With the university semester finally completed, it is with mild curiosity that I plunge headlong into the world of corporate law. For four weeks, I will metamorphise into a memorandum-producing, file-juggling, coffee-brewing minion of Higher Powers. With any luck, there will be liberal wining and dining to punctuate said activities. Hopefully, not too many of these stories will eventuate:

The two weeks before the summer program[me] starts is always a whirlwind of activity. First, there’s the matter of offices. If I had my druthers, I’d load up a conference room with a couple dozen desks and stick all of the summer associates in there for the summer. Every few hours, I’d send an associate in to explain an assignment, and, Survivor-style, the last one to complete the task would be eliminated. It would keep the summer associates on their toes and let them feel some of the pressure that the young associates do.

And of course, knowing my etiquette, there’s always the possibility of this:

I took a new first-year associate to lunch yesterday. His table manners are terrible. First, he used the wrong fork for the salad, which is just about grounds for termination, although I was in a generous mood so I chose to ignore it. We ordered some pasta that we shared, and when he reached to take some pasta and put it on his plate, he somehow carelessly dropped a pile of spaghetti on the tablecloth, in between the bowl and his plate. Of course, he instantly recognized the inappropriateness, and attempted to divert my attention and place a napkin over the offending spill. But my attention is not easily diverted, and I refused to look away. I just stared at the pasta, and stared at him, and stared back at the pasta, and stared back at him, and stared back at the pasta, and stared back at him, until he was sufficiently shamed and couldn’t bring himself to engage in any real conversation for the rest of the meal. I think he also swallowed a bone in the fish to avoid having to deal with finding a delicate way to remove it from his mouth and place it securely in his napkin. He won back some points with that.

Somehow, however, I think this episode is unlikely to occur:

I learned this morning that on Friday after work, a dozen of our summer associates decided among themselves to go out for drinks, and ended up staying out until three in the morning, finally ending up at a strip club. Normally this isn’t something that ends up on my radar screen. … But the reason I’ve learned about this, and why it’s now on my plate to deal with, is because this morning they submitted the receipts to the recruiting coordinator and asked if the firm would reimburse them, as an “informal summer associate gathering.” The pitch one of them made to the recruiter was that the firm pays for all sorts of trips to bars throughout the summer program[me], and lots of other events, all designed for the summers to get to know each other and get to know the firm. And since this activity was entirely summer associates, they feel like it’s the same kind of event the firm usually pays for, and don’t think it’s an inappropriate request. This is a problem.