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This is a humorous and sarcastic blog written by a paralegal in a mid-sized law firm in a mid-tier market. The goal is to share some of the pitfalls and foibles encountered in my own day-to-day experiences. Feel free to contact me at aparalegalslife@gmail.com with comments. Complaints, not so much :)

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Favors

One of the more annoying aspects of my firm is the significant number of "favor" cases we do for friends of senior partners.  Typically these cases are outside our normal practice.  As a result, a lot of time is spent figuring out how to do something I've (a) never done before and (b) never will again.  Like my one-and-only estate matter, or the infrequent commercial foreclosure we seem to do once a year. 

You know the phrase "a good deed never goes unpunished"?  So true.  These favors always seem to balloon into huge problem files, and we rarely end up being able to bill for all the work. 

One of these days, my bosses will learn the word "no".  I just hope it's before the Nice Young Men in their Clean White Coats arrive...

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

And they're coming to take me away, a-ha! They're coming to take me away, o-oh, he-he, ha-ha! To the funny farm where life is beautiful all the time, and I'll be happy to see those nice young men in their clean white coats...

Oh, by the way, we have "favor" cases too, but they usually involve my attorney's friends from the biker bar who need family law pleadings prepared and filed. But my attorney can't stand family law and he takes them anyways.

Anonymous said...

How about the family who once bought pre-World War I bonds from a foreign country and now wants to **sue** that entire country because they refuse to honor them (since they have essentially changed names four times in the past century)?

Paralegal said...

Oh yes. The wonderful "favor cases". The ones I have had the displeasure of working on is usually the BFF of the attorney's wife and is a HUGE pain in the ass to deal with and the case seems to drag on into eternity.

Paralegal Hell

Meeghan said...

I love your blog. I used to work in big law in Washington DC and now I work for med-size law in the South. I feel your pain!