News in Practice

Bringing a new lawyer into a live matter

Their first question is naive, and it is an excellent one. It will occupy three people for an hour, and the answer will be recorded nowhere.

For legal teams, in firms and in companies, bringing reinforcement onto a live matter. What a newcomer's first question reveals, and who actually bears the cost of induction.

A lawyer joins the team on a matter that has been running for fourteen months. She has read the pleadings for two days. On the third morning she asks her first question: why are we not applying for disclosure of the subsidiary's accounting records? The question is naive in the strict sense, since she knows nothing of fourteen months of history. It is also the best question anyone has asked about this matter in a long time.

Why it is a newcomer who asks it

It is worth asking why the question does not come from the team. It is not difficult, and those who have been running the matter know the exhibits better than she does.

The reason lies in a property of long-running matters: what has been set aside ceases to exist. Once an option has been abandoned, it drops out of the field of attention and does not return, even when the circumstance that justified abandoning it has changed. The team does not ask the question again because, for them, it is settled.

The newcomer, by contrast, discovers the matter in its current state and not in its history. She sees what is missing, precisely because she does not know why it is missing. That is what makes a joiner's first weeks so useful, and it is also what makes them expensive.

What the question reveals

Nobody can answer it immediately. The associate who has been running the matter since the start remembers that it was discussed. She does not remember the conclusion.

There are three possibilities and they have nothing in common. Either disclosure was considered and rejected for a strategic reason. Or it was sought and refused. Or nobody has thought about it for eight months, and it is a missed opportunity.

The file does not allow one to choose between the three. The pleadings do not mention the application, which is consistent with all three hypotheses.

How the question spreads

The associate searches her notes for twenty minutes, without success. She messages the partner, who replies two hours later that one should ask the person who handled case management last year.

That person has left the firm. Eventually, in an email exchange from the previous year, someone finds the trace of a discussion: disclosure had been rejected because it would have opened the way to a symmetrical application over the client's own accounts.

Note what allowed the information to be recovered: an email preserved by chance, in which the decision appears as an aside. Had the exchange been oral, which is the more common case, the answer would have been lost for good.

Total: one hour of work across three people, including twenty minutes of partner time, to recover a decision taken in five minutes eleven months earlier.

The cost of induction does not fall on the person arriving. It falls on those who must interrupt themselves to answer.

What the team does instead

Faced with that cost, teams spontaneously develop a response: the handover meeting. Two hours in which the matter is narrated to the newcomer.

It is useful and it is structurally insufficient. What is transmitted is what one remembers at the moment of speaking, in the order it comes, and without knowing what the newcomer will need. The questions she will ask three weeks later, on points that were not covered, will remain entire.

It also has a misleading effect: it gives both parties the sense that transmission has occurred. The newcomer will hesitate more before asking a question, since everything has already been explained to her, and the team will be surprised that she does not know.

Who actually bears the cost

Induction is generally presented as a cost to the newcomer: it takes time before they are productive. That is true and it is secondary, because that time is anticipated and budgeted.

The real cost falls on those who stay. Every question from the newcomer interrupts someone who was working on something else, and the interruption costs more than the answer. That is why teams end up inducting reinforcements by giving them peripheral tasks: not out of distrust, but because peripheral tasks generate no questions.

This mechanism is well documented in production teams: adding a person to a late project makes it later. Legal work is no exception, and for the same reason: coordination costs more than the reinforcement contributes, as long as the necessary information is accessible only through people.

You then get the worst arrangement: an under-used reinforcement on a matter under pressure, and a team still carrying alone what it was already carrying.

The second effect: what is never asked again

The case described here ended well, because someone searched. The frequent case is the one where nobody searches.

A question requiring an hour of three people's time only gets asked if the person carrying it insists. A lawyer who has asked two questions and sensed the irritation they caused stops asking a third. They learn, very quickly, that the right attitude is to work with what they have.

The matter then loses the only fresh perspective it had, and it loses it within three weeks. That is the real cost of the situation, and it is measured nowhere since it bears on questions that were never asked.

What a matter held together changes

The newcomer's question finds its answer in the file, in two minutes, without disturbing anyone. It remains a good question: the circumstance that led to rejecting the application eleven months ago may have disappeared.

There is also a consequence for the team itself. What is consultable ceases to be a transmission burden. An associate who knows that a newcomer can find past decisions on her own no longer dreads her questions, and the atmosphere of an induction changes entirely.

And the newcomer becomes useful immediately, because she can interrogate the matter instead of interrogating people. That is the only way to make a reinforcement genuinely useful in the month it is deployed, which is generally the month it was needed.