My client wasn’t getting enough sleep. I assumed it was insomnia, but that didn’t fit the bill. It wasn’t that she couldn’t sleep – it was that she wouldn’t sleep. She was staying up from 11 pm to 2 am, lying in bed – mostly, playing Angry Birds.
Those few hours were the only time she was left alone all day – no one from the firm called to assign her something awful to do or yell at her for something awful she’d done. To relinquish this sliver of “me time” – even for sleep – was out of the question.
Morning to night, she spent at the firm. Weekends didn’t exist, in any meaningful sense – they were workdays. Laundry went undone, as did other stuff, like getting her driver’s license renewed or her taxes filed. The only hours devoted to anything for herself were stolen from her sleep schedule, and spent slingshotting daredevil birds at sneering pigs (that’s an Angry Birds reference.)
She needed to vegetate. You need to vegetate, too. There’s only so much work anyone can do. That’s why you find yourself playing video games at 2 am instead of sleeping. You need to play and you need to sleep. You need both.
A medical resident told me law sounded worse than medicine. At least with medicine when you’re on-call, you’re on-call, and when you’re not, you’re not. With law, you’re always on call. Just because you’re asleep in bed doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be working.
Another lawyer client crawled home from the office recently after midnight, only to be awakened at 3 am by the alarm on her Blackberry. She turned it off, but noticed an email from a senior associate, still at his desk. She glanced at the email, but decided to ignore it – nothing critical – and deal with him in the morning.
She forgot his account was set up so he could see she’d opened the email.
Her Blackberry buzzed through the night, with increasingly desperate messages. “What happened? I know you read my email. Why aren’t you responding?!”
The last one arrived at 5 am.
Law firms operate on the assumption they own your soul. There’s no downtime. They own your soul on Christmas morning. They own your soul at 5 am. They own your soul when you’re on vacation. They own your soul when you’re in the hospital. There is no “me time.”
That doesn’t work, because you need “me time.” Thus, there is an apparent contradiction. So you find a work-around – what we contract attorneys call a “carve-out” – an exception. And that exception becomes your “me time.”
The all-time favorite work-around is to get liquored up and sloppy. If you’re drunk… well, there’s your carve out: they can come a-callin’, but you’re not gonna go a-lawyerin’, now are you? Voila! “Me time.”
Problem is, as a lawyer, you can’t go completely wild, at least, not on a school night (which is pretty much every night). So you arrive at the concept of maintenance drinking.
Lawyers appear at my office sometimes looking suspiciously okay. On occasion, I think I’ve stumbled on that mythical beast – the happy lawyer. And at a big firm, too! Then he mentions the four whiskies he gulps down every single night before going to bed. Oh, and the eight or ten (or twelve) drinks he downs if he doesn’t have to go into the office the next day.
He looks fine at the firm. Might not be loving it, but he’s surviving. He’s put in five or six years – might even go for partner. Nothing looks wrong, unless you’re there for an hour around 11 pm when he downs half a bottle of Maker’s Mark.
Time spent getting drunk can be “me time.” It’s escape, in the form of substance abuse. It’s also an outlet for anger. People in the recovery movement talk about “drinking on anger.” If you’re abusing alcohol, you’re always drinking on anger. It’s aggressive, doing something you know is bad for you – and something that will remove you from the world. It’s not just checking out and saying I’m not here. It’s saying “fuck you.”
Getting stoned every night isn’t much different. Pot is less physically addictive and easier on your body than booze, but doing constant bong hits is tuning out the world, and tuning out yourself – and that’s an aggressive statement. It says “fuck you” and it says “this is my only escape – I’ve run out of other options.” Let me be clear: I’ve met many lawyers in prestigious jobs who go home and get high each and every night. Smoking weed once in a while – like having a drink once in a while – is one thing. Maintenance smoking – and drinking – is another thing entirely.
Coming home and yelling at your husband or wife is yet another option for “me time” – that’s the rage-a-holic’s drug of choice. You get home late every night from the firm, and your wife looks forward to spending a few pleasant hours alone together. Instead, you turn into a beast, slamming doors and tearing into her for anything and everything.
The rage-a-holic’s “me time” is about ruining the other person’s “us time.” I’ve heard lawyers tell me they can’t stop it – you need to get the anger out of your system. The endless constriction of life in big law feels like a cage. One client actually had a dream he was trapped in a concrete chair – he couldn’t sit up, couldn’t budge.
Rage – helpless anger – arises from a life dominated by the deferred gratification of slaving for years to pay off a bank and the loss of autonomy of having a control-freak partner dictating every hour of your day. So you discharge aggression, which is gratifying – at least in the short term. It feels good to terrorize someone helpless – that is, until a little later, when the hang-over comes, awareness of the hurt you’ve caused, and possibly the end of your relationship, the one meaningful thing left.
During my Sullivan & Cromwell years, my “me time” was mostly spent with my dog. My boyfriend was away at architecture grad school, so I hardly saw him. The timing seemed perfect – I was stuck at a firm, and he was buried in design charrettes. My companion, always delighted to see me, was Margaret, a skye terrier.
She had a dog-walker, but that was hardly enough. I saw the look in Margaret’s eyes when I crawled home late at night, only to disappear back to the office an hour later. Dogs need a little “me time,” too.
There is no such thing as work/life balance when you’re a slave to the billable hour. That reality takes a toll on your psyche. You require time that’s truly yours – not a tantrum of acting out before you fall asleep.
One client told me her plan for a future legal career:
Take a clerkship,
work briefly at firm,
leave for second clerkship,
work briefly at firm,
get pregnant
take maternity leave
get pregnant again
take maternity leave
take accumulated vacation time
refuse (subtly) to work
get fired
receive unemployment.
This scheme sounds exploitative, but it has an undeniable logic – at least she’s factored in plenty of “me time.”
Firms don’t hesitate to look after their own interests. I’ve heard stories of new hires being deferred for a year without warning, or half a class of associates getting laid off after four months.
Apparently big law firms need a little “me time” – some space for themselves, to put their priorities first.
So do you.
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This piece is part of a series of columns presented by The People’s Therapist in cooperation with AboveTheLaw.com. My thanks to ATL for their help with the creation of this series.
If you enjoy these columns, please check out The People’s Therapist’s new book.
There’s a problem with this :
“take accumulated vacation time
refuse to work
get fired
receive unemployment.”
If you get fired (for cause because you went on strike), you don’t receive unemployment. In fact, that happened to the very attorney in whose desk I now sit.
Result? No unemployment.
Okay so she just needs to be a little subtle about it in order to avoid being fired for “gross misconduct” or whatever standard is used in her state to deny unemployment.
Large law firms almost never out-and-out fire someone, even someone who is barely billing time and has attempted to avoid working for the last 5 years by constantly taking leave. In order to get fired, you have to (1) do something truly negligent regarding a client — something that will cause the firm to lose the client and possibly draw ethics/malpractice charges, (2) commit an act of sexual/racial/religious harassment or discrimination so blatant and public as to draw unwanted negative attention to the firm’s diversity or treatment of women and minorities, or (3) commit a salacious crime.
Otherwise, it’s kindly suggested you and the firm part ways. You are generally still offered a reference, even if it is luke warm. Anymore, you probably won’t be given that luxurious extra time to look for a new job, but you may be allowed to keep your bio on the firm website for a time so that you don’t “look” unemployed.
As Will said, firm’s look out for their own interest. While it might not be in their interest to keep you around (if you aren’t making them any money), it usually is in their interest to avoid burning bridges with soon-to-be former employees. You never know when that person is going to pop back up, in a position to help you in some way. Former Big Law attorneys frequently wind up at regulatory agencies — it’s best to stay on good terms.
You do receive unemployment insurance in some states (California) even if you are fired. The few instances when you don’t get it is is for serious misconduct, like embezzling company money. I was fired from a firm after I started going in around 10-11 am almost everyday and taking lots of “sick days” – “me time”. Also, there was no work. I got unemployment. It was sweet.
LMAO at your lady client! But I don’t think she is being “ambitious” enough- she should go for a third baby, then try to get one of those sweet part-time gigs that seem to be reserved for the highly reproductive. She can work three days a week, mostly from home, and spend all of her time in the office interviewing female law school recruits, ushering them into her office filled with baby pictures and diaper bags and give a little speech about how the firm won an award for its maternity leave policy (which she accepted on behalf of the firm, while eight months pregnant with the third baby). Then she will ask if you have any questions about the firm’s maternity/parternity/adoption leave policy or your ovaries or biological clock, before she finally excuses herself to pump breast milk. That sure beats unemployment, right? Every firm seems to have one Designated Mother, whose salary the firm carries at a loss in exchange for the publicity warm fuzzies and ability to draw in female recruits. Never mind the fact that if you are single or married and childless you are looking at a lot of cancelled dates and angry spouses, which might ultimately thwart your your efforts to produce more human beings. But if you can manage to get a little “alone time” with that special someone and get knocked up, Designated Mother seems like nice work if you can get it.
Whoa did you ever call it. I know DesMo is at my current, and two past firms. Very clearly. And this is exactly why she exists.
While that may be true, unemployment “cause” findings are notoriously difficult for employers to get, unless they found the employee stealing, etc. In some states, i.e. Indiana, being bad at your job and getting fired for it, is not “for cause” under the unemployment statute. The problem I see with that plan is that unemployment is usually 3-6 hundred bucks a week, depending on the state. Suffice to say, that’s not quite what I make per week as an attorney, so expenses aren’t going to be met.
“Law firms operate on the assumption they own your soul.” Apparently every firm that exists is a Sullivan & Cromwell doppleganger.
No, they all do – how else do they make money? It isn’t out of attorneys taking time off.
I absolutely love this post. Thank you, Will. This resonated profoundly with me.
Will, this is awesome. “Me time” is something missing from so many of our lives, but nowhere is it more apparent than in the legal profession. It is dangerous not to have it. Without that cool-down time, which as you mention is separate and just as important as sleep, the body and mind cannot rejuvenate. The irony, of course, is that failing to take this time in order to work more actually inhibits our ability to work well. But I guess that is okay with some people . . . and their employers. Thank you for the reminder.
I agree. I nearly had a mental breakdown earlier in practice when I lost most of my “me time” for a while. A few hardy souls seem to be fed spiritually by billing hours and need nothing else – then there are the rest of us.
I’ve never been able to concentrate on work enough to get to the point where I could have Me time spent outside of work.
I’m an expert on the 50% billing ratio. By that, I mean I have to physically be in the office for 14 hours to get 7 hours of billable work done.
I’m still working on basic organizational skills.
Although I did spend some time today thinking about the English Civil War and perusing wikipedia to learn about the island of stability with respect to transuranium elements.
Back when I was billing hours, I spent way too much time analyzing the financial markets (which drove me to accept the 50% savings rate as sadly necessary).
I’m not a fan of work in general. I find law (and work in general) relatively boring and painful.
Well, I don’t know how your career is doing, but you sound like you’d be first-rate company. I wish I could get to know you.
I can’t count the number of times I heard partners or more senior associates say “you need to take time for yourself,” only to see those same partners or senior associates commandeer every waking and sleeping moment of my time. What bothered me was less the fact that they acted like they owned me (after all, they did pay me a lot of money) than the unabashed hypocrisy of it, particularly from those who would stand there and tell me that they expected people respect their personal boundaries and “me time” but weren’t willing to even pretend to respect mine.
Even after a few years in house, I’m still shedding the haircloth of biglaw – bad habits and the deeply ingrained need to scratch even the most ridiculous quasi-legal itch die hard – but at least I don’t have to sleep with my blackberry on my pillow anymore. I’ve even left it at home a few times when I run out to the store!
Hear, hear. I’m also a BigFlaw refugee. And I DID use alcohol as an excuse to “switch off.” I didn’t drink to excess, but I would have one glass of wine each night, because it’s the only thing the partners understand — “Oh, I’m sorry, I just had a glass of wine. I can’t do any heavy drafting now.”
My alcohol consumption never hit substance abuse levels, but it was still a darned difficult habit to kick when I went in-house. Took several years.
AMEN! I remember being at an airport with a partner, waiting for our flight back from a meeting in New York, and I said something about “well, the firm has an option on all my time of course” and he acted like it was a totally over the top statement and of COURSE the firm didn’t have ALL my time. That is 100% B. S. He’s the partner who got the most p.o.’ed when anyone needed time off and who always assumed I’d be on every conference call when I was on vacation (direct quote: “You’re just visiting family, right? So you’ll be around.”) and then needed memos summarizing those calls, plus emails for clients on substantive issues, and then would keep me waiting around for edits (because it’s not like I had planned to leave my parents’ house or anything while I was visiting them). Geesh.
I love the woman’s Maternity Leave Plan! I am rooting for her, sincerely! Has she implemented the Plan yet? Did you ever hear whether it worked out for her?
I did a corollary: Have kid one and kid two; develop and live with postpartum depression and attendant anxiety disorder until it is apparent to self and husband that continuing at Biglaw is a bad idea for family; quit, downsize lifestyle, etc. etc. Her Plan is better! (I hope she got babies that sleep a lot; babies twelve weeks and under are famously bad at understanding their mothers’ need for “me time.” Although if she was still getting BigLaw money, she might have had a day nanny and a night nanny.)
My plan for my future career (legal or not):
Work between 1 to 3 or 4 years, put money aside
Take 6 months to a year off.
Repeat.
That until I actually find a career that fulfills me enough that I won’t feel compelled to leave.
I’ll let you know how that works out. It’s been good so far 🙂
Sounds exactly like an academic job. 3 years of work and then you get a six-month sabbatical. Great gig if you can get it.
Of course, the ratio of PhDs to faculty positions is no better than in law …
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I knew it was time to leave my BigLaw career when I found myself spending an awful lot of time fantasizing about going to another city and presenting myself to the police as an amnesia case. I was also obsessed with thoughts like, “If I die now, I won’t ever have had a life.” That was 12 years ago, and I’ve been extremely happy ever since.
That’s rather sad, but unfortunately true. Many lawyers can have all of the academic and career success in the world, only to find some day that none of it matters in the face of real life. Remember, you only get ONE life. It’s YOURS. Don’t sell it for cheap. Do what is necessary to free yourself of your student loans and build up a little nest egg, then get out of BIGLAW. You have another 40 years to practice law. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.
Yeppers, and this is why I’m no longer writing long, or long and academic, law articles. No one reads them, they don’t get you clients or work (contacts do) and one day I realized that my very impressive 3 page resume of writing and speaking gigs didn’t mean pigeon poop to me. Now it’s all about Me Time (and doing the required minimum # of billable hours), yo.
I LOVE the amnesia idea. Wish I’d thought of it myself. Though it might be suspicious when I turn up in Asheville or some other place I’d enjoy with the clothes, books and musical instruments that I wanted to keep (my excuse, geez, musta packed before I lost my memory).
That amnesia idea is awesome! My fantasy was always to witness a mob hit so that my identity would have to be legally and properly erased and I would get to live in Utah or South Dakota on the gov-mint’s dime.
5am gym time for two hours. That’s me time. And the only way I survive.
I would be interested in your take on “me” time at work. Like JP, I was extremely inefficient when in biglaw such that it was not uncommon that I would be in the office for two hours for every one that I billed. I suspected but could never be certain that my work habits were not all that different from my coworkers, but, with some of them, more of that time looking at the financial markets, Facebook, etc., ended up being billed to a client, and thus their hours worked to hours billed ratios were better.
I could be wrong, however. I’d also be willing to believe that I was/am at the extreme end of the time-wasters spectrum. In-house, I still can’t get a good feel for how my coworkers spend their days, so I don’t know that my interest is just related to biglaw, or even law in general.
Do you have any sense from talking with your clients as to how much time during the work day the average person spends doing actual work as opposed to, say, checking Facebook?
Anon, thanks for your post. I have been wondering the same thing for years!
I am still wondering whether I am as you say “at the extreme end of the time waster spectrum” myself because because so much of my time in law was spent reading articles, the news, facebooking, the weather, replying to personal emails and so on. Actually, I still do that even though I now I spend part of my week self employed…
I have now come to believe that a lot of people are like that but few admit to it. For me I can concentrate for a certain amount of time on what I do but I’ll then need a “recovery” time doing something else.
Overall I also think it has a lot to do with how much you enjoy what you’re doing. I spent a short time in-house in a brilliant company a few years ago, and the work was so fun and interesting that I spent less time doing other things (I didn’t cut it out altogether though). As soon as I got back to boring work my facebook consumption increased.
Finally I think there are different styles of work. I work much better under pressure (I was one of those people who researched essays for weeks but only got to write them the night before they were due). I do better in small burst of work rather than long and slow work. I think other people possibly take a little longer to do their work than I do so I have more time to potter about.
Or maybe I’m just a tad lazy… 😉
Agreed. Time wasting is incredibly common in law firms. The unhappy lawyers are reading the paper, Facebooking etc.
The happier partners are STILL reading the paper, reading the ABA website, checking their stocks, checking ESPN.com…..one high billing rainmaker in my office who seems to love his job is addicted to playing some kind of game on his phone (nonstop, which is very annoying)…..
If you are not perfectly efficient, you are in the 99% majority, it appears.
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When I left big law and started a new job I realized that people doing normal 9 to 5 jobs are generally more productive than lawyers, simply because they know they will be home at 6 to play with kids and have sex later. They know that free time is coming at the end of every single day, even these days where they have to do some extra hours, and it is a big stimulus – whatever their job is actually boring or not.
In Big Law, you never know when you will have free time and the permanent stress cause procrastination.
It’s not just BigLaw. I went from BigLaw to a Fortune 500 gig, but they adhere to a “lean staffing” model in Legal which means basically that they give me enough work to keep me busy 80+ hours a week were I to actually do it competently; I have a pile which only grows taller, never shorter, and “clients” who argue with me constantly, keep things from me deliberately, don’t follow my advice, impose a ridiculous amount of stupid busywork, and complain mercilessly that their stuff is not getting done or not getting done fast enough while at the same time sitting on things, sometime for months, and then giving them to me demanding immediate turnaround.
I took a “desperately urgent” conference call from the funeral home, literally sitting over the body of a dead family member last year; a couple of weeks ago, I reviewed some agreements at my son’s first birthday party because a single day off without arranging for someone else to take up to several hours of work on a last second basis (for something that realistically was *NOT* an emergency) was not acceptable by my so-called colleagues.
And if it weren’t for that son and my need for health insurance I’d sooner be homeless than work one more day at this hellhole – I hope every day that there’s a 9.9 earthquake that takes down all the buildings at my employer’s HQ, just to give me a single day of peace. Hope it comes soon.
I wondered where corporate profits were coming from these days.
Hmm…I see the lines that “on weekends, you’re on call” as a big firm attorney.
However, after having been to what feels like a million weddings over the past several months, I have been together with my friend in BigLaw, and seated and conversing with those strangers are wedding tables who I discover through small talk are also big firm, NYC lawyers. Not ONCE have I seen any of my friends have to miss any weddings, nor have I seen them or these fellow table guests EVER on their Blackberry on the Friday and/or Saturday nights of the wedding events.
Now, I suppose it is theoretically possible that these people are working 3 out of those other 4 weekends in the month…but for this to be universally the case for 100% of BigLaw attorneys I see is too coincidental to be reasonable.
So I ask you People’s Therapist: how much do you exaggerate? Or more accurately perhaps–is it just that you use the TOP 5-10most prestigious firms as REPRESENTATIVE of ALL firms? I believe that’s what you are doing. I most certainly agree with you that the 2 people I know at Sullivan & Cromwell and Skadden seem to be off the earth. But everyone else I know is working at the Proskauers, etc. making the same loot while still enjoying their weekends just as freely as my poor, unemployed butt is. So please…enlighten me.
No, I’m not exaggerating.
You are. I used to work at a V10 sweatshop and it’s still not as bad as the picture you paint. Or, rather, it only was for the people who allowed it to be. You need to set your own boundaries in this profession. No one will do it for you. They’ll bleed you dry if you let them. But you don’t have to let them. You can work in BIGLAW without giving 100% of your live and constantly giving in to totally unreasonable demands if you do great work and work for the right partners. And just set some clear limits. If you do it right, you won’t get fired. In fact, you’ll get great review.
Wow. It would be so amazingly great if that were true. It isn’t – you’re exaggerating. But yeah, that would be amazing.
OK, if you are not exaggerating, then I ask for an explanation. All I know about “BigLaw” is what i see from the outside looking in. And what I see is that 100% of my friends who DO NOT work at a Top 5 Firm always have weekends free, always are not tied to a mobile device, always come out for weekend events. How do you explain this? Are you saying that I just happen to be friends, concidentally, with those seemingly rare associates who don’t slave away on weekends? I don’t think that can be. You seem to have confirmation bias…
I’d guess that it’s slow at their firms…and they’re worried about their jobs.
I was at a v20 firm up through being a senior associate – I was interrupted at a wedding reception and also at a bachelor party weekend both of which were long booked in advance (ever get asked to review extensive contract redlines on your BB in the car on a road trip or find a fax at a gas station where you can receive something?), was called on the first day of a vacation (as in, already there) at which I was meeting people who had traveled from across the globe to visit, and told I had to cancel the rest of the trip and leave immediately to attend to a client need, had a client show up at my home uninvited on a Friday night with documents to review – the list goes on and on. Not an exaggeration in the least, at least for some of us. And the firm I was at pitches itself as a mellower, family friendly version of BigLaw!
Well, now — it’s been 11-12 years since I was in BigLaw, but I do still keep in touch. While I did not have a happy life there, I also didn’t give over my whole life 24/7. When I was off-duty, I was off-duty. Different people manage that differently. There always is the temptation to make oneself available at all hours, if only to tamp down the anxiety of not measuring up. There also always will be control freaks who will try to make you make yourself available at all hours, and they will never stop if you don’t enforce your boundaries. The universal use of smartphones has made it easier for people to slip into the habit of being on call all the time, it’s true, but all the more reason why it’s important to say “no” and mean it rather than rely on excuses that don’t hold water any more. Phones can be turned off, though many lawyers seem to have forgotten how.
It’s not pleasant working with people who make you fight hard and constantly for what should be viewed as reasonable boundaries, but it’s also true that no one will set them for us but ourselves.
Look, the “blame the victim” theory that somehow or other it’s all our fault because we’re not “setting appropriate boundaries” is bunk, pure and simple. How are you supposed to set boundaries when you’re a peon at a law firm getting work dumped on you from all sides? I’ve worked with lots of attorneys who have tried that approach and the short answer is that it doesn’t work. At best, it gets you a bad review and dumped from the firm. If it were that easy…well, it would be that easy, wouldn’t it?
I didn’t mean to suggest it was easy. It was very unpleasant. It roils my stomach just remembering. As I said, working among people who assault your boundaries is a drag and may well spur you to go work among less crazy people. Who needs the constant armed alert status?
Nevertheless, I’ve known lawyers all along the spectrum of boundary control, and their compensation and career paths didn’t correlate with their willingness to be on call 24/7. I didn’t take vacations very often, but when I did, I never took a phone. When I was on, I was on, all night if necessary, but when I was off I was off. My colleagues and I covered for each other. We knew whom we could trust, and I have longlong bonds with those few people. It’s the only way to stay sane in a maelstrom like that.
The boundary issue I ultimately found I couldn’t manage was the expectation that my entire personal and social life would consist of marketing to Fortune 500 executives. Since I don’t market for beans anyway, even when I consider myself “on the job,” I was made miserable by the notion that I should live and play only among wealthy people while maneuvering to get their business. I could see that successful partners practically took their clients into their families, whether they liked them or not. Theoretically there should be a good way to manage that boundary, too, but I never got the hang of it, possibly because I hated the idea so much that I avoided thinking about it.
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