Last week, I was handling some business when a lawyer friend DM’ed me a story from the Forward, an independent American Jewish news site. Two high-ranking law firm partners got caught in an email scandal and had to resign. “Just another day in the world of lawyers behaving badly,” I thought, but I read on, because it’s hard to look away from these things.
Partners John Barber and Jeffrey Ranen left Lewis Brisbois Bisgaard & Smith, a 1,600-lawyer firm, taking nearly 140 lawyers with them in a controversial exodus to start their own eponymous firm, Barber Ranen.
Big money moves like this are often contentious but not uncommon. What happened next is where things get gross.
According to Lewis Brisbois, following the former partners’ departure, an anonymous tipster flagged offensive and sensitive emails exchanged by Barber and Ranen from the time they were still with the firm. They investigated and discovered dozens of antisemitic, sexist, racist, and homophobic emails dating back more than a decade. Their former firm consulted, ahem, ethics experts before concluding they had a “moral obligation” to take them public. With, you know, The New York Post and a hat tip to a Jewish news site.
Barber and Ranen resigned last week, leaving 140 lawyers without the fearless captains who enticed them to jump ship. But they are not the only ones scathed in this battle, for Lewis Brisbois must face questions from a legal community curious about the timing of their auspicious discovery, a convenient surprise following the departure of two rainmaking partners in—get this—their employment law practice.
Despite being what one crisis manager told David Lat for his Original Jurisdiction newsletter the “worst emails I have ever seen,” I am personally desensitized to the specifics. Because when you’ve seen some things in your career, you don’t need specifics to know what’s being said.
There are words behind eyes grinning their faux courtroom smiles in website photos. There are words whispered between two men in the corner office. There are words slurred at the end of a drunken happy hour gone too deep into the night. There are words few have heard but many suspected who have been inhaling their secondhand smoke for years.
The emails are just an example. They are a symptom of greater disease.
Now, I’ve worked with Lewis Brisbois in the past and have never had issues with them. My opinions only involve them as a case study; an exaggerated example of what happens quite often. I was an in-house client for more years than I practiced at a law firm, so I am used to lawyers minding their p’s and q’s around me. But all it takes is one post-conference cocktail mixer, one fancy Manhattan dinner, or one work trip out of town together to notice things. You can tell who has the power in a room. Who sucks up the most air. Who lives in the shallow, keeping conversation light, afraid to say a word out of turn. I’ve been her, too, afraid to breathe.
Many people have this binary image of lawyers from watching us on television. We’re either white-shoe professionals lamenting over the golden handcuffs of high-velocity success like the lawyers on “Suits,” or a single-shingle schlub buried under a Jenga tower of paperwork, more heart than help but an underdog to root for. In real life, most of us are neither. When you get hired for a new role, you never really know whether you’re walking into a well-oiled machine or a sweat shop. Even within firms, practice groups might operate like separate countries, receiving different resources, accommodations, and marketing budgets.
Within the world of insurance defense law, hourly rates are typically lower, which means firms need to generate more business to capture revenue. In other words, relationships are everything. If you don’t have them, you are nothing. If you do, you have it all.
Partners own those relationships, which go back years. Entire teams, even new firms, are formed around them. They will never be yours; not unless someone hands them off to you, which takes years of building trust. (And this is not a lawyer thing—it’s an everywhere thing.) I’ve serviced other people’s relationships before. Breaking bread with a client was a huge deal, so I kept quiet until spoken to. I was a prop, there to add color to the scene.
Though this appeared to me as a young attorney to be a flawed approach to management, I now understand it as a much deeper gatekeeping of power. Relationships generate power. The more you benefit, the greater you risk losing sight of the responsibility that comes with it. And some, like Barber and Ranen, get so drunk on power they forget they can lose it, even as employment lawyers doing the thing they know best not to do: putting it in writing.
Therefore, I repeat, offensive emails are a symptom. The disease is how toxic leaders can impact an entire organization.
We never know the real number of associates who leave firms because of the way they were treated. In most instances, young professionals know it’s futile to lodge complaints at firms that don’t have the administrative or moral infrastructure to handle them. They just stick it out for as long as they can, until they can’t anymore. People called me The Hammer at my first firm, because every junior associate I shared an office with quit. They manufactured levity around the turnover, misdirecting any actual criticism into a joke involving me. Until I quit, too. And the woman after me. I’m sure they blamed it on the office and joked about needing to sage the place.
We will never know the real number of associates Barber and Ranen impacted negatively, though I suspect as with any scandal, we’ll hear from some. Those disgusting words were probably just a snapshot of the environment they created for some people who worked for them. If they were willing to commit such brazen words to writing (and copy their colleagues, in some instances), imagine what it was like to work for them. Imagine just having to imagine every night what they were saying about you.
A fair question worth asking is, why did so many attorneys leave with them if they were so bad? Herein lies a deeper, more dangerous truth: toxic leaders give others permission. They teach the wrong lessons. They rewrite and undermine an organization’s values. And they show the next generation of professionals that it’s okay to act like them.
If you think younger people know better given their heightened social and cultural awareness, please allow me to remind you how money works. Morality is fluid—more fluid than it should be. I said a lot of things and excused a lot of behavior at my first firm to stay afloat. With six figures of student loan debt, I couldn’t afford to not be the good graces of my boss. The stakes that exist in your own mind are very convincing when you need them to be.
In the end, the battle between these partners and their old law firm poisoned the well for many. Even if their careers are the only ones torched, relationships have been ruined, and those relationships impacted people’s livelihoods. I’m thinking of all the young associates who’ve been pushed away from careers they thought they wanted, a casualty of other people’s poor decisions. And then there’s the culture that allowed them to thrive.
A couple years ago, I consumed hummus that had expired. I fell violently ill. Now, I always check and double check the date before opening the tub. People who haven’t been poisoned will never understand, but those of us who have will always remember that feeling.
When I clicked a link from a friend, I wasn’t planning to open the door to something that would bother me this much. Their emails are the bad apples, but many of us have sat under poisonous trees, and the clouds they cast over us are hard to forget.
Consider me a local chapter president of the Recovering Associates Association. No really, lawyers and non-lawyers: I’m here to process how the less-than-great environments you survived impacted the trajectory of your careers. Please reach out: averagejoelle3@gmail.com.
The little things
My seven-year-old daughter is about to finish first grade. I’m so proud of how she handled her transition to public school, particularly because most of her early childhood friends attend in the neighboring district, but she thrived nonetheless.
We were invited to a year-end writing celebration to acknowledge all of the “books” and work product they “published” this year. She just happened to turn to this poem and share with us the Most Important Thing about her. Boy, did it hit hard. Way to go, Haze. I’ll help you stand tall for the rest of your life.
Also
I listened to:
My two self-declared Songs of Summer: Swedish House Mafia’s “See The Light” and Diplo’s “Sad in the Summer (feat. Lily Rose),” both bangers for a run, the beach, or a night out! Highly recommend!
I crunched:
On Siete’s Grain Free Churro Strips, a delicious sweet and crunchy snack I’ll be adding into my rotation.
I watched:
“The Secrets of Hillsong,” another doc about a religious leader gone bad.
Your wins
Kate started a new job and coordinated the logistics of hiring a new nanny on her own with only two weeks left of school and a million year-end commitments, yet everyone adjusted okay! Moms are superhuman!