by Justice William W. Bedsworth

Stop what you’re doing.

It can’t have been too important or you wouldn’t have put it aside to read my stuff. Put it out of your mind—especially if it was such an ugly task it made reading A Criminal Waste of Space look good.

Now get up, walk out of your office, go to your assistant’s desk, put on a smile, and say thank you.

You can go further. You can offer to buy your assistant lunch, you can send flowers,¹ you can send him or her home early. You can come up with an even better idea. But at least say the words, “thank you.”

You’re liable to be asked, “For what?” That’s why I’m writing this column: so you’ll have an answer. Because I don’t think most of us give enough thought to what our assistants do. And how grateful we should be.

I have been blessed with a long line of truly exceptional assistants. I’m old enough to remember when they were called secretaries. And for fifteen years, while I was trying to learn how to be a lawyer—and then a boss²—secretaries protected me from grammatical errors, citation mistakes, unwelcome phone calls, and myself.

They taught me how the office ran. They taught me who ran the office.

Which was often the secretaries. Cecil Hicks was the District Attorney then. He had a terrific secretary, and if you could get Annabelle on your side, Cecil was easy money. Annabelle was worth two touchdowns and a field goal any time you had to win the boss’s approval.

The secretaries knew where the bones were buried. They knew which personalities worked well together and which personalities could turn cookies and milk into a steel-cage death match. They knew which people were sleeping together and which people couldn’t even be in the same room together.

They learned their bosses’ quirks.³ I opened my office door after an hour of seething over something one day and found that my secretary had several messages for me. “Why were you holding my calls,” I asked. “Because you were playing Cajun music,” she answered.

Cajun music is musical caffeine. It’s energizing. It lifts you up. It’s very difficult to be angry when you’re tapping your foot to a concertina and a fiddle. I’ve long used Cajun music to defuse my anger, and my secretary had learned that. She had figured out that if I was playing Lyle Lovett or Gerry Rafferty, things were going well. But if she heard Bruce Daigrepont or Jo-El Sonnier or Jeffery Broussard, it was best to give me a while to cool down.

I didn’t have an assistant for my decade in Superior Court. I had a courtroom full of them. My clerk, bailiff, and court reporter took turns yanking me back from the edge of mistake.

I had the best clerk in the history of western civilization. My first month on the bench, he probably strained ligaments giving me quick, unobtrusive little head shakes when I was doing something wrong.⁴ I would then intone, “You know, I want to give that one a little more thought; let’s put that on second call.” Dwayne would explain to me during recess what magic words I had omitted, I’d go back on the bench and do it right, and thereby make it through the day.

And my Court of Appeal assistant makes Radar O’Reilly look like a sloth.⁵

She does all the usual assistant duties plus the first-draft cite-checking for me and my three research attorneys. If I approach her desk to ask her if I have to do something, she not only has the answer, she has the form. If I ask what the Style Manual requires, she cites me chapter and verse.

She is able to decipher the cuneiform code that masquerades as my handwriting. So help me, there are times even I can’t read what I’ve written, but Kim can.

And she keeps me organized. This is an accomplishment roughly equivalent to building the pyramids. I have some lovely skills, but organization is not one of them.

Left to my own devices, I would be wandering around the Cleveland National Forest today, looking for my last draft of the Gazorninplat opinion. With Kim, I get greetings like, “Good morning; the Gazorninplat opinion is on the counter.”⁶

Let me ask you this: Who is the morale officer in your office? In the Navy, every ship has an officer whose duties include keeping morale up. Who does that in your office? Who remembers birthdays, decorates for the holidays, buys the lottery tickets, schedules lunches, posts the March Madness results . . . ?

I mention all these things my assistants have done because some of them should resonate with you. If they don’t—if you don’t see these and myriad other ways your assistant keeps your boat afloat—you’re kidding yourself.⁷

And your assistant does something mine have never had to do because I’ve spent my career in the public sector. Your assistant helps you bring in and keep business.

Let me explain. As a prosecutor, appearing in lots of courtrooms, I learned an important lesson early on: the staff reflects the boss. If the clerk and bailiff are surly and disinterested, don’t expect the judge to be a sweetheart.

Well, your clients—and prospective clients—may not actually formulate that as a guideline, but they will absolutely react to it. Nobody is ever happy about calling a lawyer. Nobody looks forward to their first conversation with the stranger they’re hoping will somehow guide them through this terrible quagmire they’ve stumbled into.

The attitude of your assistant can be critical. If your assistant seems bright and helpful and concerned, it can go a long way toward reassuring them. If your assistant seems brusque and robotic . . . well . . . “maybe I don’t have to call back when this lawyer is available after all. Maybe I should call that other lawyer who was recommended.”

You think that’s far-fetched? I was given the names of two urologists last week. When I called the first one, I got brusque and robotic; I now have an appointment with the second one. I’m not going to choose a urologist based on his assistant, but that determined who I am going to see first. And if I like him, I will never meet the other guy.

Your assistant is the face of your office. You may not care whether the attorney service messenger likes your assistant, but you will if you need him to turn around and come back quick some time. You may not care whether the court clerk likes your assistant, but you will if it causes the clerk to suggest another way to handle a problem. And you’ll care a lot if the client likes your assistant when you’re forty-five minutes late for a meeting and you have your assistant call ahead to calm the client down.

I don’t know why we abandoned the word “secretary” and adopted “assistant.” My assumption is that it was a misguided sense that “secretary” was demeaning, that it connoted only a few of the duties it was meant to describe.

But the word actually comes from the Latin word secretus, meaning “private” or “confidential.” A secretaries was “a confidential officer, a person entrusted with a secret.” It was a serious responsibility. Still is. Just ask the Secretary of State or the Secretary of Labor.

And secretaries don’t just know the secrets entrusted. They know the secrets observed. If they know about the Cajun music, you can bet your sweet life they know a lot more you haven’t told them.

Your assistant is your secretaries, your confidential officer. That’s a serious responsibility, and you’ve entrusted it to the person out there at that desk. That person can be critical to your success; at the very least that person can be important to your equanimity and happiness.

So drop what you’re doing and go say thank you for how well it’s being done. Now, right now. Think of it as a first step.

BEDS NOTES

1. NOT a sexist suggestion. Men like flowers. When I had my own bench and could decorate it as I saw fit, I always had a yellow rose on it.
2. Two very different skill sets. Don’t assume because you’re good at one that you must be good at the other.
3. Which in my case was like learning to recite Leviticus from memory.
4. I improved over the next 119 months, but his neck tendons were never completely safe if court was in session.
5. In case you’re too young for this reference, Walter “Radar” O’Reilly was the clerk of the MASH unit in the movie and TV series of that name. He knew every regulation, every form, every loophole, and was always several steps ahead of the officers he served. The “Radar” appellation referred to his preternatural ability to anticipate problems before anyone else could see them.
6. It’s not on my desk because my desk resembles nothing more than a post-tornado trailer park in Oklahoma. You put something on my desk only if you don’t want it to be found and can’t get it into witness protection.
7. And you better hope she’s not typing up her résumé.

William W. Bedsworth is an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal. He writes this column to get it out of his system. A Criminal Waste of Space won Best Column in California in 2018 from the California Newspaper Publishers Association (CNPA). And look for his latest book, Lawyers, Gubs, and Monkeys, through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Vandeplas Publishing. He can be contacted at william.bedsworth@jud.ca.gov.