NEWS YOU CAN USE: Ten Things Your Law Firm Boss Wants You To Know, But Isn’t Going to Tell You. The “be nice to everyone” advice is especially good, and it’s surprising how many young lawyers put on airs and treat support staff badly. Don’t do that.

I’ll add another piece of advice — if you can, give yourself slack. As an associate, I once set the firm’s internal deadline (which was basically just my deadline) for a court filing the day before the actual deadline. That turned out to save the day, and let us still file on time. Had I not done that, we would have discovered the problem at the last minute on the actual deadline, and there would, at the least, have been a lot of drama.