms since law school so dumb question. He’s been coordinating everything from his personal computer so far. For purposes of filling out the conflicts questionnaire, he’s worried that sending the filled out form containing client data over his personal computer might constitute mishandling of client info for ethical purposes— more in comments

I have noticed that some paralegals and staff are rude to junior lawyers. Why is this the case?Even those really good at their work, they basically try to tell them that they don't take orders from them, but there is a hierarchy and really, they do. Why? what is their issue with junior lawyers?