There’s a very good chance that next week my wife will no longer be a personal trainer but a records clerk at a law firm. (A big rich one as it happens–they have represented lots and lots of giant corporations you would recognize.) Lots more money! A better schedule for her! She’ll miss helping people as a personal trainer but fundamentally it’s a great move for her, she says.
Also there’s a poorly defined culture of “promoting from within” at her (we hope) new workplace, and in fact the position she’s hoping to fill opened up because the previous spot-holder moved upwards somewhere. Where, we don’t know.
My question here is, what do you think would be examples of typical paths upwards for a records clerk at a big law firm? She has no degree relevant to law or anything, and her work history is in teaching and in personal training, so I imagine it’d be low-level administration stuff unless or until she decided to go to school for a more advanced business/admininstration credential or something?
I don’t know. What do you think may be in the cards?
I suspect the best possible outcome is she eventually becomes office manager, and has the lawyers’ balls via coffee, room temperature, and access to office supplies. Sort of like the redhaired chick in Mad Men.
Records management at law firms is a pretty hot field right now, combining elements of IT, administration, risk management, and legal compliance. (“Do we have all of the records we’ll need with a good chain of custody, and none of the records we’re not required to keep that might prove embarrassing later? Do we have adequate security/privacy policies? Can we find the right records quickly and cheaply?” )
It’s a good goal. The office manager will get paid well. Not like a partner, but probably better than secretaries, and records clerks. Plus you won’t have to do more than pay nominal fees for legal services. Hopefully not something you need to take advantage of, but it’s there.
This. Or office manager. It’s not a bad gig. Our office manager knows where all the bodies are buried and makes $100k a year. Also, she’s probably reading this.
Just curious: is she going to have a conscience about the outcomes brought about by her firm? Giant corporations and their attendant law firms don’t have the best reputations for good works and human-centered outcomes. Even though she’s not practicing law there, she will be helping them do whatever good or bad they do. [/HIJACK]
Presumably since she is not a lawyer, she is not bound by the ethical codes that regulate attorney practice. Of course, that’s not carte blanche to go around committing clearly unlawful acts, but it provides a shield for her to recognize that it is not her job to police the attorneys’ conduct 24/7.
It’s a bit odd to assume that whatever her firm is doing for these giant corporations involves squashing the little guy. Giant corporations need all sorts of legal services, most of them transactional.
-RNATB, lawyer for giant corporations whose practice definitely involves squashing the little guy
Ultra Vires’ point is just the opposite. Staff in a law firm are always under the supervision of a lawyer and are thus indirectly bound by the ethical code of conduct which lawyers must meet. She doesn’t get a free pass because she’s not a lawyer. If it would be wrong for the lawyer to do it, then the staff in the office can’t do it.
So I don’t know the details of the position, but my understanding is that a records clerk in a law office would know nothing about any of the cases being worked on. They’re literally just finding files and putting files back, AFAIK.
Okay basically I’m just not clear on what the concern is supposed to be.
Can those of you expressing this concern give me a fairly concrete example of the kind of problem you’re worried about? What is an ethically bad thing you’re worried a records clerk might be asked to do?
I can’t think of anything that might come up. There were a few times where (while I was a law student working as a paralegal) I pointed out a conflict of interest or something to my boss, who has been practicing long enough to forget most of the bar’s ethics rules that aren’t frequently litigated, but I wouldn’t be worried about it really.
At many jobs there is the possible concern that your employer is doing something you wouldn’t approve of. This is no different, if you don’t like what your employer is doing to make money then you can quit and look for another job. Although lawyers have a bad reputation I don’t think many of them are engaged in the type of activities that would offend most people.
In my experience, most ethics breaches aren’t that someone was intentionally asked to do something contrary to the Code of Ethics, but rather that there was an inadvertent mistake made that breached the Code.
One area that comes to mind in the case of records is confidentiality. Lawyers have a very high duty of confidentiality, owed to both their own clients and, in some cases, to the opposing side. If the person handling the records breaches that confidentiality, even inadvertently, the lawyer on the file may be subject to discipline.