That’s an interesting quote and a worthy subject for discussion. But if one of the purposes of writing a paper is to gain an understanding of the topic you’re writing about, then you have no idea if a plagiarist understands the subject. Academic writing or business writing is not supposed to be “go rewrite something else.” It’s allowed to happen, but if your plagiarise, you don’t demonstrate any of your own knowledge. And in this case, it sounds like her end product wasn’t useful and she lied about how she came up with the document.
So you’re a boss of a boss of a boss. Nothing here says you *are * or does more than imply you are not a law firm. If you’re not, what are you?
53 words without a hint of what your company does, or what it might have done for this client. Whether you’re practicing law or not, it’s clear that you’re a lawyer.
So you’re out some money. Why did your client care? Why do you? Why is your employee’s work unusable? It isn’t, if it’s only flaw is plagiarism, and I suspect you know it. It can be rehabilitated with proper attribution and credit.
You’ll pay some salaried drone to redo the document, give him/her a copy of Mallon’s book, and a copy of the fired woman’s work and as much of her source material as you can find. Exactly how does this either hurt or exculpate you?
Okay, you* don’t * have strict written rules about plagiarlism, or even plagarism. I do, though, and I’d like you to tell me what it *takes * to violate your ethics.
I’ve seen above, and this sounds more law-firm-ish than ever. *What * was she doing? It sounds as if she was paid to review and condense already-provided documents and client-statements into a usable brief, which may or may not have been provided.
Thanks for the heads-up with respect to your ethics code. Lie to anybody except your boss. Oh, please, Bricker. You’re better than that.
Of course. Of course he would. And of course your analysis would have bcome immediately relevant at the time.
It’s too bad you had to fire someone, Bricker. Sometimes it’s necessary, but it’s never a pleasant experience.
The firing was entirely justified, no doubt about it. She attempted to defraud both your company and your client. It wasn’t a mistake or an error in judgement. It was an intentional violation of ethics and professionalism. She knew she was wrong when she did it. A company like yours is only as good as its reputation and if the client has reason to believe it can’t trust your work, the whole company suffers. Protecting the integrity of the work has to be your paramount concern.
I despise plagarism in academics and I fear that it leads exactly to this kind of thing in the workforce. Once cheaters become dependent on cheatiing they don’t know how to do it without cheating. I think colleges should have a zero tolerance policy for plagarism and that students should be expelled and have all prior awarded credit hours revoked after the first violation.
What does it matter what his company does? He had an employee who lied and attempted to cheat her customer and her company. She knew it was unacceptable or she wouldn’t have lied about it. It was unacceptable to the customer or they wouldn’t have complained about it. Waving your hands around claiming that it’s no big deal, or only a big deal under certain circumstances that people have to demonstrate is silly. He’s already said why it’s a big deal.
I do still find it a little funny, though. She doesn’t sound very bright.
First violation, dismissal from the class.
Second violation, expulsion.
In a job, first violation, out on your ass. There are lots of people who need jobs. I’m not going to stiff one of them in favor of a liar.
It matters what his company does because it matters whether what the employee did was against the law or not.
The employee who lied may have been defrauding her employer, her employer’s client, or both, to either, both, or neither’s benefit. Friend Diogenes puts the best possible face on it, but if he is right, and** Bricker**'s company is only as good as his reputation and good name, then it’s time to recalculate.
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Not sure where you are going with this apparent “it’s okay to do this in a law firm.” But the firm where I work has fired partners for deliberately overstating billable hours, and refunded the fees plus interest to the clients.
Yes, we use a lot of template and boiler documents, and have a best practices document repository, but if you use a previous document you charge just for the actual edit time. Not work half an hour and charge three weeks.
But why? It’s not against the law for me to take five hour lunches, but I guarantee you it’ll get me fired.
We’re a government contractor. We have a contract with a government agency: the Department of Widgets. Our client supervises and regulates the widget industry in the United States. We were hired to review their processes and procedures for supervising the widget industry, research the applicable law to the production and distribution of widgets, and recommend better ways that the Department of Widgets can regulate and supervise the widget industry.
My client cares because the work that was presented as an original product, encapsulating three weeks worth of interviews and research, was not that at all. It did not, as we promised it would, provide a summary of how my client is actually doing business right now. It was a set of recommendations from a white paper that were very generic in nature, NOT a summary of my client’s actual practices.
The payment to the salaried drone is not in my budget. The salaried drone will have to be pulled off some other task for three weeks to re-create the work in question. Since I have already paid my former employee for her three weeks of effort that produced nothing usable, I now have to pay an unbudgeted three weeks to create the required document. Hours don’t come from the ether. I have to bring someone else in, or slide another task to the right, in order to make up this lack. That cost ultimately comes from the fee on this contract.
I’m amazed that you don’t see the problem here. We have a rule that forbids dishonesty in conduct, period. There is nothing I’ve written that could remotely be construed as condoning lying except to the boss. She represented the work as hers. The client recognized that (1) it was useless, since it didn’t reflect their actual practices, and (2) that it was taken from a white paper available on-line.
If the problem were simply that it was useless, then the employee in question would have been incompetent. That is, she would have failed to produce the product that her job required. Because the product she submitted was simply taken more or less verbatim from another source, and because she represented the work as her own, she is not merely incompetent: she is a plagiarist.
It’s unclear to me what, precisely, your objection here is.
I don’t believe her condict was criminal.
If this were another type of contract - cost plus fixed fee, or time and materials - then my submission of her hours on an invoice to the government, knowing that she did not work the hours in question, would potentially be a criminal act.
But I don’t see why you’re focused on whether her conduct was against the law. How is that relevant?
Stories like this always make me sad. I’m not saying Bricker acted inappropriately, just, were I in his shoes, I’d be painfully torn about what to do.
I knew someone once who got caught cheating on a final exam in college. She’s a brilliant woman and could easily have aced the test on her own (just as she did in every other class), but succumbed to stress. The fact is, she was depressed, having anxiety attacks, and starting to approach academic pressures in an irrational manner.
The school has a strict honor system, it was clearly her college’s administrator’s prerogative to summarily expel her, and there is no question she was fully aware of the wrongness of her actions. But there was an explanation, if not an excuse, for her wrongdoing, and this was the first time in her life she’d ever transgressed in any way this seriously.
The deans and the professor of the course decided to give her a zero for that class and suspended her for a year. They took into account the extenuating circumstances, and penalized her in what they considered a just manner. To do otherwise might have ruined much of the rest of her life, and I personally don’t think she deserved that.
So, again, when I hear the details are “irrelevant”, I do feel torn about zero-tolerance policies, at least in some circumstances. I hope, at least, the individual who was sacked, at such a young age, will not suffer such severe damage to her prospect from this transgression that she can no longer hold down a job as an attorney. Plagarism is indeed a serious offence, and not doing the work you’re being paid for is indeed inexcusable. Maybe termination was the only appropriate response. It would be unfortunate, I think, if a cloud hung over the rest of this person’s life for this offense. As it is not a crime, there is no clear way for her to demonstrate her remorse through some repayment of a “debt to society” other than to attempt to start anew at another firm and behave scrupulously henceforth. If she never gets a chance to do that, well, I think that would be too harsh.
Honestly, I don’t think you’d be particularly torn.
If someone attempts to defraud my company, they are hurting me (as their manager) but also hurting all of my coworkers. They are taking money away from all of us, increasing the workload of all of us, showing all of us in a bad light, lowering the morale of all of us. Companies are made up of real people. Screw the company, and real people get screwed.
And there are always great, honest people who need the jobs.
Well, yeah I would, because I’ve known good people who have screwed up. When told to go forth and sin no more, they did precisely that and redeemed themselves. Certainly some sort of punishment is in order, I just hope that punishment didn’t ruin this person’s life, primarily because she didn’t ruin anyone elses.
It’ll certainly have a significant financial impact on her life, just as her actions had a significant financial impact on the company she worked for.
I don’t think Bricker’s company could make a good faith effort to retain their client without firing this person. Even more than that, I don’t think they could have any confidence in her work as an employee. There are lots of big mistakes that honest employees can be forgiven for, provided they make an effort to do the right thing. I’ve screwed up things that cost tens of thousands of dollars to fix, and the company I work for has still kept me on. But if I sat around for three weeks drawing a regular paycheck, producing absolutely nothing, and submitting somebody else’s work as my own, I’d be out the door in a heartbeat, and rightly so.
I’ve had to fire people in the past because they juist couldn’t do the job they were hired for, no matter how hard thay tried. That was hard. This wouldn’t be.
Well, maybe. I admit, it’s a toughie.
I’ve just been dragged kicking-and-screaming into the world of management myself (something I’ve almost miraculously been able to avoid for a couple years now, due to some creative maneuvering on my part). I do not at all relish the thought of having to make decisions like this.
Man, this is an easy one. Just you wait… 
Credibility to your clients is one of the greatest assests a firm possesses. I don’t see how Bricker could have done much else to restore the faith of the client. There are no winners here, but Bricker did the right thing. I think if she had extenuating circumstances, it would still be difficult not to fire her, but it doesn’t seem she even offered those.
We were in a comparable situation. I was put in a project team with two others, one of them being an expensive external consultant. At some point I started to realise the consultant was generally clueless and I ended up doing all the work. I involved my direct superior, we had a chat, and the consultancy firm was fired. In the end my superior and I agreed to do the whole project by ourselves.
As to the concept of plagiarism, didn’t a famous artist say that good artists copy, and great artists steal? There’s a lot to that.
First, you’re confusing me. Was she full of remorse or not?
Second, if you can’t believe she’d gone down that road and still be remorseful, then I guess the whole world of literature & film is a sham, because it’s full of stories about questions like this.
Third, you’re best placed to judge the situation, so don’t think the following remark is meant to judge you.
Fourth, not knowing the particulars, I’m inclined to vote for the offer of redemption. We obviously have no clue what motivations or thoughts led to the end result; however, it could easily have been a situation where someone was more in need of guidance and help than punishment. You yourself state you don’t know what motivations led to the scandal, so unless there is pertinent information you haven’t shared (or that I missed), I don’t see how you can speak to character (e.g. “quasi-sincere sorrow”). It’s easy for life to fool us with small choices that take us to where we never wanted to end up.
Of course, that must be weighted by your knowledge of the events. For example, a relative of mine is a repeat embezzler of large sums of cash. Giving a second chance is one thing, but being a dupe is another.
As for reputation, if I was your client and saw you take the risk—even if it involved handing out significant punishment to recoup costs and scold the wrongdoing—and give a person a second chance, provided there were reason to think it would be worthwhile, then in my estimation you & your firm would be considered as most honorable and highly esteemed, IMO.
But like I said, I’m not judging your decision because you were there and I wasn’t. I’m just sharing some thoughts.
And if I were your client and I got a second document that had been prepared by the same woman, I’d immediately take steps to terminate the relationship. Your reasons for retaining or firing her are none of my business, but I don’t want her working on anything to do with me.
It’s not like this woman was making an honest effort to do her job and she made a mistake. She did nothing for three weeks, got paid for three weeks, and then tried to pass off somebody else’s (useless) work as her own. She cost the project (and the company) three weeks of work, plus delays that may or may not result in damages, plus credibility in the eyes of the client. Maybe there are extenuating circumstances that could convince me to give her another chance, but I haven’t got a clue what they would be.