Wednesday, November 18, 2009

The Industry

When I interviewed for the position at this startup, one of the guys informed me that, if I didn't know already, the music industry is very old school. For example, he said, none of the industry attorneys will use the track changes feature to redline agreements. They mark them up by hand and have them emailed to you as a PDF. This seemed amazing to me, but believable. To be fair, I know older attorneys in the technology sector who still do that.

Sure enough, my experience has been of emailed PDFs with semi-legible question marks and brackets in the margins. Still, I didn't entirely understood what old school really meant, until I got an email from an industry attorney in LA. It was about a paragraph long, acknowledging receipt of our change requests (a proper redline).

At the bottom of the email below his name, it said: "Dictated but not read."

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Progress with Reversals

I'm very happy to report that I secured a part-time gig at a very cool company. It's a media company that works with musicians - and I'm a big music person. I also really like that the GC (who I'm working under) is a woman. That's a special treat because it's rare, and because she's cool.

I was connected with this opportunity by one of the partners at my old firm, which has led to an odd situation. Where I was once a lowly associate under this partner, I'm now the client. I enjoyed working for him and genuinely like him, but I'm still adjusting to the transition. As an associate, my focus was to do exactly what he asked and to do it fast.

Now I have to ask him to do things!