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: Anonymous Attorney

By Anonymous Lawyer (Jeremy Blachman)

Roger Clemens reminds me what's right about the world. In case you missed it, this afternoon he announced that he's signed with the Yankees. Most players sign with teams during the offseason, go to spring training, and then try and play the whole season. Not Roger. Roger's better than that. And a terrific demonstration of why people who are better than everyone else should get to play by different rules. If Randy Wolf had told the Dodgers he wanted to wait until May to decide who he wanted to play for, they would have said, "Okay, Randy, that's fine, but we can't wait for you. We probably won't have a spot for you, or the budget flexibility to sign you at top dollar." That's because Randy is merely a run-of-the-mill major league starting pitcher. He's good, but he's no Clemens. Clemens, on the other hand, gets to wait until the entire Yankees rotation is on the disabled list, and they're desperate for pitching help. And then he can swoop right in and volunteer to help them out, in exchange for just a couple dozen million dollars.

I'm not intending any sarcasm here. I applaud Clemens. I applaud him for being able to tailor the system to his needs, and I celebrate the ability of the free market to adjust to a player like Clemens, who only wants to pitch part of the season, and who wants to keep all of the cards in his hand for the longest time possible. I'm just glad the law firm recruiting market doesn't work the same way. It would make my job a lot harder. Imagine the normal recruiting season. The run-of-the-mill Ivy League law students interview and get offers. But what if the standouts got to bypass the system? What if they were able to call us the day after we signed Big Client X to a headline-making deal, and offer their services for 50% above the normal rate? Well, we'd laugh at them. We'd say they should have gone through the normal recruiting process. We'd send paralegals over to their houses to throw eggs at their windows.

But that's only because there are no standouts. Associates are all the same. They're all equally capable of doing the mindless work we assign, and the "standouts" are just the ones who never go home. They're all fungible parts, easy to swap in and out when they leave for the hospital after their nervous breakdowns. That's just the way the system works.

And the way it works here makes me forget that there are other places in the world where skill and talent actually make a different, and standout performers deserve special treatment. Not here. But on the Yankees. And that's what Clemens reminds me. Good for Roger. I wouldn't hire him to do document review outside of the normal recruiting calendar (although he'd probably do just fine at it), but I'm glad he gets to pitch for the Yankees and get $30 million for half a season's work. Congratulations, Roger.

Full post as published by Anonymous Attorney on May 06, 2007 (boomark / email).