A defection

A RILF raid on the firm ... How management handles the embarrassment when a lustrous fee earner is poached ... The slurring of a defector ... Interesting dynamic at play ... Suddently the curry at the partners' lunch gets interesting ... Dorothy Says

George mooched into my office and conspiratorially closed the sliding glass door.

"Guess what?" he said, voice loaded with portent. It was not really an invitation to guess, so I did not try.

"Peregrine has retired from the partnership."

This is truly astonishing, and unsettling news. Peregrine does add a certain lustre to the brand, as he is wont to remind us.

"Jumped or pushed?"

"Jumped. RILF."

RILF - Rapacious International Law Firm - is one of the many English firms launching an attack on the Australian legal market, causing a collective quaking of Big Firm knees.

It was thus very important to go to the partners' lunch today.

George and I arrived early, piled the green chicken curry, roast lamb, and spinach and ricotta ravioli onto our plates, took our places at the table, placed our napkins on our laps and waited for the fun to commence.

The turn out was high;  the mood funereal - much like that of the Persians when they heard Alexander the Great was making his destructive way east.

Ivan, our practice head, strolled in nonchalantly with a large smile and a cheery hullo.

His sleeves were rolled up, as they would be if you had been hard at work building some barricades or fortifying a moat.

He sat down. The conversation wandered desultorily for three or four minutes.

Then, very casually, as if he had just thought of it, Ivan raised the topic we were all there to discuss.

All of us, that is, except Fred, who calls a spade a shooovle, and calls political nuance absolute crap.

"I don't know if you have heard," Ivan said, "that Peregrine has resigned?"

"Oh really" said Fred, as he tore apart his white roll and attacked it with a large nob of butter. "That is a blow. What are his plans?"

"I think he said RILF."

There was a momentary silence while we contemplated that.

There were three categories of contemplation: disappointment from those who have had no response to their furtive offers to partake in RILF's buckets of gold; trepidation from those about to announce their own departure; and foreboding from those who long for a quiet life and can see that we might be abandoned in a backwater when the rats have deserted the ship.

Ivan said: "Well frankly, I am not surprised he was looking elsewhere. Things were starting to close in on him here. There was that allegation of bullying."

There it was, the moment George and I had been waiting for: the slurring of the defector.

The obvious truths about Peregrine - greed, the pomposity he sports in lieu of a chin, his need for a refresher on the law of fiduciary obligations - would not be mentioned, possibly because, in the partners' dining room, they are not recognised as faults.

George, who bristles when he sniffs wrongdoing, said: "Oh did we push him? I heard RILF has guaranteed him 1.4* a year for three years."

Ivan glanced at George, eyes narrowed, then continued to speak as if he was not there:

"It was a difficult thing to manage. I kept it to myself at the time, but we only just managed to avert a stress claim. She was threatening to go to the press."

It is important to understand the dynamic happening here. Ivan's job is to manage, so he is like a rooster with a cache of hens.

With a combination of bullying and a bit of strategic rogering, he must keep those he wants to stay here, and oust those he wants to leave.

To have someone leave of his or her own accord could be interpreted as a reflection on his capacities as rooster, so it is important that he find another explanation for it, and preferably hint that the outcome is so desirable, he had secretly engineered it.

To have them go to RILF, well, that could start a stampede and/or a revolt.

"Wasn't there some question about his expertise?" asked Fred. Fred occasionally (and accidentally) strikes just the right note for Ivan.

"Yes" said Ivan. "Even Smith [a partner who works with Peregrine] said that column Perry wrote for the AFR was just embarrassing." 

Ivan frowned and shook his head, to show how embarrassed he was.

"I wonder how he manages to stay Number One in Legal Directory?" I said valiantly.

There were some little grunts around the table, as everyone took a sudden interest in the curry.

Serendipitously, Roger's phone rang, loudly. He peered at it while it continued to ring, picked it up and, with an air of important urgency, answered it - loudly - as he left the room.

This happens at least twice at every gathering of partners. We think it is his wife.

With visible relief, Ivan was able to change the subject to how he was going to take the opportunity to replace Peregrine with someone totally stellar who, he was able to explain, Peregrine had been blocking from the partnership.

Oh, we few, we happy few, we band of brothers siblings.

Dorothy

* Million, in case you are wondering.