Fired summer associate Forum

[abiglawyer]

I'm a little disappointed. With all the logical reasoning in the LSAT, you'd expect folks to be familiar with Occam's razor. What is more likely? A summer was stupid enough to grope someone midday at lunch OR DPW HR knew the Vault rankings were coming out and concocted this whole thing to overshadow their fall from grace?

I know which one I'm going to believe.

Famous burden of proof Occam’s razor. When I’m making a momentous decision, like whether to ruin someone’s life, I never learn all the facts. I just take the initial report and then intuit the right answer like I’m squinting at a magic eye puzzle.

[Man from Nantucket]

I'm a little disappointed. With all the logical reasoning in the LSAT, you'd expect folks to be familiar with Occam's razor. What is more likely? A summer was stupid enough to grope someone midday at lunch OR DPW HR knew the Vault rankings were coming out and concocted this whole thing to overshadow their fall from grace?

I know which one I'm going to believe.

Famous burden of proof Occam’s razor. When I’m making a momentous decision, like whether to ruin someone’s life, I never learn all the facts. I just take the initial report and then intuit the right answer like I’m squinting at a magic eye puzzle.

This is a good point re: recommending DPW to someone, there’s just no recovering from that prestige hit.

[nixy]

Um, what? Why are we rushing to assume there’s some justification for running your hands up a woman’s leg at a work lunch? The switching seats with the woman (and GETTING FIRED) all point to this being non-consensual. I cannot for the life of me imagine someone getting fired for the “impropriety” of running their hands up their girlfriend’s leg.

Ah, well, if you can’t imagine it, then I guess the issue is settled. On the strength of your conviction, let’s go ahead and ruin his life.

It’s not like we’re all lawyers, after all, in which case we would have had formal training in the difficulty of proving issues of fact and intent.

Thank you for snarky response. So you have actual concrete examples of people being fired for consensual PDA?

Yes, I remember Evidence class, where we learned that to disprove a prosecutor’s argument one must give concrete examples of an opposite scenario.

Have you ever heard that description of reading caselaw as stirring concrete with your eyelashes? That’s what trying to have an argument with you is like. That or catching the wind in a sieve.

This would be pertinent if we were talking about criminal charges, but we’re not.

Premises:
- SA ran his hands up a woman’s leg and got fired.
- Non-consensual sexual contact is a reasonable basis for firing an SA.

Unless you can demonstrate there’s also some kind of practice of firing SAs for consensual PDA (...under a table), isn’t the most logical conclusion that it was non-consensual?

Now obviously if other facts applied we could reach other conclusions. I have no idea if the leg-fondling is true, but if that is what happened I don’t think it’s “ruining someone’s life” to understand it as non-consensual.

(I’m not enjoying this argument either, believe me.)

[QContinuum]

Um, what? Why are we rushing to assume there’s some justification for running your hands up a woman’s leg at a work lunch? The switching seats with the woman (and GETTING FIRED) all point to this being non-consensual. I cannot for the life of me imagine someone getting fired for the “impropriety” of running their hands up their girlfriend’s leg.

Ah, well, if you can’t imagine it, then I guess the issue is settled. On the strength of your conviction, let’s go ahead and ruin his life.

It’s not like we’re all lawyers, after all, in which case we would have had formal training in the difficulty of proving issues of fact and intent.

Thank you for snarky response. So you have actual concrete examples of people being fired for consensual PDA?

Yes, I remember Evidence class, where we learned that to disprove a prosecutor’s argument one must give concrete examples of an opposite scenario.

Since you remember Evidence class, perhaps you also remember the part about the Evidence rules only applying in courts of law.

[abiglawyer]

Um, what? Why are we rushing to assume there’s some justification for running your hands up a woman’s leg at a work lunch? The switching seats with the woman (and GETTING FIRED) all point to this being non-consensual. I cannot for the life of me imagine someone getting fired for the “impropriety” of running their hands up their girlfriend’s leg.

Ah, well, if you can’t imagine it, then I guess the issue is settled. On the strength of your conviction, let’s go ahead and ruin his life.

It’s not like we’re all lawyers, after all, in which case we would have had formal training in the difficulty of proving issues of fact and intent.

Thank you for snarky response. So you have actual concrete examples of people being fired for consensual PDA?

Yes, I remember Evidence class, where we learned that to disprove a prosecutor’s argument one must give concrete examples of an opposite scenario.

Have you ever heard that description of reading caselaw as stirring concrete with your eyelashes? That’s what trying to have an argument with you is like. That or catching the wind in a sieve.

This would be pertinent if we were talking about criminal charges, but we’re not.

Premises:
- SA ran his hands up a woman’s leg and got fired.
- Non-consensual sexual contact is a reasonable basis for firing an SA.

Unless you can demonstrate there’s also some kind of practice of firing SAs for consensual PDA (...under a table), isn’t the most logical conclusion that it was non-consensual?

Now obviously if other facts applied we could reach other conclusions. I have no idea if the leg-fondling is true, but if that is what happened I don’t think it’s “ruining someone’s life” to understand it as non-consensual.

(I’m not enjoying this argument either, believe me.)

I’m not doing this with you because it’s boring and you’re not very smart, sorry.

[cavalier1138]

Wow. We went from

That said, many people in this thread seem to have never had an organic moment of passion in their lives, or at least argue like they haven’t, which is sad.

to

Do we know the two were not in a relationship, and that the issue was just the impropriety of PDA at a firm event?

in a fucking heartbeat, huh?

Not that I'm surprised, but self-awareness is a rarity these days.

[nixy]

Lol, that’s a convincing retreat, abiglawyer.

If you’re operating on the assumption that we’re currently in an atmosphere where any accusation of impropriety is going to get someone fired no matter how innocent it was, then maybe make that explicit. Like if you don’t trust the accusation, just say so. Coming up with some kind of convoluted “but but maybe it was someone he was in a relationship with!!” is frankly much less convincing than saying “I don’t believe this is what happened.”

I am happy to open this up to other biglawyers. Is it reasonable to think that an SA would get fired for consensual leg-fondling under a table during lunch? And that the fondle-ee switched seats for some unrelated reason?

Again, if you don’t trust the account of what happened, that’s fine. Just assuming that what was described is what happened, though.

[QContinuum]

I am happy to open this up to other biglawyers. Is it reasonable to think that an SA would get fired for consensual leg-fondling under a table during lunch? And that the fondle-ee switched seats for some unrelated reason?

The second - the "fondle-ee" switching seats - yes, sure, I can easily see an innocent explanation. E.g., BF's feeling frisky, GF's not feeling it, and GF moves away to avoid BF's wandering hands. Or maybe BF and GF had a big fight earlier, and BF is now teasing GF/testing the waters, but GF's still steamed and not having it.

But the first, no, not at all. I can't see any summer being fired for stroking his GF's leg under the table during lunch (unless the stroking was seriously R-rated).

Wow. We went from

That said, many people in this thread seem to have never had an organic moment of passion in their lives, or at least argue like they haven’t, which is sad.

to

Do we know the two were not in a relationship, and that the issue was just the impropriety of PDA at a firm event?

in a fucking heartbeat, huh?

Not that I'm surprised, but self-awareness is a rarity these days.

cav, you realize abiglawyer's a lawyer, and applying the FRE on TLS and arguing in the alternative are things big lawyers do, right?

[nixy]

I am happy to open this up to other biglawyers. Is it reasonable to think that an SA would get fired for consensual leg-fondling under a table during lunch? And that the fondle-ee switched seats for some unrelated reason?

The second - the "fondle-ee" switching seats - yes, sure, I can easily see an innocent explanation. E.g., BF's feeling frisky, GF's not feeling it, and GF moves away to avoid BF's wandering hands. Or maybe BF and GF had a big fight earlier, and BF is now teasing GF/testing the waters, but GF's still steamed and not having it.

But the first, no, not at all. I can't see any summer being fired for stroking his GF's leg under the table during lunch (unless the stroking was seriously R-rated).

Fair. I lean to the sinister explanation in the context of the firing (also assuming like a restaurant or something where switching seats would take some effort, which of course isn’t necessarily the case), but that makes sense. (But if so, seriously, people, learn some judgment.)

[LaLiLuLeLo]

Granted, I was a summer before the metoo era so maybe my perception is skewed but I feel like a hand on leg situation as described would actually get you merely no-offered UNLESS the gropee complained/the person who saw it was a powerful partner that felt strongly about firing the summer.

The bar to get fired as a summer is REALLY high. I’ve heard of some pretty egregious things that just resulted in a no offer, not a firing. But maybe things have changed.

[cavalier1138]

Wow. We went from

That said, many people in this thread seem to have never had an organic moment of passion in their lives, or at least argue like they haven’t, which is sad.

to

Do we know the two were not in a relationship, and that the issue was just the impropriety of PDA at a firm event?

in a fucking heartbeat, huh?

Not that I'm surprised, but self-awareness is a rarity these days.

cav, you realize abiglawyer's a lawyer, and applying the FRE on TLS and arguing in the alternative are things big lawyers do, right?

If that's what I thought was going on, sure. But this is pretty blatant "It's just so hard to understand what's acceptable these days!" when looking at a completely obvious situation. It's not argument in the alternative so much as argument in the oh-shit-it-turns-out-this-was-creepy.

[abiglawyer]

Those two quotes aren’t inconsistent at all. The first one is about dancing, generally, and not at work events, which Halp seems to think requires loud consent before hands move to hips, which is sterile and absurd. The second was in response to the report of the hand on the leg, which came later.

I think it’s likely the summer associate did something wrong. My point is that, because we cannot say this for sure, it is unethical to assist ATL in spreading details of the firing.

[nixy]

Granted, I was a summer before the metoo era so maybe my perception is skewed but I feel like a hand on leg situation as described would actually get you merely no-offered UNLESS the gropee complained/the person who saw it was a powerful partner that felt strongly about firing the summer.

The bar to get fired as a summer is REALLY high. I’ve heard of some pretty egregious things that just resulted in a no offer, not a firing. But maybe things have changed.

Yeah, that’s why I incline toward thinking something pretty bad happened. Obviously I can’t say for certain what it was, and I could still be wrong.

(Also abiglawyer I think you’re reading Halp as contentiously as possible.)

[icansortofmath]

If the harassed associate makes a big deal out of whatever the incident was, no firm is going to go out of its way to protect the accused summer even if a reasonable person would find the incident to be minor.

[LaLiLuLeLo]

If the harassed associate makes a big deal out of whatever the incident was, no firm is going to go out of its way to protect the accused summer even if a reasonable person would find the incident to be minor.

Yeah exactly. As soon as there’s a complaint it’s done. But if there’s no complaint a firm can pretend ignorance and just no offer. Predictably, a summer would be reluctant to make an actual complaint which is why it’s rare.

[QContinuum]

If the harassed associate makes a big deal out of whatever the incident was, no firm is going to go out of its way to protect the accused summer even if a reasonable person would find the incident to be minor.

Yeah exactly. As soon as there’s a complaint it’s done. But if there’s no complaint a firm can pretend ignorance and just no offer. Predictably, a summer would be reluctant to make an actual complaint which is why it’s rare.

Generally summers are nervous about getting that offer even at 100%-offer firms, so I can't imagine a summer filing a formal complaint with HR bar seriously egregious wrongdoing (and maybe not even then).

Women (men too; it just happens less frequently to men) in general are very hesitant to complain about sexual harassment/assault, due in large part to the sort of victim-blaming crud that tends to come up. Female summers are going to be even more hesitant to come forward than the average employee.

[nixy]

The other thing is that in theory someone else saw, so if so, and as someone suggested earlier, it was a sufficiently powerful partner, the SA fondle-ee might not have had to bring it up.

[misterjames]

For those of us who have no interest in reading through all the crap in these last 6 pages, can someone provide a summary update on what we know here?

[patent_guy]

For those of us who have no interest in reading through all the crap in these last 6 pages, can someone provide a summary update on what we know here?

There’s been a lot of speculation and useless arguing, but nothing has been confirmed at all.

[abiglawyer]

For those of us who have no interest in reading through all the crap in these last 6 pages, can someone provide a summary update on what we know here?

Just wait for Private Pyle’s turgid writeup in ATL, no doubt forthcoming. Hi Joe.

[misterjames]

For those of us who have no interest in reading through all the crap in these last 6 pages, can someone provide a summary update on what we know here?

There’s been a lot of speculation and useless arguing, but nothing has been confirmed at all.

So business as usual, got it

[MaxMcMann]

That is a fair debate though. If two people are dancing, for example, and hands are already in play, the line is indeed blurred on what would constitute groping and what would constitute welcome escalation.

Please explain how dancing "escalates." Is the idea that if someone starts doing the Charleston that they're naturally up for doing a Lindy Hop? Is tango an escalation from salsa? Inquiring minds want to know!

If you're doing the tango with someone, you are almost certainly committing actions that would be considered groping in the absence of consent.

[icansortofmath]

Even just regular Waltz can be harassment...

[cavalier1138]

That is a fair debate though. If two people are dancing, for example, and hands are already in play, the line is indeed blurred on what would constitute groping and what would constitute welcome escalation.

Please explain how dancing "escalates." Is the idea that if someone starts doing the Charleston that they're naturally up for doing a Lindy Hop? Is tango an escalation from salsa? Inquiring minds want to know!

If you're doing the tango with someone, you are almost certainly committing actions that would be considered groping in the absence of consent.

Do you usually engage random women in non-consensual tango sessions?

[abiglawyer]

Let’s please re-litigate the dance-touch issue forever.