Managing Up: Working Well With Senior Lawyers

Nobody teaches you this part in law school. You learn how to read a case, how to find the ratio, how to argue both sides of anything. Then you start articling and discover that most of your day is not really about the law at all. It is about a person: the associate or partner who hands you work, waits on your work, and quietly forms an opinion about whether they can trust you with the next thing.

That relationship, the one running upward, is the one that shapes your year more than any file. Managing up is the skill of making yourself easy to rely on. It is not brown-nosing, and it is not laughing at bad jokes. It is a handful of habits that lower the stress of the person above you, which turns out to be the fastest route to more interesting work and a real hireback conversation.

What "managing up" actually means

Every senior lawyer is carrying more than you can see. Multiple files, competing deadlines, clients who call at inconvenient hours, and a mental list of things that could go wrong. When they delegate to you, they are not offloading a task so much as taking on a risk: the risk that it comes back late, wrong, or in a form they have to redo themselves.

Managing up means reducing that risk. You do it by being predictable, by closing loops, and by anticipating the next question before it is asked. Do this consistently and something shifts. The lawyer stops double-checking your work. They start handing you the file instead of the fragment. They mention your name in the hallway.

A partner once told me the students she remembered were not the brilliant ones. They were the ones she never had to chase.

That line has stuck with me for years, because it is the whole thing in one sentence. Reliability beats brilliance, most of the time, because reliability is rarer.

Anticipate the need behind the task

Junior lawyers deliver what was asked. The ones who get noticed deliver what was actually needed, which is often slightly more.

Say a senior associate asks you to "find out whether we can get an extension on this deadline." The literal task is a yes or no. The need behind it is a decision they have to make and a client they have to advise. So the useful answer is not "yes, we can ask for one." It is: "Yes, the rules allow a request, here is the process, here is roughly how long it tends to take in practice, and here is a draft of the letter if you want it." You have not just answered the question. You have moved the file forward and saved them a step.

This is the core of anticipation, and it comes from asking yourself one question before you hand anything back: what will they do with this the moment they read it? If the answer is "email me a follow-up question," go answer that question now.

A word of caution, because there is a failure mode here. Anticipating the need does not mean going rogue and spending eight hours building something nobody wanted. It means thinking one move ahead, checking your assumption early if the task is big, and then delivering something that lands cleanly. When in doubt about scope, a thirty-second question at the start beats a wasted afternoon.

Communicate in a way that lowers their load

Most friction between juniors and seniors is not about competence. It is about communication rhythm. Here is what senior lawyers consistently tell me they wish students did more of:

• Confirm you understood the task before you disappear. A one-line "Got it, I'll draft the memo on the limitation issue and have it to you by Thursday" costs you nothing and reassures them enormously.
• Give a heads-up before a deadline slips, not after. If Thursday is looking tight, say so on Tuesday. Bad news early is a manageable problem. Bad news late is a crisis.
• Ask questions in batches. Interrupting six separate times fragments their day. Note your questions as they come up and bring them together, unless something is genuinely blocking you.
• Tell them what you did, briefly, when you hand something back. "Here's the memo. I focused on the two provinces you flagged and left a note where the case law is unsettled." Context turns a document into a conversation.
• Match their channel. Some partners live in email, some want a quick chat at the door, some prefer a short call. Watch how they reach you and answer in kind.

None of this is complicated. It is just deliberate. The student who communicates this way feels calm to work with, and calm is a currency in a profession that runs on stress.

On receiving feedback

You will get edits back that look like a crime scene. Red everywhere. This is normal and it is not a verdict on you. Senior lawyers redline heavily because that is how legal writing gets made, and because their own drafts once looked the same.

Read the edits carefully rather than defensively. Notice the patterns, because the same corrections tend to repeat, and the fastest way to earn trust is to stop making the same mistake twice. If you genuinely do not understand a change, it is fine to ask, once, in a way that shows you are trying to learn rather than to argue. And when you disagree, and occasionally you will be right, raise it as a question, not a stand. "I'd drafted it the other way because of X, but happy to go with yours, was there a reason?" keeps the door open.

Learn how each person actually works

There is no single senior lawyer. There are many, and they differ enormously. One wants a full memo with every authority cited. The next wants three bullet points and hates being sent anything longer. One thinks out loud and changes direction mid-sentence. Another says almost nothing and expects you to read the silence.

Early in a rotation, spend real attention on figuring out the person. Do they want detail or the bottom line first? Are they a morning person or do they hit their stride at four in the afternoon? How much hand-holding do they expect, and how much do they resent? You are not being a chameleon. You are being considerate, and you are saving both of you the grind of mismatched expectations.

If you article somewhere with several supervising lawyers, this matters even more, because their preferences will contradict each other. Keep a private note on each. It sounds excessive until the day it saves you.

Build trust in small, boring increments

Trust is not granted in a single moment. It accumulates. Every task you return on time, in the right form, without needing to be chased, adds a coin to the jar. Do it enough and the senior lawyer's default assumption about you flips from "I should check this" to "this will be fine." That flip is worth more than any single impressive performance.

A few habits that build the jar faster than anything else:

1. Do what you said you would do, when you said you would. If you commit to Thursday, deliver Thursday, or renegotiate it honestly before it arrives.
2. Own your mistakes plainly. You will make some. "I got this wrong, here's what happened, and here's how I've fixed it" earns respect. Hiding it, or explaining it away, spends the trust you have built.
3. Protect their time and their reputation. Proofread before you send. Flag risks you spot on a file even when nobody asked. Never let them get surprised in front of a client by something you could have caught.
4. Follow through on the small stuff. The forgotten calendar invite, the citation you said you would double-check. Seniors notice the small dropped balls precisely because they are small and easy to catch.

When it is genuinely hard

Managing up is a skill, not a personality, and it does not require you to be a doormat. Some working relationships are difficult through no fault of yours. A supervisor who is unclear, volatile, or simply too busy to delegate well is a real and common challenge, and the answer is not to absorb it silently until you burn out.

When the problem is workload or clarity, name it early and specifically: "I've got three things due Friday, which one takes priority?" puts the decision where it belongs. When the problem is behaviour that crosses a line, that is not a managing-up issue at all, and your firm's articling principal, HR, or your provincial law society have resources for exactly that. Looking after yourself is part of doing the job well, not a distraction from it, and it is worth reading more on protecting your mental health in law before you need to.

Most days, though, it will not come to that. Most days managing up is just the quiet, unglamorous work of being someone others can count on. That reputation follows you. It shows up in hireback decisions, in references years later, and in the calls you get when a former supervisor moves firms and wants to bring good people along.

If you are still lining up the position where all this begins, the same instincts that make you easy to work with also make you easy to hire. It is worth reading how to land an articling position and how to survive the articling year once you are in the door, and when you are ready, the current openings are on the jobs board. More writing on the working life of the profession lives in the profession.

Start with one habit this week. Confirm every task before you begin it, out loud or in a line of email. It is the smallest possible change, and it is the one senior lawyers notice first.