Lawyers even eat their own young

Anonymous Lawyer reveals the dirty secrets of his profession. In his profession, it has to be anonymous. Remember The Firm. Nobody wants to be whacked by Wilfred Brimley. In his latest post Anonymous reveals how lawyers eat their own young. They used to feed them to the dogs out back, but the dogs are gone now.

We know who we want to have succeed here and who we'd just as soon say goodbye to in a year and a half. We know whose names we eventually want on the letterhead (just a turn of phrase... we stopped putting partners' names on the letterhead a long time ago). And if they don't graduate with honors, then maybe we start to second-guess ourselves. Maybe we made the wrong choice. Or regular honors when we thought they'd do even better than that? Maybe they're slackers. Maybe a distinguished career in the law isn't as important to them as we thought. Maybe they're just like everyone else, and we should just burn them out as fast as we can and throw their carcass to the pile of dogs waiting out back (just a turn of phrase... we got rid of the dogs a long time ago).