Guy in mailroom gets law degree from dubious institution…is not immediately offered a law position within a large high-class lawfirm…does that sound like the mailroom guy got screwed?
As an aside, if it had been a real law firm, there would be no reason to assume that the three “name partners” are the only equity partners.
Indeed, when a firm becomes large and successful, there’s almost no way to keep operating without increasing the number of partners.
Lawyers who are signing up and managing large client accounts won’t stand for remaining at associate status.
Trivia:
At a large law firm, there are several “ranks” of lawyers and the rank table can look like this. Obviously details and nomenclature vary widely, but these are common definitions.
Legal assistant/paralegal
— many of them have law degrees and might even be licensed to practice. But many traditional firms will never let someone hired at this level move up within the firm.
So their refusal to let Jimmy move out of the mailroom is pretty damn common.
Summer associate
— law school students. Up until 1995 or so, if you were a summer associate at a big law firm, you could expect to receive an offer to be an associate upon graduation.
Traditionally, summer associates are given real work and are invited to a lot of parties and fancy events.
Contract attorney
— signed on for a year at a time usually. Often hired to staff big litigation projects. If you impress, there’s a chance you can make associate.
Staff attorney
— another “you’ll never move up” level.
Associate/senior associate
— “Partner track” lawyers who are usually hired out of law school. Traditionally, if you haven’t made partner after X number of years, you’re asked to move on.
“Senior associates” are very often lateral hires from the associate ranks of another firm.
Counsel/“Of counsel”/senior “of counsel”
— sometimes a senior associate will be considered valuable enough to keep on even though he or she has failed the partner track because he or she doesn’t have the personality or skill to bring in new business or whose job is primarily to manage other lawyers rather than ohm up clients.
This is where those folks end up.
Also, if you are an experienced solo practitioner or a partner at a different firm whose practice has gone belly up, you can end up at this level.
Of counsel can also be the top lawyers in a practice area that the firm doesn’t specialize in.
Alternatively, counsel might be lawyers who kind of keep some of their own practice going on the side but are eligible to be called upon to manage or staff cases that there isn’t a partner to handle.
These days there are also partners who voluntarily take a demotion to of counsel for less pressure and workload.
Of counsel can often be lawyers who have had a successful career in another field, like politics or in-house at a company or trade association.
Women who had children before they could make it to partner and aren’t rich enough for a full-time nanny. Yes, it is a traditionally sexist and not family-friendly business.
In real life, Hamlin’s offered of “counsel” status to Jimmy would be considered pretty respectable.
Non-equity partner
— a salaried partner, really a kind of glorified senior associate. When times are bad, these folks sweat unless they can make it to full partner status either at this firm or another.
Partner/full partner/equity partner/shareholder/member
— a co-owner of the firm, most of whose income comes from profit distributions. They are expected to "make it rain.@ if they lose major clients, clients go bankrupt, or they stop brining in new clients, they can find themselves voted out by the other partners or asked to take of counsel status.
Summer associates are given little real work, is what I meant to say.
Depends on if his brother is a senior partner of the firm (apparently, 1 of 3). 
At the least, you’d expect the brother to use his connections to help him find a position somewhere doing something law-related.
Jimmy / Saul, to pseudoquote Tuco, has quite a mouth on him. Mike is the strong, silent type. Mike’s silence was also a contrast with the Super Bad-Ass gunman in the parking garage.
Although I really enjoy watching the character development in the Jimmy / Saul plot line, I think I prefer Mike’s story so far. He’s the sane, dependable man in a world in chaos. I loved seeing Mike give advice to the Pill Man towards the end.
A more mature Chuck would’ve congratulated Jimmy for passing the bar, then offered to help set Jimmy up in his own practice. There’s a lot to be said for the advice that Chuck gave about being his own man. Jimmy had already exercised independence by passing the bar in secret.
Shutting Jimmy down so cruelly was entirely unnecessary. It took a while, but Chuck has reaped what he sowed.
I’m going to throw this out there, given that it was in a review of this episode that I read the other day & I find it to be a pretty compelling argument.
On some basic level, Chuck does have a point about Jimmy’s ascendency to lawyer status, insofar as the younger brother almost certainly did take a few shortcuts in order to pass the bar & practice law in NM. The thing is - and I know a lot of posters will probably disagree with me here - I really don’t think that any of that even matters.
You gotta realize, Jimmy came to where he is in BCS after having been a complete failure as a grown-assed man in the BCS flashbacks. The fact that he was able to clean up his act, finish his undergrad work, attain a law degree (even if it was from a so-called mail-order school), AND pass the bar is a testament to a helluva lot of hard work & determination. I’d even go so far as to argue that the fact that he did all of those things as an ADULT is MORE impressive than if he had gone the “conventional” route of the straight-and-narrow path to law school as a youth.
Yeah, it might have been wishful thinking to imagine himself IMMEDIATELY getting hired at HHM, but his brother shouldn’t have screwed him the way that he did. Jimmy could have worked his way up to partner more gradually - and Hell, for all we know, Howard might have been more than willing to do that - but Chuck would have none of that. So uncalled for, and such bullshit IMO.
“Senior partner” is rarely if ever an actual title in a law firm. It’s an informal description.
And as I said above, there’s no reason to assume that the three “name partners” constitute the full equity partnership.
Only at a very small law firm is it common for all the equity partners to have their names above the door. HMM looks like a large firm, so in real life I would expect there to be way more than three equity partners.
Names can be from people who have died or retired and it’s pretty common for names to be dropped through mergers or rebranding. You can’t make any assumptions from the name.
Indeed, if there had only been three equity partners, Jimmy would have known for sure right away that Chuck was in on the decision.
Well, for what it’s worth I’m a lawyer, and I sorta agree with you.
Going to a good school is necessary for one thing - getting your first job. After that, people don’t really care - it is all what you have achieved in the workplace. Chuck could have used his connections to find him some appropriate work, seen how it worked out for him.
Now, as far as Jimmy goes, IMO the issue isn’t his credentials, it is his tendency to sneaky, underhanded and illegal or unethical behaviour - the “Slippin’ Jimmy” persona. The worry is that he hasn’t totally reformed, and that in a moment of stress, he’d revert to that.
Chuck had legitimate concerns about that - but it hardly lies in his mouth to complain about Jimmy’s tendency to lie and manipulate, after what he did to Jimmy!
While it is of course true that “senior partner” isn’t a real title, I have to disagree with your analysis of how this firm seems to work in this program.
In the info we are actually given in the series, Jimmy just assumes that “the partners have made a decision” really translates into “that douchebag I hate has decided”.
This is consistent with actual control of the firm being in very few hands.
If it was widely distributed among a whole bunch of equity partners, the plot would not make any sense - how would Chuck, by making a midnight phone call to that apparently-douchebag fellow, “fix” it so that Jimmy can’t be offered a job - even though it would cost the firm a $20 million case? Wouldn’t the rest of the equity partners not give a shit what Chuck had to say - if it cost them a big case?
Law firm partnerships are social groups, especially if they’re all working in a single office. The managing partner—which is what Hamlin seems to be—or other respected partners can be enormously influential on the other partners, especially if they are founding partners or name partners.
So, while you might be right about what’s going on in the show, just because that’s a habitual way TV scripts are written, in real life you would be making unfounded assumptions.
One inconsistency; if Chuck was undermining Jimmy all this time, why did he laboriously piece together those shredded documents that proved the smoking gun for Jimmy’s case? Or was he intrigued by the case but not enough to let Jimmy get ahead? And, as I said above, was the $20 million offer a deliberate attempt at raising the stakes enough that Sandpiper’s lawyers would go after them big time, in a way that Jimmy couldn’t handle on his own? Because Jimmy looked ready to take the half million-dollar offer that Sandpiper made.
Thank you, everyone who shared a T-shirt link! I ordered a heather gray one from Teepublic, has the university logo and Law School printed underneath (love the Latin phrase); and a navy BCS logo (scales of justice) from the BCS store. Cool, I hope to attract other fans … can just see them flocking to me now for a gab fest … but really, I’m out in the sticks in the middle of of Oklahomastan …some ol’ guy will amble up to ask me, “What’d you study in that there college?”
Chuck was intrigued and the more he looked, the more that he saw that it was a great case. In his mind, it was Jimmy getting lucky and falling ass backwards into something that he really didn’t understand. In reality, it was Jimmy being clever as hell with a bit of it takes a scammer to know a scammer.
It fits with the plot if they have 3 equity partners - Hamlin, Hamlin and McGill. We’ve not seen the other Hamlin, but it’s believable that both Hamlins could hate or pretend to hate Jimmy. Chuck would always be overruled 2/1. And presumably the Hamlins are close and would wield influence in that way.
I agree, she looked so solemn and kept calmly saying, “Take the deal” … Jimmy knew it was serious.
So, he had a plan on his way to Chuck’s – if big brother really does support Jimmy in his fight to work with HHM on the case, the solution is simple. All Chuck has to do is pretend to quit. Chuck seems to hold the keys to the Kingdom of the Firm … looks like they’d do anything to keep him happy, since the alternative might mean financial ruin … but all Jimmy is doing is calling Chuck’s bluff.
Jimmy has checked his cell phone records. His brother went to great lengths to call Howard at 2 a.m., using a phone that must have hurt him a great deal. What could possibly be that important? Jimmy knows what went down. When Chuck is cornered, we hear, "You’re not a real lawyer!” … which breaks Jimmy’s heart, and mine.
So … he’ll decide if he cannot win his brother’s approval, he’ll become the kind of lawyer his brother despises.
I hope I don’t get into trouble sharing this, you regulars will have to school me if I do something wrong, but I found this interesting since we had been wondering about it.
One of the show’s creators, Peter Gould talked to EWabout the fractured relationship between the brothers:
“Part of the reason Jimmy’s always gotten into trouble is because he could never equal Chuck,” Gould continues. “Chuck was always the good brother. But from Chuck’s point of view, Jimmy was the one who got all the attention. Jimmy was the kid who would make everyone laugh with a joke. And Chuck, for all his ability and all his brains, really doesn’t have the common touch. And we realized—and it came as a shock to us—that on some level, Chuck is jealous of Jimmy. …
"And one of the things I love about the scene at the end of episode 9 that [co-executive producer] Tom Schnauz wrote, and that Bob and Michael played, is that Chuck is not all wrong. … there is an element of truth to what he says: ‘The law is sacred. If you abuse that power, people get hurt. This is not a game.’ And that brings up the question: How much is that a self-fulfilling prophecy? Does Jimmy act out because deep down, he believes what Chuck thinks of him?”
I think what makes it a screwing is two things:
(a) Chuck effectively lied by not being the one to tell him himself
(b) There was not even an apparent effort to meet him halfway, give him some sort of tryout, let him be an unpaid paralegal for a month to see if he’s good, anything of that sort.
It would have been ridiculous for HHM to just say “OK, you’re hired, here’s your corner office and your secretary!” but given that Jimmy already worked there and as the brother of a partner, it’s hardly preposterous to think they could do SOMETHING, even if something largely symbolic.
But the worst part was the lying.
I thought about that as well. If there were 12 bottles and each bottle had a hundred pills and they were 80 milligram oxy’s (all assumptions except for the 80mg part) that’s 1200 pills. Call that $50 per pill street price, that’s $60K. At wholesale, maybe he got $30,000 for the box. I can count money at a reasonable fast pace, but it takes me about 30 seconds to count a thousand dollars in 20’s and I wouldn’t be able to do it inside an envelope.
I agree that they may have tried to keep it brief, but they should have made it more realistic as well. 300 one hundred dollar bills would have been easier to count and they could have shown him awkwardly/nervously counting them in the minivan while Mike is standing there. They could have even thrown in a mix of 20’s so they could use that line. Mostly hundreds and a few twenties would only take him 2 or 3 minutes to count.
No, on the face of it, it doesn’t. I’m sure even Jimmy didn’t feel screwed at the time. But that’s not the point, the point is that the real reason he didn’t get the job is because Chuck told Howard not to hire him. There’s no other reason for it. None. Chuck told Howard (and/or the other partners) not to hire Jimmy. We can only speculate at his true reasons for doing it, but that’s the reason he didn’t get hired. Hell, maybe HHM wouldn’t have hired Jimmy on their own, but they didn’t even have to make that decision.
And FWIW, I’m willing to bet if Howard had gone to the partners and said 'My brother got his law degree, I’d like to bring him out of the mail room" they would have.
I was thinking about what was said upstream about contract lawyer, it would have been easier for chuck to have him brought aboard, provisionally as a contract lawyer, and then told his performance was not desirable and drop him at the end. It would suck, but at least chuck could have deflected jimmies disapointment back at him.
Like any work place, some people are not good cultural fit , regardless of either their competence or pedigree.
Declan
But what if he was a good fit. If he worked at HHM, he may have turned out to be a great lawyer and fit in just fine in that corporate culture. Perhaps (and we’ll see how it plays out) the only reason he’s an ambulance chaser is because that’s where Chuck pushed him.