I guess one of the consequences of home working is that this is a rarer phenomenon than it once was. There are also armies of HR bods around nowadays.
What are your best examples of fights breaking out at work?
I don't think we have ever had a physical fight in chambers
Really? Not even a post-lunch scrap in the clerks room?
Seen a few office related scraps late on a Friday night but closest to violence in the office was a supervisor who used to throw his shoe at trainees that displeased him. Better times.
ah, I can't answer for the clerks
Been out the back, fisting Norman Lamont?
Never seen an actual fight in the office but enjoyed some impressive shouting matches.
Never seen or heard of anything like this
Saw a couple of equity corporate partners square up to each other in my former US shop. Both middle aged flabby fookers but on balance I'd have backed the Norn Irish one in a punch up.
Backing Northern Ireland in such situations is always the safe bet tbf.
Heh @ Tom
The very idea!
On March 5th 1998 I was approaching end of a week in which I had been working, flat out through the weekend, on a Mareva Injunction as they were then called. A Russian financier had defrauded my privatised utility company. I was working with a partner who was a renowned CU next Tuesday. He had been a total liability with the client and me all week. We had worked late and he was angry, snarly, stressed. The client was beating him up and he was the solicitor advocate. The hearing was before Mr Justice Lightman in the Chancery Div, as he then was. The partner was stressed about it and on the Thursday he came into my room and started throwing papers around and swearing. I said don't swear. I decided I'd had quite enough of this man and he had a huge body count of associates who had left blaming him for making their lives intolerable. I did not intend to lose my job or be hunted out of the business and decided I would take him on.
I had a desk with a guest chair facing it. I shared a room with one other associate. The partner sat down and apologised for throwing papers. But then the bad angel took over and he swore again and started shouting. I stood up and said very coldly "If you swear at me once more I will not help you any further. The hearing is tomorrow and we are not ready and you will be on your own". In response he stood up abruptly and let rip the most sweary frothing mouthed gasping rage I'd heard for many a year.
We were there with both our hands on table, at full stretch, leaning towards each other like cats, then suddenly he lurched towards me as if to throw a punch or grab me or something, so at that point without thinking about it much I summoned full strength and pushed the desk forwards and it slid along the floor and slammed him back in the chair. He slumped back and at that point I completely lost it and saw nothing but a blood red mist. I pushed the desk and his chair through the room and slammed his back against the wall and tried to trap him in situ. The computer and screen, my papers etc were all torn off the desk. He had a look of complete fright, which emboldened me. The bump into the wall held him in place but it also created a pause, which he used to clamber out of the chair onto my desk and stood there, on top of the desk and jumped towards me and hopped off the desk. I backed up and he came to where I was standing. He raised a fist. So I put my hand out and pushed him back and at that point he swung at me and I grabbed his neck and pushed him up against the wall and he started thrashing out two fists in sort of weedy flea haymakers which were not connecting. I was taller, have long arms and he was small, Napoleonic angry and a few inches off target. I held him there by the neck as he combine harvested at me and then, totally unplanned, I just kicked him really hard in the balls and let go. He bent over and I bellowed "Get out", which he did. He said nothing and left.
He then called me and said "we'll say nothing about it". We then went to the Raglan, had a pint and discussed how we would deal with each other going forward. Bullies need to be presented with hard resistance. I got nothing but respect thereafter and we got along quite well. He picked on others, of course. A shithead.
The roommate was quite surprised at all that kicking off in front of her.
There is at least one RoFer who witnessed this going on. It became an amusing legendary moment in the lives of us associates under the duress of this absolute khuntbadger.
Best Mutters story ever!
Did the room-mate chuckle wryly?
She was on the phone. SOmewhat surprised to see this. She did say "are you ok" and we both just sat there thinking what the hell just happened.
The name of the pub provides some context.
On a slightly serious note, I do think that this different world we inhabited in the 90s was oddly healthy. I say that because misbehaviour and bullying now results in an associate or trainee feeling very depressed, enduring it for weeks or month, not feeling they can raise the point with anyone (partners won’t act, HR are useless and usually make it worse etc) and then the mental strain is all on the victim. Then they get to the stage where it impacts their work, they are vulnerable to performance-related management consequences, they go off sick and their career stalls. All for the want of some early resolution. In those days we did not call it “resilience” or, in fact, call it anything. We just didn’t let shit go unaddressed. I learned to stand up for some principles and felt able to do so. The effect of that was that we carried on, he behaved better, I held my head high and got along with the partners who knew I was up to the pressure of the role, forgave my reaction to his poor behaviour and we just all agreed to crack on. We were not sworn enemies thereafter and my progress was not impaired by this event. Perhaps it improved. Who knows? HR played no part in all that. The open expression of views, the permission to meet fire with fire, the escalation and de-escalation in hours not months of terrible process. It was all quite welcome. I came in the next day, we made the application, we got the order, we got on with the litigation, all good.
I cannot help but feel it is now harder for people in such situations. Although maybe the partners are not so violent so it’s swings and roundabouts maybe.
Heh @ mutters. You have told this one before. Was it one of the three partners we were discussing the other day?
It was at Clifford Chance. No need for a secret. It's nearly 30 years ago and he has retired.
no Wang, none of them.
Are you doing anything to celebrate the 28th anniversary of this pugilistic moment?
heh. no. but oh my gosh it's today!
In 2 years time we need to have a big one
Lollers.
Surely a Rumble in the Jungle style re-match is in order? Two years is ample lead time.
heh. I don't wish him violence.
Penis cancer maybe.
The simple reality about most of these office bullies is that they’re middle class wimps not accustomed to being offered out.
Or even having their bluff called.
Bravo mutters. There are at least two c unts I had the misfortune to work for who if I met now I would gladly and immediately lamp.
There was a massive dust up one friday in the aldersgate Hogshead between the post room boys of the two adjacent firms. They nearly spilled my girlfriend's smirnoff ice!
Awesome anecdote Mutters
Squared up a couple of times but never thrown or received a punch as a lawyer
Once to an asshat colleague and once to a laptop robber
Ah, smirnoff ice! A bottle of that playing the role of lemonade poured into a pint glass and topped up with Stella to create the Turbo Shandy, a favourite of junior lawyers at the Calvinist Ant Farm in the early noughties looking to get smashed out of their minds as quickly as possible on a Friday night to forget the horrors of the previous working week.
In a meeting I once told a certain gallic khunt at Proskauer that he'd need some new teeth if he talked to me like that again. He continued to talk to me like that and I did not knock his teeth out, so go me.
We had a very flighty and fighty woman in the canteen who was in love with a senior partner 30 years older than her.
She fell out with about canteen worker, pulled a knife (bread, I believe) on her. She then ran to the partner, asking that he "save her". He had no clue who she was.....
How bizarre. You all need to calm down
Filing clerks in the Channel Islands are obviously Zen-like in their business lives.
“Do not dwell in the past. Do not dream of the future. Concentrate the mind on the present moment because that utility bill won't photocopy itself” – Buddha
Heh.
only work related fight i ever saw was on the PW intern programme back in the day. they brought us together with the Coopers and Lybrand intern programme for a drinks evening just after the pwc merger was announced. it all got bit punchy. i was otherwise engaged.
I remember being engaged in a deal at the time and having to change quite a lot of documentation as a result of the merger.
A punch up between gangs of employees of two rival firms of accountants. Let's just think about how that might look.
How do you like these beans??
Lots of people falling over backwards because they've grabbed hold of a clip on tie
Fights between solicitors are an even better example of physically unintimidating men attempting aggression than are footballers’ handbag sessions,
That said, I did once, when a trainee, learn of one very senior partner (who was a large and quite intimidating man, in good shape for his years) threatening a younger partner quite convincingly with physical violence. Not seen any actual tussling tho.
Would be fun to see a proper melee with secretaries, post room guys, even the securitisation geeks all piling off the bench to get involved. Those days are surely gone tho
I know of a junior (and physically unimposing) solicitor being roughed up on work premises by a senior (and much larger) solicitor who talked a lot about his boxing training
This was all a long time ago and so nothing was 'done', but i suspect that the junior may have received some recompense from the firm's wine cellar and the senior guy was told that he did not have to leave right now, but that partnership was definitely off the cards. He was gone within a year.
The worst behaviour i witnessed in firm was a partner who was so incandescent with rage at another that he pushed partber B out of the room and slammed the door. It was Partner B's office and partner B had organised the call that was going on, unmuted...
Tbf partner B was a proper moron
I was once given the task of arm-wrestling (all v good natured) a client for his requested 30% off our invoice. He was a former Mountie, and graciously suggested a left-handed match (I'm a leftie). I won. He still got 25% of the bill. Entirely unfair.
Wang - was it that quim from Lovells?
No, but it was someone u may have met it passing at your last shop
We had a summer firm party in a shite club once, north of Liverpool St, and firmly in the "Essex folk on the way home on Friday" zone. The only thing to do was drink. At a certain point in the evening, there was a sudden rise in the population of people in the club which we had booked out exclusively. Questions were asked and it seemed the answer was that the seccies had invited all their friends (boyfriends, girlfriends, friends, hundreds of them). The dance floor was flooded with unrecognised TOWIEs. Door security was in on it. There was nothing that could be done. Then, predictably, the atmosphere became quite dynamic. Free drinks were consumed at spectacular speed, I assume on the belief that they'd soon all get chucked out. But they didn't. Then one rather lumpen PA was dancing with some lad who was apparently the bf of a slightly more bantomweight skinframe, and the latter took issue with that, stalked onto the dancefloor and told him to stop dancing with her. The lumpen one said something injudicious and then the skinny one pulled a fork out of her pocket and stabbed it through the lurex crop top into her left tit.
The professions
Lucky it wasn't a few years later - doing that to a TOWIE these days would make one helluva POP
Involuntary guffaw at Mutters's anecdote.
Did aforesaid pugilist win the hearing the next day?
Mind you, he must have been something of a ballsy fecker doing his own Injunction hearings way back then…
Only real violence I have witnessed was back in the ‘80’s, when a v good looking trainee mate of mine, who was very handsy with the secretaries, went up behind a new secretary and started giving her an uninvited shoulder massage.
She turned round, stood up and gave him a fearful smack round the face and an absolute volley of verbals.
Quite brilliant to watch, but it didn’t really put a stop to his antics.
I don't think we have ever had a physical fight in chambers
Really? Not even a post-lunch scrap in the clerks room?
Seen a few office related scraps late on a Friday night but closest to violence in the office was a supervisor who used to throw his shoe at trainees that displeased him. Better times.
ah, I can't answer for the clerks
Been out the back, fisting Norman Lamont?
Never seen an actual fight in the office but enjoyed some impressive shouting matches.
Never seen or heard of anything like this
Saw a couple of equity corporate partners square up to each other in my former US shop. Both middle aged flabby fookers but on balance I'd have backed the Norn Irish one in a punch up.
Backing Northern Ireland in such situations is always the safe bet tbf.
Heh @ Tom
The very idea!
On March 5th 1998 I was approaching end of a week in which I had been working, flat out through the weekend, on a Mareva Injunction as they were then called. A Russian financier had defrauded my privatised utility company. I was working with a partner who was a renowned CU next Tuesday. He had been a total liability with the client and me all week. We had worked late and he was angry, snarly, stressed. The client was beating him up and he was the solicitor advocate. The hearing was before Mr Justice Lightman in the Chancery Div, as he then was. The partner was stressed about it and on the Thursday he came into my room and started throwing papers around and swearing. I said don't swear. I decided I'd had quite enough of this man and he had a huge body count of associates who had left blaming him for making their lives intolerable. I did not intend to lose my job or be hunted out of the business and decided I would take him on.
I had a desk with a guest chair facing it. I shared a room with one other associate. The partner sat down and apologised for throwing papers. But then the bad angel took over and he swore again and started shouting. I stood up and said very coldly "If you swear at me once more I will not help you any further. The hearing is tomorrow and we are not ready and you will be on your own". In response he stood up abruptly and let rip the most sweary frothing mouthed gasping rage I'd heard for many a year.
We were there with both our hands on table, at full stretch, leaning towards each other like cats, then suddenly he lurched towards me as if to throw a punch or grab me or something, so at that point without thinking about it much I summoned full strength and pushed the desk forwards and it slid along the floor and slammed him back in the chair. He slumped back and at that point I completely lost it and saw nothing but a blood red mist. I pushed the desk and his chair through the room and slammed his back against the wall and tried to trap him in situ. The computer and screen, my papers etc were all torn off the desk. He had a look of complete fright, which emboldened me. The bump into the wall held him in place but it also created a pause, which he used to clamber out of the chair onto my desk and stood there, on top of the desk and jumped towards me and hopped off the desk. I backed up and he came to where I was standing. He raised a fist. So I put my hand out and pushed him back and at that point he swung at me and I grabbed his neck and pushed him up against the wall and he started thrashing out two fists in sort of weedy flea haymakers which were not connecting. I was taller, have long arms and he was small, Napoleonic angry and a few inches off target. I held him there by the neck as he combine harvested at me and then, totally unplanned, I just kicked him really hard in the balls and let go. He bent over and I bellowed "Get out", which he did. He said nothing and left.
He then called me and said "we'll say nothing about it". We then went to the Raglan, had a pint and discussed how we would deal with each other going forward. Bullies need to be presented with hard resistance. I got nothing but respect thereafter and we got along quite well. He picked on others, of course. A shithead.
The roommate was quite surprised at all that kicking off in front of her.
There is at least one RoFer who witnessed this going on. It became an amusing legendary moment in the lives of us associates under the duress of this absolute khuntbadger.
Best Mutters story ever!
Did the room-mate chuckle wryly?
She was on the phone. SOmewhat surprised to see this. She did say "are you ok" and we both just sat there thinking what the hell just happened.
The name of the pub provides some context.
On a slightly serious note, I do think that this different world we inhabited in the 90s was oddly healthy. I say that because misbehaviour and bullying now results in an associate or trainee feeling very depressed, enduring it for weeks or month, not feeling they can raise the point with anyone (partners won’t act, HR are useless and usually make it worse etc) and then the mental strain is all on the victim. Then they get to the stage where it impacts their work, they are vulnerable to performance-related management consequences, they go off sick and their career stalls. All for the want of some early resolution. In those days we did not call it “resilience” or, in fact, call it anything. We just didn’t let shit go unaddressed. I learned to stand up for some principles and felt able to do so. The effect of that was that we carried on, he behaved better, I held my head high and got along with the partners who knew I was up to the pressure of the role, forgave my reaction to his poor behaviour and we just all agreed to crack on. We were not sworn enemies thereafter and my progress was not impaired by this event. Perhaps it improved. Who knows? HR played no part in all that.
The open expression of views, the permission to meet fire with fire, the escalation and de-escalation in hours not months of terrible process. It was all quite welcome. I came in the next day, we made the application, we got the order, we got on with the litigation, all good.
I cannot help but feel it is now harder for people in such situations. Although maybe the partners are not so violent so it’s swings and roundabouts maybe.
Heh @ mutters. You have told this one before. Was it one of the three partners we were discussing the other day?
It was at Clifford Chance. No need for a secret. It's nearly 30 years ago and he has retired.
no Wang, none of them.
Are you doing anything to celebrate the 28th anniversary of this pugilistic moment?
heh. no. but oh my gosh it's today!
In 2 years time we need to have a big one
Lollers.
Surely a Rumble in the Jungle style re-match is in order? Two years is ample lead time.
heh. I don't wish him violence.
Penis cancer maybe.
The simple reality about most of these office bullies is that they’re middle class wimps not accustomed to being offered out.
Or even having their bluff called.
Bravo mutters. There are at least two c unts I had the misfortune to work for who if I met now I would gladly and immediately lamp.
There was a massive dust up one friday in the aldersgate Hogshead between the post room boys of the two adjacent firms. They nearly spilled my girlfriend's smirnoff ice!
Awesome anecdote Mutters
Squared up a couple of times but never thrown or received a punch as a lawyer
Once to an asshat colleague and once to a laptop robber
Ah, smirnoff ice! A bottle of that playing the role of lemonade poured into a pint glass and topped up with Stella to create the Turbo Shandy, a favourite of junior lawyers at the Calvinist Ant Farm in the early noughties looking to get smashed out of their minds as quickly as possible on a Friday night to forget the horrors of the previous working week.
In a meeting I once told a certain gallic khunt at Proskauer that he'd need some new teeth if he talked to me like that again. He continued to talk to me like that and I did not knock his teeth out, so go me.
We had a very flighty and fighty woman in the canteen who was in love with a senior partner 30 years older than her.
She fell out with about canteen worker, pulled a knife (bread, I believe) on her. She then ran to the partner, asking that he "save her". He had no clue who she was.....
How bizarre. You all need to calm down
Filing clerks in the Channel Islands are obviously Zen-like in their business lives.
“Do not dwell in the past. Do not dream of the future. Concentrate the mind on the present moment because that utility bill won't photocopy itself” – Buddha
Heh.
only work related fight i ever saw was on the PW intern programme back in the day. they brought us together with the Coopers and Lybrand intern programme for a drinks evening just after the pwc merger was announced. it all got bit punchy. i was otherwise engaged.
I remember being engaged in a deal at the time and having to change quite a lot of documentation as a result of the merger.
A punch up between gangs of employees of two rival firms of accountants. Let's just think about how that might look.
How do you like these beans??
Lots of people falling over backwards because they've grabbed hold of a clip on tie
Fights between solicitors are an even better example of physically unintimidating men attempting aggression than are footballers’ handbag sessions,
That said, I did once, when a trainee, learn of one very senior partner (who was a large and quite intimidating man, in good shape for his years) threatening a younger partner quite convincingly with physical violence. Not seen any actual tussling tho.
Would be fun to see a proper melee with secretaries, post room guys, even the securitisation geeks all piling off the bench to get involved. Those days are surely gone tho
I know of a junior (and physically unimposing) solicitor being roughed up on work premises by a senior (and much larger) solicitor who talked a lot about his boxing training
This was all a long time ago and so nothing was 'done', but i suspect that the junior may have received some recompense from the firm's wine cellar and the senior guy was told that he did not have to leave right now, but that partnership was definitely off the cards. He was gone within a year.
The worst behaviour i witnessed in firm was a partner who was so incandescent with rage at another that he pushed partber B out of the room and slammed the door. It was Partner B's office and partner B had organised the call that was going on, unmuted...
Tbf partner B was a proper moron
I was once given the task of arm-wrestling (all v good natured) a client for his requested 30% off our invoice. He was a former Mountie, and graciously suggested a left-handed match (I'm a leftie). I won. He still got 25% of the bill. Entirely unfair.
Wang - was it that quim from Lovells?
No, but it was someone u may have met it passing at your last shop
We had a summer firm party in a shite club once, north of Liverpool St, and firmly in the "Essex folk on the way home on Friday" zone. The only thing to do was drink. At a certain point in the evening, there was a sudden rise in the population of people in the club which we had booked out exclusively. Questions were asked and it seemed the answer was that the seccies had invited all their friends (boyfriends, girlfriends, friends, hundreds of them). The dance floor was flooded with unrecognised TOWIEs. Door security was in on it. There was nothing that could be done. Then, predictably, the atmosphere became quite dynamic. Free drinks were consumed at spectacular speed, I assume on the belief that they'd soon all get chucked out. But they didn't. Then one rather lumpen PA was dancing with some lad who was apparently the bf of a slightly more bantomweight skinframe, and the latter took issue with that, stalked onto the dancefloor and told him to stop dancing with her. The lumpen one said something injudicious and then the skinny one pulled a fork out of her pocket and stabbed it through the lurex crop top into her left tit.
The professions
Lucky it wasn't a few years later - doing that to a TOWIE these days would make one helluva POP
Involuntary guffaw at Mutters's anecdote.
Did aforesaid pugilist win the hearing the next day?
Mind you, he must have been something of a ballsy fecker doing his own Injunction hearings way back then…
Only real violence I have witnessed was back in the ‘80’s, when a v good looking trainee mate of mine, who was very handsy with the secretaries, went up behind a new secretary and started giving her an uninvited shoulder massage.
She turned round, stood up and gave him a fearful smack round the face and an absolute volley of verbals.
Quite brilliant to watch, but it didn’t really put a stop to his antics.
Join the discussion