After Monday's post, a virtuous and wise Victoria Moffat lead me away from competitive trickery and lead me to formulate A Cunning Plan.
This was to write the best handover notes and use them to update the fee earners responsible for the files. A twofold benefit for me: (1) Successor Trainee will have good notes to work from and (2) I will get brownie points for updating my fee earners. Its win win, right?
Wrong
I forgot to take into consideration the fee earner's in my department aren't particularly forward thinking. Apart from my supervisor, none of the other fee-earners had positive reactions. Most of them just wanted to know if there was anything pressing and although I had highlighted this at the top of each note, they refused to read them. Others had forgotten that I had the files, despite checking my outgoing correspondence on said files for the last 6 months so thought I was cheekily reminding them! So much for the extra brownie points.......
By far my favourite reaction was the following, from a grumpy fee earner:
Grumpy Lawyer: "Miss TS, what is this?"
Miss TS: "It's an update on your file that I am going to handover to the your new trainee"
Grumpy Lawyer: "Did I ask you to do this?"
Miss TS: "No, but I thought it would be a good idea for you to be up to date with what I have been doing"
Grumpy Lawyer: "Its very in depth. Is is on the file?"
Miss TS: "Not yet, I wanted you to read it first."
Grumpy Lawyer: "Don't bother. This new trainee has got to learn on his own without any help from you. You can't be his wet nurse"
Miss TS: "-"
Grumpy Lawyer: *walks off muttering* "What a waste of time........."
Charming. Oh well, I tried!!!
Our handover went okay. The trainees in our department did well written handover notes (which were appreciated). However, with a two week gap things had moved on, on most files there had been developments and anything urgent had been dealt with by a paralegal (myself) or a supervising fee earner. So I've a further update meeting on Monday with the incoming trainee to update them on all the files I was "babysitting".
ReplyDeleteThe things that were useful were various "guides" the outgoing trainees drafted, such as the Trainee's guide to SDLT (which hopefully means I won't be expected to train all the trainees on SDLT matters - but that remains to be seen).