The truth about life in a top legal company

Honestly, the arrogance of some people – some bosses – is just eye-watering.  I’d never encountered it on quite such a scale before, until I was moved to a different department at this legal company where I’d worked (quite happily) for a number of years.

Suddenly I was surrounded by Female Lawyers, not a man amongst them (well, there was one, but then he just disappeared under mysterious circumstances – more about that later).  I’d worked with female bosses before, but never ones like these.

It was amusing at first, sitting at my desk, watching these woman strutting around so incredibly full of themselves.  How they managed to squeeze their inflated egos through doors I’ll never know.  They didn’t speak to the secretaries if they could possibly help it, we were way down in the hierarchy.  If you said good morning to them in passing they’d either glare at you like you were a single celled organism, or else totally ignore you.  If they had to speak to us they’d make it brief and abrupt - secretaries just weren’t worth the breath.

They complained that our group of secretaries were making too much noise.  We were told to stop talking so much (just normal talking).  I felt like I was back at school.  If we ever indulged in group conversations (again, just normal talking) the Big Boss would come out of his office and say he’d had complaints (this was when the male boss was still with us). 

Sometimes they’d complain about the smell of our lunches – sandwiches! 

There were corridors between our groups of desk.  Sometimes the female bosses (or, as I preferred to call them, the Foot-Stamping Princesses) would stand talking in these corridors.  You’d walk towards them, to the loo or to the kitchen, and they’d watch you approaching but didn’t move a single muscle to get out of the way.  How rude!  We (the mere secretaries) would either have to squeeze passed them or, if you said Excuse me, they’d glare at you and shift sideways a whole millimetre.

Every one of them was a nightmare to work for (I was fortunate in that my bosses were human).  One boss used to scribble incoherent notes to her secretary.  The secretary would do the work noted and take it to her boss.  The boss would then say, with some regularity and with deep exasperation, “I know that’s what you think I meant for you to do, but I didn’t mean it that way, you’ve done it wrong!”  The secretary took to asking other secretaries what they thought the scribbled notes meant and try and work it that way, to no avail.  Basically, the boss didn’t have a clue what she was doing and, as was the way in this department, she blamed the secretary.

One boss never smiled.  I mean never.  That’s just not natural, is it.  But then, in this department, there wasn’t a great deal to smile about.  It was a terrible place to work, oppressive, highly competitive and aggressive, and the behaviour of these FSPs was way out of control.

I passed a telephone message on to one of the FSPs about taking some email documents into a meeting with her.  She peered down her nose at me and snapped, “Well print the documents out and bring them down to the meeting room!”  There were several seconds as we just stared at each other, then I had to turn and walk away before I said something I might regret (and later regretted not saying anything).  I couldn’t access her emails as I wasn’t her secretary, her secretary wasn’t there and, because of the way she’d spoken to me, I thought Bugger it.  When the boss returned from her meeting she passed my desk and gave me a dirty look.  I thought, Call that a dirty look? and gave her one of my own.  She quickly turned away but never said anything.

The worst of them – the absolute worst - were two bosses who really needed to be taken into a room and given a damn good thrashing.  You wouldn’t treat dogs the way they treated their secretaries.  Nobody ever called them on it (I suspect everyone was terrified of them and they were quite high up in the company), so they just carried on doing it.  They were absolute control freaks.

One was a complete monster.  Brought in millions for the company so, of course, they weren’t going to question her behaviour or upset her in any way.    This boss would badger her secretary relentlessly, give her work and then say, 5 minutes later, “Have you done it yet?  You haven’t done it yet?  But I need it now.”  She wouldn’t say it in a quiet way either, she’d bawl so everyone would hear, humiliating the secretary further.

The Monster would stand behind the secretary barking orders, telling her to do this, do that, why hadn’t she done this yet.  She’d tell everyone this secretary was useless (she wasn’t).  I’d glare at her as she ranted and raved, and she saw me glaring, but hey, she was the top dog, she could do what she wanted.  And she did.

The Monster’s secretary was quite good, tried not to get flustered, would tell everyone, “Oh I just let it go over my head.”  But go out for a drink with her and she’d say, “God, I hate the bloody bitch.”  Nice woman, easy going, funny.  After a couple of years of this constant haranguing she started suffering from high blood pressure.  Her GP actually wrote to the company suggesting the secretary was moved to a different department, or at least given a different boss as the one she had was having a detrimental effect on his patient’s health.

What did the company do about this?  Absolutely nothing.  Oh they made the right noises, said they were waiting to transfer her, but there were no other vacancies in the company – despite the company regularly hiring temporary secretaries to cover positions.  12 months they left this secretary being harassed every day by her monstrous boss.  The blood pressure got worse.  The secretary started having chest pains.  It was really starting to get to her.

And then, one day, the Monster Boss asked the secretary for a file that had been archived.  While the boss shouted and bawled, the secretary searched through the archives but couldn’t find the file.  The boss was furious and stomped off.  Minutes later, the Monster returned - with reinforcements.  Three Foot Stamping Princesses stood around this secretary, all screaming, “Where’s the file?  We need the file!  Find it!  We want it now!”  Someone who witnessed this said she felt sick to her stomach, that this was a deliberate and prolonged mobbing.

That particular secretary has since handed in her notice - and thank god for that.

The Monster Boss completed huge deals for the company and got more and more powerful.  She disliked the Big Boss, a man who’d been with the company (and also brought in millions) for over 20 years - he was well liked.  One day we all came into work and were told he was gone.  No explanations, he just wouldn’t be working there any more.  There were rumours about him being sacked because the Monster Boss had demanded it.  The day he disappeared, the Monster Boss came out of her office and sat with all the Foot Stamping Princesses, all laughing and joking together – celebrating the Big Boss’s fate in front of everybody.  Playground behaviour.

Then there was another terrible boss.  Again, a top dog.  Behaved like a 3 year old.  If something went wrong, anything at all, she would storm out of her office and stand in front of her secretary screaming abuse.  I kid you not, she’d stand there and scream, “Why wasn’t this f**king well done?” even if it was nothing to do with the secretary, who was often reduced to tears.  Not one single person in the entire office ever stood up and said, “This is unacceptable behaviour.”  Not one.  How amazing is that?

This boss was a thrower.  She would get so angry she would throw things across her office, several times she'd thrown something at her secretary or other ‘lower’ staff – books, papers, whatever was in her hands she’d throw it.

“How can you put up with that?” I’d ask her, amazed.

“She’s worn me down,” the secretary would say, “I don’t have the confidence now to go for another job.”

This same secretary was told she couldn't talk to other people (she wasn't a yakker, wasn't the type who regularly wandered off to talk to other people, she kept her head down and got on with her work).  Her boss said she'd had complaints about her talking too much - the woman barely left her desk!  If anyone dared talk to this secretary, the boss would storm out of her office and tell them to go away, the secretary had work to do, so people stopped talking to her, she wasn't allowed to talk to them and spent all day silent and alone and thoroughly bloody miserable.

If this secretary went to the photocopier, she'd see her boss walking passed to make sure she wasn't talking to anyone.  If the secretary went to the kitchen to make a drink, the boss would hover outside.  If the secretary went to the toilet, the boss would follow to make sure she wasn't chatting.  This is a company that actually has lawyers dealing with Human Rights, who give seminars and in-house counselling on employment law.

Gobsmacking.  The company knew all this was happening, it was all relayed to the office manager, but the manager was rubbish and didn’t intervene in any way, didn’t do anything about it.  Ineffective management in a hostile environment, a terrible combination, a terrible place to work.

One secretary, celebrating her 50^th birthday, was told by her lawyer, “You don’t have much to show for the last 50 years, do you?”

Another secretary, when she said she couldn’t attend a late meeting because she had to get home to her children, was told, “You shouldn’t have had children, then!”

Another very young secretary was getting serious grief from an older secretary and mentioned it to the office manager, who said, "What do you want me to do about it?" (your job, perhaps?)  I had a problem with a small group of secretaries who's behaviour was totally unacceptable and mentioned it to the (same) office manager, who said, "What do you want me to do about it?" - it was clearly her motto for dealing with things, or not.

Yet another secretary was so driven to despair by her massively ambitious boss that she was forced to take nine months sick leave because she was so stressed.  “I thought I was going mad,” she told me.  I could well understand why.  Secretaries were routinely humiliated and treated with total disregard. 

It got to me in the end.  There were some quite serious problems and nobody was dealing with them, they were ignored, denied, tolerated.  Secretaries were dispensable.  Things just seemed to get worse and worse, the atmosphere in this department was diabolical.  As I value quality of life, I decided that this aggressive environment wasn’t for me and left.  Three other secretaries left shortly after me, and several bosses also handed in their notice (though not, unfortunately, any of the Foot Stamping Princesses).

I still have friends there who tell me nothing has changed, that people are leaving left, right and centre - in fact, this company is haemorrhaging staff to a rival legal firm.  I hope they go bust.

I now work for a non-legal company with genuinely nice people, which was such an eye-opener after working for this awful firm.  The thing about working in an aggressive environment is that you get used to it.  It’s only when you leave you realise how bad it was.

I should have left sooner.

But at least I got out.  I doubt I’ll ever work for lawyers again – I’d much rather stay sane.