I began my career as a chemical engineer in the metal finishing industry for 10 years and during the last 4 years went to law school as night to become an environmental attorney. My first job as an attorney I worked for a prominent Environmental Attorney in a big firm. I started even before I finished law school and I got one of the top scores on the Michigan Bar Exam that year (175 out of 200).

As I noted, I worked for a prominent environmental attorney. Her clients loved me — many were in the metal finishing industry. I was able to save them a lot of money as their lawyer by using my background as a chemical engineer and my extensive knowledge of their industry. I was able to resolve issues that other environmental attorneys could not without expert consultants. However she was a bad boss.. always berating me in front of the clients to make herself look good and apologizing for it after in private. I believe she berated me to prevent her clients from trusting me as their primary attorney — after all they were her clients.

Nine months after she hired me, she fired me. She hired two experienced environmental attorneys and allegedly did not have the work to keep me. One of those new attorneys lasted 1 month.. the other about a year. So she was not able to keep them, or expand her department.

Her stated reason for firing me was that my writing was terrible (that was how she got permission to fire me from the managing partner of the firm). I admit my writing was not great at the time so I began a self-improvement project to improve my writing.

Several years later, I had a mutual client with her firm. The client came to me with an environmental issue and he used my old firm for almost every other legal situation he was involved with. Later, the client related to me that he had mentioned to the managing partner at the firm in a social situation that he had hired me as his environmental attorney. The managing attorney mentioned that he knew me and that I was fired for being a poor writer. The client shot back (to the managing attorney’s dismay) that I was the best legal writer that he knew.

So my revenge was to see her fail in her ambition of expanding her practice AND to improve my skills to address the perceived weakness that she identified in my skills.