As a very junior associate at Milbank, I was given an assignment at 6 PM to mark up a 50-page agreement by the next morning. Two problems: I already had a full workload that would keep me up past midnight, and I had never seen that type of agreement before.
I tried to ask for guidance, but the partner—clearly in a rush for a dinner engagement—left me to figure it out. A wave of anxiety hit me.
I started reading but had no idea what was or wasn’t negotiable—or even what should be negotiated in the first place.
This was in the earliest days of document management systems. I searched our database and found a final version of a similar agreement. I took it to the word processing/proofreading department (back when that was a thing, and they worked overnight shifts) and asked them to create a comparison against my draft. Then I got back to my other assignments.
By 3 AM, I had a hand redline. I went through it change by change, analyzing what was beneficial for our client, and completed my markup.
The next day, the partner said he was impressed by my insight. When I explained my approach, he was even more impressed by my 𝒓𝒆𝒔𝒐𝒖𝒓𝒄𝒆𝒇𝒖𝒍𝒏𝒆𝒔𝒔.
A lot has changed since then, and this anecdote seems obvious with the technology available to us now. But the lesson remains: Don’t reinvent the wheel. Leverage what has come before to accelerate your learning and take your work to the next level. I didn’t just copy that prior document—I used it to train myself on what mattered and where I could add value.
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