My wife is about a million times smarter than I am. (No … 100 billion.) For my money, that’s the recipe for a successful marriage. I’m a lawyer; she’s a legal assistant. We don’t work together, though — because that would be the recipe for a failing marriage. Not only do I have a deep personal respect for my wife, but I also have similar professional respect for what she does at the office. She knows more than I ever did about substantive law, even if you count the corpus of what I did know when I was still an active practitioner, many moons past. Certainly, I’m biased, but I don’t believe this level of professional respect is of the same sort regularly accorded to support staff in law firms. In fact, I know it’s not. In too many cases lawyers view their support staff as expendable commodities, replaceable and performing functions on a lower level than they do.
Originally published December 8, 2014
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