Time Recording - AWK.AWK.03

This is the third instalment of our popular time recording How-To series:  Awkward Encounters. You've just completed your first seat, and for the last month have been adulting like a real lawyer. Conversations at drinks with trainee friends focus less and less on the embarrassing moments of the past week, and you are able to move onto other topics.

But you move to your next group. You've passed Stage 1 (Excitement) and have potentially progressed onto Stage 2 (Overwhelmed) (see earlier post). Suddenly, you're finding the need to pull out that old AWK.AWK timer, which you thought you'd left behind. This post aims to provide some further examples with which to help you decide if your second seat encounters are awkward enough to constitute recordable time.

Slips of the tongue

You're Australian and are used to saying "Your Honour" when faced with Court scenarios. You attend an advocacy course where you learn that when addressing a High Court judge in the UK, you must use "My Lord/My Lady" or "Your Lordship/ Your Ladyship". Your brain somehow chooses to go with "Your Honship". The minutes of embarrassed silence following, not once, but every time you accidentally say "Your Honship" is accountable time.

Getting a little too comfortable

You've been successfully navigating the banter at work, making light jokes and having a laugh. You're feeling pretty confident. You walk into an associate's office and strike up a conversation. He mentions that he's feeling a bit overheated and asks if you feel it too. You reply "the whole office is hot, you're not just radiating heat due to your good looks". The long, suffering silence that follows is all recordable under AWK.AWK.03.

The Blank

A female Senior Associate in the group, who you think is an absolute boss, comes into your office to talk to your supervisor. To your surprise and delight, she compliments the salad you're eating and asks you what's in it. She has never spoken to you before, and in your internal excitement you temporarily lose the ability to recall vegetable names. You stare forward for 15-20 seconds in complete silence, only realising later that your Resting Bitch Face was on full strength as you tried desperately to remember the word for "grated carrot". 

The 15-20 seconds of blank stare, plus the minutes of agony that follow after the Senior Associate smiles awkwardly and turns to your supervisor before you can get out a single word, are all recordable under this time code. 

What's said in the office, stays in the office

You and your supervisor get along great. As an Australian, you inevitably get into a debate about the word "thong". A debate ensues where you allege that if you search Google for "thongs", pictures of flip flops will come up. He thinks you're wrong, asserting that pictures of G-strings will be the only result. So you put it to the test, searching for "thongs" on Google images. Of course it's at this moment that a Partner walks into your office, staring horrified at your computer screen which shows, mostly, bottoms of all shapes and sizes. She recovers, and speaks to your supervisor without mentioning anything. You quickly close the screen. 

She leaves, and you say to your supervisor that the result will be different if you search google.com.au. So you type in that search and bring up another array of bottoms and cracks, with a couple of flip flops. The Partner, forgetting something, walks back into the room. If your supervisor and the Partner look like this, then it's all accountable:

Out of arms' way

You've had a rough week and have just moved into your new seat....literally, you're sitting in your new seat and trying to adapt it to your new desk. You try to adjust the armrest but it won't move. You tug at it gently, but it still won't budge. You try to pull it harder, and suddenly the arm flings off the chair and flies across the room. Your brand new supervisor, of course, chooses that moment to walk in and sees the arm of your chair lying on the floor. He asks if everything's ok, you want to say:

What's in a name?

You go to ask an associate a question over email, but accidentally send the email to a client instead. You feel mildly embarrassed - this in itself will not be recordable under the AWK.AWK code. On the other hand, the client receives your email with good humour and tells you a story. When they were an associate, they wanted to ask their PA to do some printing ahead of a meeting, but sent the email to the Financial Director of a FTSE 100 company who happened to have the same name. Safe to say the FD apparently did not bring the print outs to the meeting. This would be recordable under AWK.AWK.03.

Inappropriate hugging

This example seems so obvious it need not be stated, but unfortunately, mistakes do happen. You've been in your new seat for three weeks now and find the group to be lovely. This gives you a false sense of security. One day, you find yourself creeping towards 6pm with 3 tasks all due that night. Your team are also urging you to go to the team drinks. You go to the drinks, intending to only go for an hour and then head back to your desk, but instead you get tipsy off one glass of wine - this regularly happens at law firm drinks where dinner consists of a handful of crisps. An associate in your group very kindly speaks to the Partner for you and gets the deadline moved to Monday, clearing you to stay at the drinks. You are overjoyed, wrap your arms around her and give her a hug. 

Do not hug your colleagues. They are your colleagues. 

While you were too tipsy to notice the awkwardness at the time, you may retrospectively record such time once awkwardness is realised.

The five stages of trainee

I have officially finished my first seat! Six months of general litigation have come and gone, and I'm one quarter through my training contract. I'll get the (meagre) status boost of being a "second seater" and should be able to hit the ground running more so than in my first seat. That means no time needed to get used to our electronic filing system, working out how to send something to the printing department or order dinner from the canteen.

It will be a step back though. Someone suggested to me that we'll lose around 30% of our capability when we move seats. That's very specific (I'll let you know if it's closer to 35%) but I think I understand what he meant. There will be a new culture to get used to, new banter, new personalities, a new subject-matter of work (I'll actually be wikipedia-ing real estate law today!), new research tools and new lingo. 

We have "handover" coffees or drinks with the trainee that we're taking over from, where they go through the background of the group's work, the personalities in the group, the tasks that you'll be responsible for and any sneaky tips. After my handover, I'm excited to be starting in my new group, but I have a feeling I'll need to quickly learn all the acronyms! I think a glossary of terms should be compulsory in all groups. 

In honour of finishing my first seat, I thought I'd write about the Five Stages of Trainee - these are both a reflection of my first seat and my predictions for the next three.

1. Excitement

The first few weeks start off with a hopeful sense of adventure. This is a clean slate, your first day at school. You have so much ahead of you and could really love this group - I mean, maybe this is where you'll qualify?? 

You start by doing all the right things. Keeping your desk tidy, coming into work early and plastering an enthusiastic smile to your face. After all, first impressions last and you want to be taken seriously:

2. Overwhelmed

Excitement gives way to a mild panic. So many new terms and processes to get used to, you feel slower than usual. One thing I've noticed is that there's a "shared knowledge" within each group. This is an undercurrent of terms and concepts that are so obvious to everyone that they occasionally forget what it's like to not know these things. 

One example from early in my first seat was at the beginning of the bundling process, where I found a new document that had to be inserted into our already-printed and paginated trial folders. I had no idea what to do in those circumstances, but was told that it was "common sense" to think of paginating the document as an "A" and "B". E.g. if the document went between page 150 and page 151, then you would write the page numbers as 150A, 150B, 150C etc. Um NO!?!? Who would think of that??

Of course now it seems obvious, but at the time, it was only common sense in the context of the shared knowledge of the group, which at the beginning a trainee doesn't possess.

You start doubting the skills that you know you have and feel like you're a step behind everyone else:

I can already tell that Stage 2 will be less and less pronounced as you go forward. This is because while you'll come across things you've never done before, they will either be similar to something you have done before OR you'll be able to tap into the building blocks of skills that you now have and you'll have a better chance of working it out yourself. 

3. Perseverance

You keep at it, working hard and learning from those around you. 

4. Small wins

You start having more and more small wins. You can probably look back at some of my old posts for examples!! 

Maybe you're doing a research task and you find a case that's directly on point:

Maybe it's something as simple as being thrown into a stressful situation, and managing to keep your cool:

In any case, you feel like you're getting the hang of it, you've made back that 30% that you lost coming into this new group (haha!). I have to say, these small wins are such a great feeling when they happen.

5. Acceptance

Acceptance seems to be the final stage of trainee-dom. Maybe you've had an overall excellent experience and you're feeling confident and happy working with this group of people: you feel a little bit sad at the thought of leaving them. Maybe instead, acceptance is more an acknowledgement that you'll never quite fit in there, whether it's because of the culture of the group or because you didn't enjoy the work quite as much as you thought you might. 

Overall though, I think it's an acceptance of yourself. You start figuring out the type of lawyer that you want to, and are going to, be and no-one can really change that about you. I know I finished my first seat with a little bit of this:

Good luck to all my friends starting their new seats on Monday!!!