Young lawyer exacts revenge on boss that plagiarizes their work; partners are furious.

Entry-level jobs are tough. Regardless of what it is, lawyer, doctor, or writer, you'll most likely get stuck with the boring work. Push through it, though, and you'll hopefully be doing the work you want to do.

On a popular Reddit thread in the Petty Revenge Subreddit, a young lawyer keeps stealing their work from their boss, so they take revenge befitting a lawyer.

They write:

'This opinion is sh%t,' my boss told me. He’d been a lawyer for three years, and the firm assigned me to him for training, to show me, a humble articling student, how to be a litigator (I'm from Canada, and here a law student has to train for about a year after they graduate before they can become a lawyer. The process is called 'articling.' I'll add that this occurred over thirty years ago).

I disliked my boss for many reasons. He knew no law, and he expressed himself badly in writing. For a litigator, that’s like strike one and two right there, and strike three was this: he had no balls. He was scared of going to court.

I noticed this when he took me to assignment court one day, and when it was his turn to speak, his hands were shaking. He was scared in f#$king assignment court, where all you do is set a trial date.

'What’s wrong with what I wrote?' I said. 'Not what I asked for,' he said, turning away. But when I checked the memo he’d emailed me two weeks earlier, I saw that the opinion I wrote was exactly what he asked for.

I knew what was up. He would delete my dockets for writing the memo and then claim he did it himself, thus leaving me quite a bit short of my docketing quota for the month. I knew he would do this to me because he’d done this before.

My memo would end on a partner’s desk without my name. I knew that because the firm I worked at was one of the first in the city to have a good internal network. We were using email for internal communications before the internet became a thing.

So the firm was way ahead in terms of technology but not in terms of security, and not long after I joined the firm, I learned how to surf away on the firm’s hard drive and find interesting things, like evidence that my boss plagiarized my work.

My boss was the very model of the young downtown lawyer. His perfect shoes always gleamed. He wore bespoke suits because he came from money. Everyone just took it for granted that he was on the partner track.

On the other hand, I was well on my way to not being hired back, so maybe he thought it was ok to f%ck with me. If so, that was a big mistake on his part because although he didn’t know it yet, I was the articling student from hell.

I didn’t like having my billable hours f#$ked with. I seriously resented it because I was already being targeted as one of the students who doesn’t docket as much as he should, and I was getting pushback from the partner who headed our team. I told the partner what was happening, but he didn't care.

It was like being back in middle school and showing up in the office with bruises on my face and the principal saying, ‘Boys will be boys' and sending me on my way. 'You’ll just have to work harder or smarter,' the partner said when I reported the latest bullshit thing my boss did to me.

I couldn’t work harder (I was doing the usual six-days-a-week sh#t that students downtown are forced to do), but I could work smarter, and that night I thought up a plan. Christmas was coming, and I thought I’d give my boss a little present. It landed on his desk on December 24th as a memo purporting to be from the partner my boss reported to.

The partner was an old guy and not really on board with emails and computers, so he did everything old school, on paper. So when my boss came in on December 24th and saw a memo from the partner with a legal research assignment on his desk, that wasn’t unusual.

The memo was drafted in the usual form the partner used because I had taken great pains to ensure it looked authentic. My boss walked over to the little cubicles where the students worked and gave me the same memo. Except his secretary had re-typed it, so now the assignment was from him to me instead of from the partner to my boss.

The assignment was difficult, requiring me to do a deep dive into admiralty law and its relationship to the common law, combined with a constitutional division of powers question.

'But this is a huge assignment,' I whined, 'and I will be away. Can’t you get someone else to do it? Is it really urgent?' The memo I’d forged to my boss stressed how urgent the situation was, but there was no way my boss could double-check with the partner because the partner left the day before on vacation.

That’s why I’d waited until December 24th. 'No can do,' my boss said, 'this is a big deal. Just let HR know. Maybe they’ll give you time and a half or something.' He turned his back and walked away, thinking he had ruined my holidays.

But he was mistaken. I’d written a paper for a third-year course that was the same as the memo's research assignment. So the only ‘work’ I had to do, was to find the old floppy disk with the draft on it, fiddle with it a bit, and voila: a very detailed and very long memo on an obscure point of Admiralty law, with references starting back to Lord Coke’s day.

So I put the memo together and took my holidays as planned. I wasn’t traveling anywhere (because I had no money), but I saw my family and stayed in town. I made a point of dropping by the office during the holidays, sending an email or two, establishing that I was around, and docketing all my time for the vast amount of research I was allegedly doing.

So the holidays end, and I’m sitting in my sh%#ty little student’s cubicle with a huge stack of work to do, and my boss comes up to me in one of his bespoke suits with a gold tie pin and cufflinks to match. He was wearing a gold watch, too. He was dressed up, even for him, trying to make an impression of some kind.

'Where’s that memo? You were supposed to have it on my desk when I got back. I’m going into a meeting at noon.' 'Just finished it this morning,' I said, handing him the lengthy, warm memo from the printer.

My boss took the memo in his hands, felt its heft, and smiled. Then he turned and walked away without a word.

Just before lunch, I heard a commotion down the hall. It was a loud commotion, as such things go, a loud 'f%$k!', and then a door was flung open. It was the partner, and he was screaming for my boss to get his a#$ into his office, now, right now, as in immediately.

I had the pleasure of watching my boss scramble down the hall. 'Just what the f#$king f*ck is this?' the partner said, standing in the doorway to his office and holding my handiwork with his thumb and index finger as if he were afraid that handling it would soil him.

My boss mumbled something, and then the partner ushered him inside. I heard more shouting, then the sound of muffled excuses, and then more shouting from the partner. Then the door flung open again. 'Calledinthe90s. Get your a#* in here, too,' the partner said, and I got my a#* in there pronto.

'Did you write this f#%king memo?' the partner said. I took it from him and looked it over. 'I wrote it. The cover page has been changed to remove my name, but other than that, it’s mine. I spent my Christmas on it. Is there something wrong with it?' The partner exploded.

'Is there something wrong with it? Something wrong? I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it. It’s f#$king useless! Useless!' I explained that I’d followed my boss’s instructions to the letter and docketed more than a hundred hours on it.

At this, the partner went nuts and told me to go back to my desk and fetch him the memo from my boss. I brought it to him, and when he read it, his face went red. He told me I could leave, and I hauled a#* out of there. From my little student cubicle, I wasn’t close enough to hear the full chewing out my boss got.

Still, I heard the details through the grapevine over the next few days about how the partners were seriously pissed that my boss had wasted over a hundred hours of a student’s time on a useless task that was a prank and how had my boss had not realized that he was being pranked, was he an idiot? I wasn’t blamed; I had been working under my boss’s close supervision.

My boss didn’t get fired, but there were some good outcomes for me. For one thing, the partner told me to send him a copy of any memos I wrote for my boss, which ended with him taking credit for my work. My boss also stopped deleting my dockets for my research. Plus, I got a belated Christmas bonus for having to give up on my alleged vacation to write the stupid memo.

I hated my articling year, but whenever times were tough, I’d think back to 'The Case of the Forged Memo,' which always made me smile.

The crowd is going wild.

SweetieLoveBug says:

Clever! Great memories are worth their weight in gold.

aquainst1 says:

Floppy disk? FLOPPY DISK? Yeah, good save, writing that this incident was 30 years ago. 3 1/2 or 5 1/2?

PeterHorvathPhD says:

Why is it petty? It's epic AF.

OP, you'll have to explain what a floppy disk is for the kids in the back.