Moving and Waiting

"Thanks for keeping the ball moving forward" or "we will be all over it to get the ball moving" - I cannot tell you how many times I have heard some variation of the "moving ball-" theme as a metaphor for doing work on a deal. I always thought it was kind of dumb because moving the ball along usually means sending a disingenuously courteous email ("at your convenience, please let us know, if..." to somebody (typically the other party's lawyer) who is supposed to be doing something related to the deal and copying everyone else on it, including your client and every last minion working for him/her and the addressee's client and related minions. Typically, an email like this humiliates people into responding with a suggestion to set up a conference call. A call (especially an "all hands call" (another example of law firm jargon that makes me cringe)) implies that their failure to respond was not accidental, no! It was justified because the issues were just too important and controversial for one person to take on... After this, days can go by without any further action because someone (usually the non-lawyer client) realizes that they don't feel like wasting their time on a call with a bunch of lawyers discussing whether the words "amend, add to or remove" should be added after the words "[may not] modify" or whether "modify" already captures it all. After a few days though someone has to get on that ball again lest it gets definitively dropped...

Hyper

Recently, my boss, R., invited me to his office for a chat. ("Come by at your convenience" - he emailed me, which means: "Please come by now. Something that has to do with you just crossed my mind and I have nothing to do anyway because my clients are either bankrupt or have been fired so I have to spend the little time that I spend at the office on "managing" associates and finding a good contractor to build a ten-thousand-dollar dog run for our two-thousand-dollar puppy."




He told me to close the door (always a sign of seriousness). He then proceeded to telling me (in essence) this: you are doing a great job, your other boss (the one who still has some work left to do) is really satisfied with your work, but you have to be more "hyper" about the job. From what I gathered, the incident that prompted this "talk" was my not responding to my other boss's email on one recent Saturday. R. suggested that I check my blackberry at 11 am, then 1 pm and every couple of hours until 11 pm every day - including Saturday and Sunday. I reassured him that I understood and that I would certainly make sure to check my blackberry, but that "hyper-ness" was just not really in my personality and moreover I found that unnecessary excitement over minor and almost silly things was counter-productive. I think this must have embarrassed him slightly and he in turn reassured me that he "loved me" and got somehow guilted into saying: "Of course, Faaany (this is how he pronounces my name to try to make it sound authentically Hungarian, which is quite sweet, really), most of this is silly and really just for "optical" reasons you should pretend."

As I was walking out - I guess just to show how sophisticated he was and how he knew what things were truly important in life - he told me that he had just had a long lunch at Balthazar, a place that, to R., epitomizes trendiness with a capital "T" (not in the least because, as he once wrote in an email to a few of us, he read in the NYT Styles section about "the cohort of interesting people" including the staff of Gawker.com who regularly have breakfast there). I once casually mentioned it to him that through David I know the chef at Balthazar and since then he always brings up any visits to the restaurant when he feels the need to seem cool. I contemplated telling him that I also personally knew the "interesing people" he read about, but I decided to save that one for later.