Happy Holidays From Quinn Emanuel

"Here are a few tales from the holiday season at Quinn Emanuel:

We all joined Quinn on an up-note. We were told we would be direct hires making $55/hour plus overtime and operating on California's generous overtime rules. The project was to be run by a heavily made up (think Jersey Shore) cheerleader and a crooked-nosed lurch from Fordham.

All went swimmingly for a week. We got our steady diet of indignity, but as it was served with a healthy dose of money, who were we really to complain. And so it carried on a week until the Wednesday before Thanksgiving when they gathered us all in a great big room to tell us that our pay had been reduced by $19 an hour, cheers, and have a great Thanksgiving. Also, you no longer work for Quinn, you work for a woman at Strategic Legal with a herpee on her lip. Oh, and a baleful "sorry" to those who had canceled their holiday plans, but our work wouldn't be entirely necessary this weekend as they planned to increase our hours later.

And so they did. The week after Thanksgiving was up to sixty hours. The week after that was unlimited, but do not bill too much lest you get tired. The apoplexy and abject managerial failure obtained in the instructions doled out assiduously by the Cheerleader in a flurry of daily emails reminiscent of Donald Rumsfeld's 'snowflakes.' In these emails were a delightful mix of perfect reversals in instruction with the necessary admonishments about how we should have known the entire time what she was thinking (though she didn't give us the production requests because drooling assholes like us wouldn't get such high falutin language); warnings blasted without even a scintilla of irony when people worked fewer than fifty hours the week after Thanksgiving about failing to live up to what we 'had agreed' to do; and perhaps my favorite, an email in which the Cheerleader (I'm sure to appease Lurch) lectured us children on the moral quagmire of billing while shitting. I was so shocked by the last bit that I forwarded it to a few friends with jobs at other firms.

To make the season bright, I get word today that the project looks to end Thursday. Christmas Eve. With no warning given either to those of us on the project since the Great Rate Cut or to those that started yesterday. What the fuck is this job I've got. I'm so grateful I couldn't have made plans for Christmas, seeing as I'll likely not be working after all."