For some jobs it is important to be able to process work very quickly, especially when it is easy to do.

What would you do if most of the work at your company is extremely quick and easy, but then they brought in a new type of work that is much more complicated but they still want the work done fast?

That is the situation the lawyer in this story was in, so when his boss said to work faster, he complied and really backfired.

Let’s read all the details.

Told “Quantity Not Quality” by Boss, Gave Them Exactly That

I worked at a law firm that handled an extremely high volume of cases, I’m talking thousands per month, and due to the specific field they were in, the work called for a ton of motion practice.

We had to respond to motions on nearly every case, after which the cases would settle, and we would be paid relatively small amounts that added up.

To answer all the motions we would use a boilerplate template, input a few specifics via prompts, and send it off – this would take about 15-20 minutes.

Sounds like a good business to be in.

It was a profitable scheme, and to be fair, it worked for that specific field of law.

This is highly irregular and would be nearly impossible to effectively mount a counter argument in any other field of law, which typically requires research and fact specific rebuttal to very specific challenges to your case.

Fast forward and now the firm is taking on cases in a new field of law, nearly all between 200-300k per case, or about 100x what a case in their original field would take.

We needed to draft and file Complaints on these cases.

Not all law suits are the same.

To achieve this, the partners insisted that our senior attorney would create a template, our “paralegal staff” making $10/hr would speak with the client and create an intake cover sheet for each case, and I would be the lucky middle-man who got to input the cover sheet data into the template and generate a complaint, for every single case in this new field that the firm was handling.

In essence, they thought we could handle this new, complex, different field of law with much higher stakes in much the same way they were handling our “normal” cases.

The intake staff had no clue what they were doing, and the boilerplate template was wildly insufficient to allege the particular facts, which varied so considerably between cases (also why intake had problems).

The Partners thought it should take me about 15-20 minutes to generate a complaint with their method, but the reality was I actually had to review every file from scratch, figure out what was going on, input the data myself, make massive edits to the Complaint, etc, it would take me at least 1.5 hours to do a good job.

It takes time to do a good job.

And honestly, that’s what I did, a good job.

As you can imagine, something of a backlog ensued and the partners wanted to know what the issue was.

I explained that due to the nature of the cases, they were requiring specific edits.

I offered several recommendations for how we could improve our efficiency, but they didn’t want to hear it.

I explained that these cases were worth significantly more, and even spending 4-5x longer on them than on our other cases was still a huge win for them.

They wanted paper out.

What a foolish thing to ask for.

“Quantity over Quality” I was told, leave the decisions to them, do what I am instructed to do and play my part on the assembly line.

Note that these partners did actually no legal work whatsoever on any cases – they once did long ago, but now just watch cameras all day and complain if you’re 5 minutes late.

In a fit of frustration and rage I maliciously complied.

I actually stayed late few nights and banged out maybe 75 or so complaints that had backlogged.

I sent them all to the Sr attorney for final review, with no edits whatsoever, wrong data from our intake team, nonsensical legal arguments, fact patterns that were completely untrue, just like I was told.

Gee, I wonder why they were upset.

About 3 workdays later I got called in for a meeting about what the heck was going on in these complaints, and that the sr attorney was about 1/3 of the way through what I had sent him and not one of the complaints was suitable to be filed.

I told them I was just doing my job on the assembly line and that the issue must be coming from somewhere else, but definitely not from me, because I did exactly as instructed and mindlessly input the data and sent it along.

They told me this was unacceptable and if there was an issue I should have brought it to their attention, to which I replied that I tried and was not listened to.

They sound really stubborn.

They refused to accept defeat and attempted to change data collection, change the templates, to no avail.

It got hostile.

No matter what they did, their system just didn’t work, and I continued to comply with their insistence I do my job and my job only.

It was unbelievable how stubborn these people were.

I bet he was relieved to move on.

Quit that job and moved on.

I’ve been tracking some of the cases online, and they’re getting dismissed on motion.

Quantity not quality, eh?

Not how I practice law.

Why do people in charge never listen to the people actually doing the work?

Let’s read what the people in the comments on Reddit have to say about this.

There are plenty of jobs like this.

This commenter says it was unethical.

Yes, always document everything.

Here is someone else who worked in the legal field.

This commenter is glad the guy left that job.

This senior attorney is just greedy.

If you liked that story, check out this post about an oblivious CEO who tells a web developer to “act his wage”… and it results in 30% of the workforce being laid off.