RESPECTFULLY SUBMITTED
A VINCULO PARTNERMONIIS
I have this friend, and I am partial to him. We have known each other for a long time, and together we have endured the passions of professional youth and the mellowness of middle age. As practitioners of the same art, we have prospered in parallel, apart, but never too far. I had lunch with him recently, the first time I had seen him for a while, and the metamorphosis he had undergone in the interim was astonishing. His eyes did not have their customary gleam, and his appetite, once legendary, was insulting to the short order cook. Although he was at first reluctant to discuss his rigor mentis, under careful cross-examination he admitted the source of his consternation was the impending dissolution of his long-standing partnership. It seemed that after many years of professional bliss, he and his partner had come to a parting of the fees. Not wishing to intrude further into his melancholy, I abandoned the lie of questioning in favor of the less perturbing subjects of marital infidelity and child abuse.
In my tenure at the bar, I have seen a lot of partnerships that pass in the night. Once I even had one, and it was better than most. Where I was weak, my partner was strong. Where I could laugh, he could cry. My colleagues on more than on occasion remarked that my partner was diligent, patient, tactful, clever and kind, and the reason we got on so well together was because we were so dissimilar. As our professional interests went their separate ways, so did our firm, but to this day we remain good friends.
Some partnerships, alas, do not sever so well. Most older brothers no doubt recall a well-known partnership of some years ago that had earned certain pre-eminence at the local Bar, but when it erupted, it put Cracatoa to shame. The partners at first attempted to distribute the assets with the same grace characteristic of their practice. However, when they could not amicably agree upon an equitable division of the caseload, one partner hurdled the impasse by grabbing some 400 active files and dropping them, time slips and all, from a private plan over Lake Erie. A Court of Admiralty assumed jurisdiction of the dispute, but when the parties could not decide who should be the Petitioner and who the Respondent, the Court awarded salvage to the itinerant bass fisherman whose boat had been sunk by the weight of the caseload and who spent his declining years in retirement, living off the referral fees.
It has always seemed to me that those partnerships that survive the ravages of barristry are those in which the whole exceeds the sum of its partners. Like marriages of the flesh, the successful firm assumes a distinct personality all its own. Partnerships can have a certain style or lack of it, a special grace or a predisposition for ineptitude, all of which may be totally unrelated tot he qualities of the individual partners. While this sui lexis is ethereal, it is sui nevertheless, and is borne of the delicate intercourse between the members of the firm, a process so subtle as to often escape discernment. There are however a few maxims I have been able to extrapolate from my observations of partnerships and their survival, and I pass them on to you herewith, regardless of their merit:
Do not treat your partners with respect. They aren’t used to it and it may make them nervous.
Share your secretaries equally with your partners during office hours.
Always let your partners think they are earning their keep.
Be gracious when your partners are named defendants in a malpractice suit or they may join you as an additional defendant.
Pay for the toilet paper yourself if to do otherwise means going without.
Neither sign your name to a partner’s pleading nor your partner’s name to a firm check.
Trust your partners implicitly. The truth is too high a price to pay to gratify one’s suspicions.
It is, I suppose, a basic instinct of all lawyers to be combative, competitive, and hostile. Accordingly, a law partnership is contrary to nature, and, like “a friendship among women”, “is only a suspension of hostilities.” If in some way I have added one minute to that armistice or have contributed to the salvation of a single partnership, that will be fee enough for my effort, though a partner may prefer cash.
Respectfully submitted,
S. Sponte, Esq.
© 1978, S. Sponte, Esq.