interview with the soul vampires

If you think (as I tend to do) of interviews as blind dates, this would be the one where both people sit down, look at each other, smile politely, and immediately start to eye the nearest exits.

It should have been so good, too. He *loved* my anti-BigLaw cover letter (obviously not the one I usually send out, but he had requested a custom letter in the ad, stating that generic ones would be tossed and blacklisted) and I liked what I'd read about his business model (no billable hours, work/life balance, everybody gets an MBA while working there, a pro bono wing that works with struggling artists and musicians, etc). But some things just make more sense on paper.

I won't name names, but this firm is a sham, a train wreck, a disaster in the making. It's run by this (very) young salesman who just passed the bar this February (after graduating from a certain fourth-tier school in the Boston area), has no legal experience to speak of (although he was CFO of some startup or other before law school), doesn't expect to turn anything approaching a significant profit until about this time next year (meaning, of course, that no one gets paid, at all, until then), and has no one on his team so far who has any significant experience whatsoever in the fields that he intends to practice in--although, to be fair, they all seem to have very strong business backgrounds. Where most new firms would shore up their resources and be sure that they had the right people able to cover the right areas before actively thinking about marketing themselves, he's doing it totally backwards: namely, building up a fancy corporate structure, doing expensive market research, and planning a business model for the past nine months BEFORE taking on any attorneys, let along clients. Actually being able to perform the work in question seems to be entirely incidental to selling what he calls their "package of products" (y'know, what most people would call "legal services"). i finally had to ask him: "Don't you think it might be a problem that no one here has any legal experience at all, and that you're mostly talking about hiring people straight out of school?"

"Well," the Salesman said, "it's a team environment. We can learn from each other." That was about enough for me. I was already unimpressed enough with the office, with his breezy sales talk and illusory business model, and (most importantly) the prospect of not being paid more than a couple hundred dollars a month for the next year, but being told that the blind can, in fact, be expected to successfully lead the blind was really all I needed to hear. I'm not asking for a workplace that comports with Scripture, but I would at least prefer that we try to heed some of Jesus's most generally applicable teachings. The blatantly indifferent stupidity of this approach was so overwhelming, so totally blinding, that I couldn't even think straight for a few minutes when faced with its full implications for a new law firm in one of the nastier legal markets in the country. You can't start up a new firm without at least a couple of experienced attorneys behind it. You just can't.

I'd already been warned that these guys didn't have it together, that the Salesman was selling a lemon, but that was after I'd already gotten the interview. At that point, I thought it might be a chance to practice my interview skills... but I didn't even have the heart to do *that* once I saw the office. I mostly wanted out of there. But the feeling was mutual after he asked me if I'd taken a Meyers-Briggs test recently.

I have, of course, and we're total opposites on every count. He's up in the freakishly extroverted corner of things, and I'm pretty much on the other side of the diagram. Again, the long, mutual stare of a blind date gone horribly wrong. "You know," he said, "we're really looking for people who can aggressively network, who can get out to every possible function and get the word out about this firm."

"Look," I said, with a quick glance at the exit before I stared him down. "You send me out alone to one of those functions, and I will singlehandedly destroy your firm's chances of survival."

There was a long pause with a lot of eye contact. He kept waiting for me to smile, and then finally broke the tension with some nervous laughter. I didn't really see anything to laugh about.

You know how these dates usually end: awkward smiles, a bad hug, eyes everywhere but the other person, maybe a chaste kiss on the cheek if one or the other of you are feeling particularly gracious. My only consolation was that my pesky questions about the feasibility of all of this, my unmaskable cynicism about what he was trying to do, seemed to keep him more nervous than I was. And I wasn't, really. It's hard to be nervous about missing an opportunity for something you really don't want to do.