I work in a law firm. This woman was hired as the lead paralegal of a team of three of us. Boy, was [Paralegal] a piece of work.

Her resume listed several jobs over a two-year period with no timeframes given. Yet when an applicant did the same thing, [Paralegal] was highly critical. At meetings, [Paralegal] always carried an armful of books and papers to show how busy she was, but never consulted those papers. If something on a project went well, it was to her credit, but if something went wrong, it was always somebody else’s fault. [Paralegal] was good at criticizing others, but if anybody dared criticize her, she went to the attorneys and claimed she was being bullied.

At least two paralegals walked out without notice because of [Paralegal]. I was out sick when one person left because of [Paralegal]; colleagues called me at home to tell me what had happened and attorneys called me at home to make sure I wasn’t going to leave. I later did leave because of [Paralegal] as I couldn’t take her unjustified accusations any longer.

Did that make the firm fire her or reprimand her? Nope. [Paralegal] later went to law school, but her personality was so bad that she couldn’t keep friends at any type of business and job-hopped there, as well. No idea what happened to her since. If she ever shows up at the firm where I work now, I have enough seniority that I can refuse to work with her and openly say why.

I worked at a law office. My boss instructed me to set up a spreadsheet with clients’ names and other details that were relevant to the case. We did this spreadsheet for every client. He showed me exactly how it was to be done. Then, I emailed it to him to make sure it was exactly like he wanted, and it was. I did these spreadsheets every day for every client. [Boss] never complained. 

Enter [Coworker].

Coworker: “Hey, I saw some of these spreadsheets you did for a client, and I had a question.”

Me: “Sure.”

Coworker: “I don’t understand them. What does it mean?”

I took the time to explain to her what the information meant.

Coworker: “It’s so confusing. Why did you do it like this?”

Me: “This is the exact same way the boss said he wanted it set up.”

Coworker: “Yeah, but I don’t understand why you did it this way.”

Me: “Well, this is the way the boss said he wanted it to look, and he has not had any complaints about how I’ve been doing them.”

Coworker: “Well, I still don’t understand why you’re doing it this way. I mean, it’s confusing.”

Me: “It makes sense to me and the boss. It probably doesn’t make sense to you because you don’t work in this department.”

Coworker: “Well, I don’t like it. You need to change some things in it, like this, for example.”

[Coworker] started charging things on the spreadsheet. She was adding things to it that were actually messing it up.

Coworker: “Now this makes sense. You have to start doing it this way from now on.”

Me: “Well, don’t you want to ask the boss if your way is better?”

Coworker: “No.”

I changed everything that she messed up on the spreadsheet back to how it was originally, and I did not do the spreadsheets her way.

My job was different from [Coworker]’s. That’s why it looked different to her. She didn’t know what she was looking at.

I’m an estate lawyer. There’s a type of decedent that every estate lawyer runs into: an old man is absolutely loaded, has no wife or kids, has several nieces and nephews, and dies without a will. His money is squirreled away into a thousand little small accounts across the country.

At least in the case that landed in my lap, the niblings (gender-neutral term for nieces and nephews) were willing to split everything equally, and that helped a lot.

There was no centralized list of what he actually owned, so we were stuck doing all sorts of research to figure it out. The documents came in dribs and drabs. 

I filed for an extension for time to file, and over the course of about two and a half years, we put his estate to rights.

They planned to sell his house, but they decided to remodel first. It’s a good thing they decided to remodel because when they tore up the carpet, they found more money, including bond and stock certificates, hidden under the carpet.

They decided to look into this more closely and found money hidden under the insulation in the attic, behind the bathroom mirror, and even hidden inside the walls behind a blank socket plate.

The clients reported to me that it was like a demented Easter egg hunt, and it made them paranoid that the others were taking the money out without reporting it. They wound up hunting in groups no smaller than three, and they each tallied the money and certificates individually.

All in all, most of the certificates were already accounted for, as the companies had electronic records, but the cash added another million to the estate.

When I was doing my articles at a small law firm — an internship to be admitted as an attorney — I was the go-to person for everything at the office e.g. setting up computers, buying stationery, paying bills, going to court, seeing clients, etc. After being admitted as an attorney, I continued doing all this because the secretary only did about 20% of what a secretary would usually do and refused to do anything else. My boss did some shady business (didn’t pay taxes, etc.) so he couldn’t just fire her for fear of her ratting him out. He also never disciplined her. We are not in the US.

Since we worked from my boss’s mother’s house, the secretary also spent about 50% of her day just chatting with his mother and they became fast friends. Guess who was always the evil one that everyone ganged up on? Yours truly. I was made out to be incompetent at my job, and I used to cry a lot and almost became an alcoholic from work stress.

One day, the secretary got really upset with me after I asked her to buy stationery since we didn’t even have staples. After a heated argument, she told me:

Secretary: “You are not the office manager, and you should stop lording it about as if you were!”

Bear in mind that I was her senior both as an attorney and in the number of years I’d worked at the firm. My boss did nothing and rather got upset with me, as did his mother.

I decided then and there that I was done doing both secretary work and my attorney work because I was working roughly fifty to sixty hours per week — the standard was forty — trying to get everything done without receiving overpay. (The unemployment rate in my country was around 30%, and in the legal field, the supply of lawyers exceeded the demand.) The secretary knew this and my boss knew this, but no one cared that I was basically working myself into an early grave.

Cue malicious compliance. If everyone agreed that I was not the office manager, then I would stop managing the flow of the office and only do my attorney work. I stopped paying the bills, buying the stationery, reminding my boss of important meetings, etc.

Within two weeks, the electricity was cut off for ten days because it wasn’t paid and my boss’s elderly mother and the rest of his family had no electricity. We also could not work for those ten days. Once the electricity was turned back on, the phone lines were cut because of non-payment. Again, we could not work. The post piled up. There was no stationery. We couldn’t do service of court documents because our service providers cut us off. It went on for weeks. I simply worked around the issues and sorted my life out. (One example: when the WiFi was off, I used my cellphone as a hotspot for my laptop without telling anyone.)

In the end, my boss and his mother begged me to do what I used to do, but I refused. Since I was focusing more on my actual work, my fees increased, and my pay increased, as well.

Shortly thereafter, I moved away from that office to our secondary office and worked alongside lovely colleagues who all did what they got paid to do. I have been at this new office — the same firm, just a different location — for the last two years.

I worked in a law office for about two years, and I had a coworker who thought she knew everything. One day, she sent me an email.

Coworker: “My client took FMLA, and I need you to contact (our liaison in another office) We need to know if we have to pay FMLA back I don’t know what FMLA is or anything about it.”

FMLA is the Family and Medical Leave Act, a labor law that requires companies to provide employees with job-protected, unpaid leave for accepted medical and family issues.

Me: “I know what FMLA is. It is up to twelve weeks of unpaid time off. I can send you a link that explains exactly what it is.”

Coworker: “No, we need to know if we have to pay someone back for the FMLA the client took.”

Me: “This is unpaid leave — unless she took short-term disability with the FMLA. The only thing to pay back in that case would be the short-term disability.”

Coworker: “No, I want you to email the liaison and find out for sure that FMLA does not have to be paid back.”

I didn’t understand why she couldn’t email the guy herself. I went ahead and sent him the email, and I was thinking he was going to think we were incompetent here. The liaison emailed me back and confirmed that the FMLA was unpaid leave time and there was nothing to pay back.

I called [Coworker] and told her this, and I sent her the link to read about FMLA. 

About three months later, [Coworker] called me.

Coworker: “Did you ever find out if the FMLA has to be paid back?”

Me: “Yes, I did, and I let you know months ago that it does not have to be paid back. Did you read that link I sent you that explains FMLA?”

Coworker: “No. I don’t know anything about FMLA.”

Me: “Okay. FMLA is twelve weeks of unpaid leave. FMLA is job protection. It doesn’t have anything to do with money. So there will be nothing to pay back.”

Coworker: “Okay, I’m confused. Should we be paying somebody back?”

Me: “No, it’s only unpaid leave time. The client didn’t get paid when she took FMLA.”

Coworker: “I’m still not sure about that. Can you call around and ask if we are supposed to be paying anything back for the FMLA?”

Me: “There’s no one to call. As I explained, FMLA is only unpaid leave time and job protection. It’s not like Worker’s Compensation.”

Coworker: “I still don’t know if that’s right.”

Me: “In my previous job, we learned about FMLA, and from my experience, it is unpaid leave time, and it is job protection. There is nothing to pay back since no money was paid to the client.”

Coworker: “I would feel better if you would just call someone to ask.”

Me: “I have explained everything to you about FMLA. I don’t know who you would want me to call. We don’t want to look incompetent.”

Coworker: “Well, I’ll just call around and ask myself.”

Me: “Call the client and ask her if she received any pay while she was taking FMLA.”

Coworker: “I already asked her and she said no.”

Me: “Then you see there’s nothing to pay back.”

Coworker: “Well, I hope you’re right about this.”

I quit a month later.