I don’t remember much more than the theme song and opening credits, but the concept – giving it all up, packing your bags and fleeing for the sticks, spouse (and maybe kids) in hand – resonates with my lawyer clients. Some are beginning to sound like aspiring Eddie Alberts.

I’d like to say there’s a great lawyer return to the land on the way – driven by a love for nature and the outdoors. To some extent that’s true. But mostly, it’s a product of desperation. The big themes are escaping biglaw misery, seeking adventure, looking for a healthier lifestyle… and fleeing school loans.
One client’s story weaves these themes into a magical tapestry of personal growth, spiritual awakening and debt avoidance.

He was suffering modestly at a big law firm in L.A. Then he got posted to an office in Asia, where he happened to speak the language. There he discovered how bad bad can be. The US office dished out standard-issue biglaw brutality. Nothing could have prepared him for the Asia office. The cruelties committed by the local staff and attorneys would make Hieronymus Bosch wince. In their laser-beam-like focus on punishing my client for speaking their language and attempting to work in their homeland, they achieved new plateaux of sadism on a weekly basis. He developed insomnia, migraines, then panic attacks – and was fired a year later, without comment.

That’s when the Green Acres theme began playing in his head.

I’m not sure where he got the idea, but for whatever reason, he bought a 500 square foot cabin in the middle of nowhere, snug against the 49th parallel. Then he wrote a blog about woodcarving. And that’s about all he did – that, and shovel snow.

Ten months later he remembered the $150k he owed in school loans and back taxes from his Asian debacle, packed his bags and caught a ride to New York City – and doc review. Foreign language doc review pays better than regular doc review, but it’s still doc review. Working with the burnt-out remnants of lawyers is refreshing after working with actual lawyers – and at first it was amusing to get paid to peruse an Asian businessman’s emails to his mistress, then click “relevant” “incriminating” and “privileged.” But even assuming steady work, he didn’t see how he could pay off his loans within a decade.

His solution? Hitch a ride back to The Great White North – and his rustic cabin. There, he could find public defender work in the local courthouse – and wait tables. He calculated that $30k per year would be enough to cover food and fuel – but insufficient to attract the attention of his creditors. Not even a bank addicted to the lifeblood of youth can squeeze that blood from a stone. In his free time – which is most of the time, at this point – he wood-carves. For whatever reason, he finds that more exciting than doc review.

Voila. All you weeping, tooth-gnashing, garment-rending lawyers out there who constantly ask me – what can I do now? Here’s a solution. Green Acres is the place to be!

If you’re a true daredevil, you can fly the coop bigtime – take it beyond a meek retreat back-to-the-land, and embark on grand adventure.

For role models, you have those lawyer-bloggers who regularly up-date us on their fantastic doings. My clients inundate me with links to these guys.

There was the former bankruptcy associate who walked across the country. I don’t remember if he did it for charity, or an up-coming documentary film, or because he was losing his marbles. From the bit I read, I suspect option number three.

I’m not sure what walking across the country costs, but most of the “grand adventure” types are drawing on some unnamed source of cash to pursue their dream.

There’s the former biglaw chick traveling around the world, who started with the Trans-Siberian, and last I checked, was on a vision quest in Thailand. Her spin on the whole thing is “wow! I’m taking time off to grow as a person!” but I suspect the truth is closer to “I was losing my shit in biglaw and could afford to do this.” She assumes we want to hear what it all means to her – ignoring the reality that smoking weed in Chiang Mai with cute Swedish guys is a well-worn trope. We get it. We’d love to blow out of law and into “personal growth” along these lines, too. But there’s the issue of cost…

I stumbled on another former biglaw victim who moved to Italy to work as a free-lance journalist. Once again, how she pulled off this feat remains a mystery – I suspect one involving an Italian husband with a family house.

For those of us who don’t savor walking across the country – and don’t have the money for a year of traveling around the planet or a husband with a house in Italy – the Green Acres experience might, of necessity, play out in a humbler – and perhaps more heartfelt – manner.

You can read about this breed of Eddie Albert – the humbler, heartfelt-er ones – in the “lifestyle” section of the New York Times. The key search terms are “organic” and “artisanal.”

You’ll find the family that lives in a house on fifty acres in the middle of nowhere, Maine. The husband – bearded, lanky, and simultaneously wifty and scarily intense – manufactures driftwood sculpture and furniture. The wife – with braided hair and sensible shoes – home-schools their kids. The family gathers hearthside in the evenings to steam kale and discuss books.  It’s all very heartfelt.

Another guy built a treehouse on the coast of Oregon. I can’t remember what he does up there – but stop smirking. He’s not marking up a purchase agreement or replying to a request for discovery, so it’s more fun than whatever you’re doing.

The spin in these pieces is appealing. It requires courage to give up the money, the status, the title – to head back to the land and commit yourself to something crunchy. Lawyers are feeling the pull.

Another one of my client’s got the itch bad. For her, the question is whether her husband, an academic who stays at home with their two kids, is up for abandoning his career and switching to goat farming.

He might be.

“I know this sounds crazy,” she says. “But I want to make cheese. I want to learn how, and I want to make my own cheese.”

“It can’t be that crazy,” I informed her. “You’re the second lawyer this month.”

I’m not making that up. Goat farming – and the manufacture of chèvre – have developed into a miserable lawyer leitmotiv. You can’t riff on the theme without it.

People are trying. Lawyers are talking the talk – even if fewer are actually walking the walk.

Once again, money is the first obvious roadblock on the road to Green Acres. Even Grizzly Adams needed a few buckskins to purchase his log cabin – and stock the pantry full of mac and cheese for the long winter ahead.

The trick to leaving your money troubles behind – and unshackling your peripatetic soul – is abandoning the crazy notion of repaying gargantuan loans. After that, settling into brewing your own buttermilk is a piece of cake.

My client on the 49th parallel is giving it a go – and it might work. At some juncture, as a lawyer with loans approaching two hundred thousand dollars, you begin to sense at a visceral level you’re never going to pay that money back – not in this lifetime. The loans are perpetual – so you might as well cry uncle and give up. Then you can stake a claim out past them thar hills, earn a pittance to feed yourself, and get on with your life.

There are two major steps you have to take right off the bat. First, get rid of your phone. You can’t afford it anyway, and it drives the banks into conniptions when they can’t harass you every day. Second, scale down your lifestyle. Dump any possessions the banks might sink their slimy claws into. My client’s cabin is worth about $40k. Even in the USA, where foreclosing is a way of life, that’s not worth foreclosing on – and, in any case, his mortgage is a few hundred bucks per month.

The ultimate get-away? Leave the USA behind. Head South of the Border – or just across the border. There are lots of off-the-beaten-track spots to explore. I’ve been hearing about Costa Rica, Australia, and India from lawyers I work with.

If your immigrant parents fled another country for opportunity in the USA – well, now might be time to flee back! You already speak the language, and the banks will never find you. Sure, you can no longer work in the USA – the money-lenders would descend like rabid hyenas – but you’re technically not a criminal. You can maintain citizenship and pop in for visits.

Some lawyers are picking a random spot – any spot – on the map. It only has to be far away from biglaw and all-American debt slavery. There’s loads of space in the Northern Territory of Australia!

Farm livin’ is the life for me…

Can it happen? Can you give it up, buy a rustic cabin way over yonder and live like Grizzly Adams (or Crocodile Dundee)?

Once you’ve tasted biglaw, plodding through snow to an outhouse doesn’t sound half bad.

Speaking personally…Dah-link I love you, but give me Park Avenue.

But the honest answer is I don’t know if you can pull it off.

Eva Gabor seemed to adapt. Maybe you can too. And maybe you can convince the wife and kids to come with.
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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, Way Worse Than Being A Dentist: The Lawyer’s Quest for Meaning

I also heartily recommend my first book, an introduction to the concepts behind psychotherapy, Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy

(Both books are also available on bn.com and the Apple iBookstore.) 

It never occurred to me I’d be deluged with lawyers as clients.

It never, ever occurred to me I’d be deluged with partners as clients.

It never so much as crossed my mind they’d be so unhappy.

It turns out being a partner can be…not all that. For many of my clients, the job boils down to evil middle management.

Permit me to explain.

Biglaw associates resemble the low-level evil henchman in James Bond movies – those omnipresent guys in jumpsuits who all look the same and do what they’re told. They drive around evil headquarters in little golf carts, manipulate dials in the control room, shoot at James Bond (always missing) – then get shot themselves. Presumably – like biglaw associates – they’re mostly in it for the money, rather than a genuine penchant for evil.

I felt like an impostor at S&C – only pretending to be a genuine low-level evil henchman. I was more like James Bond after he bonks the real low-level evil henchman on the head, then reemerges strolling through evil headquarters sporting that guy’s jumpsuit.

I was an impostor – trying to look like I drank the Kool-Aid, going through the motions. I wasn’t even a clandestine agent, battling evil, like 007. The plan to blow up the moon wasn’t my problem. I just wanted a way out of that crummy job – one not involving a fatal dunk in the evil piranha tank. Somewhere in that evil-lair-secreted-in-a-hollowed-out-volcano there had to be a door marked exit.

Most of the partners I work with are looking for the same thing. The difference is, as a partner, you’re not an impostor pretending to be a low-level evil henchman – you’re an impostor pretending to be evil middle management.

“Preposterous!” you sputter, outraged. “Partners never condescend to be middle anything! They crouch, smugly, at the pinnacle of the evil pyramid! With one wiggle of their evil little finger…they manipulate human life!”

It can look that way from the bottom rung, whence a partner appears as far removed from a low-level evil henchman as a junior associate from a positive bank balance.

From the vantage of the pyramid’s sub-sub-basement, all partners appear interchangeable – the unifying feature being their utter dissimilarity from anyone like you. A partner’s one of them – evil incarnate, possessing his own evil headquarters – his own creepy evil white cat (for stroking purposes) – and his own weird evil European accent (with which to mutter, “Come now, Mr. Bond…”) A partner doesn’t have to drink the Kool-Aid – an iv bag of the stuff dangles by his bedside.

If only that were true. After getting all up-close and personal with a bevy of partners, I’ve caught wind of a terrifying reality: All partners are not the same. Most are nothing more than evil middle managers.

It turns out – I swear on a stack of Books of Mormon – there’s only one guy per law firm who actually owns an evil headquarters.

He’s also the one guy who gets to stroke a cat and mutter diabolical threats. At most, there are six or seven guys (yes, they’re always guys.)

The other, lesser partners aren’t diabolical geniuses – or low-level evil henchmen. These so-called “partners” only get to act like they personify evil – they’re hardly Dr. Evil himself. They’re more like the bland guy sitting in the wrong chair in the evil boardroom when Dr. Evil presses that discreet little button – the one that activates the steel wrist straps and the trapdoor in the floor.

I’ve worked with partners so traumatized by the situation, it’s shaken their faith in global organizations dedicated to evil.

It’s dispiriting.

Here, in a nutshell, is how you end up in evil middle management:

Over the course of years of slave labor, you make yourself indispensable to a rainmaker (your “rabbi”.) He elevates you. Then two things happen: First, you acquire the title of PARTNER and all the rights, privileges and immunities (and status and money) thereunto appertaining; and second, the ink begins to dry on a binding contract with Beelzebub.

Mr. Rabbi doesn’t share his clients with you. You’ve never spoken to them. He elevated you to do his work, transforming you into a glorified senior associate (glorified = overpaid.) Since the downturn in 2008, there are no longer any actual senior associates at the firm – they’ve been fired – so the actual partner reduces your points (partner-speak for money) and increases your workload.

It’s getting to where you’re not even overpaid, let alone glorified.

Don’t like it? No problem. Do what they keep telling you to do: Find your own clients. Generate business. Pull your weight. Do some marketing.

There are issues. First, you don’t know how to market. They didn’t have a class in “marketing” at your evil law school. Second, when you try marketing – which seems to mean pointless research, then taking people you hardly know out to lunch – you feel like an idiot. Third, it doesn’t work. They don’t suddenly call with a pile of overpaid legal stuff for you to do.

This is not entirely surprising. In a domestic market containing, at minimum, twice the lawyers the entire planet could possibly utilize, clients aren’t sitting around waiting to be asked to hire over-priced outside counsel. Many are bringing work in-house to cut legal bills – or strong-arming outside counsel to trim prices.

You could offer to reduce your fee – slide your price to bring in work – but your rabbi won’t hear of it. It would “degrade the firm’s brand” – which means it might affect his fee. He’s got his own book of business, and doesn’t give what we’ll euphemistically refer to as a “hoot” about your book of business. You’re competition.  He’s content having you do his work.

That’s evil middle management. You’re a partner, but you don’t feel like it. Your friends and family assume you’re rich and powerful. Your car mechanic tacks on made-up charges when you take your Benz in for a tune-up. Obscure charities guilt you into tickets to their annual ball thingamabobs. Even your therapist considerately slides his rate up for you.  : )

The truth is you’re rich-ish – or used to be, or were heading in that direction. But you earn a tiny fraction of the rabbi’s take and that keeps declining. And power? You hold none whatsoever, beyond the ability to torment associates – which isn’t as much fun since they fired all the associates.

Things get worse as the recession deepens. The plan to build your own book of business seems more and more like a pipe dream.

You have no actual idea what’s going on at your firm, since no one shares information. The other partners in your group tell you nothing. Without warning, five of them took off from the LA office last month. You found out by reading AboveTheLaw.

Scarier still, the rabbi isn’t sending you as much work. You hear about partners at other firms – and your own – getting pushed out. First, they’re hunched at their desks, playing computer solitaire – then they’re no longer with the firm. You recall that discreet little button.

There are additional indignities. Your secretary is fired. You come in and she’s not there. Yeah. That happens.

But you’re a partner! You can say to heck with it, and take off. If this is how they treat a co-owner of the firm, you’ll go somewhere else, where partnership still means something.

Nice try. You’re a service partner. You have no book of business. No other firm is going to greet you with open arms. They will buy a book of business – and probably overpay, since it will be inflated with clients who aren’t actually portable. But no book of business? No evil headquarters.

How about going in-house? Sure, you’ll take a pay cut, but a senior vice president job would be cool, or even general counsel. You could frame it as a lifestyle choice – something you’re doing for the wife and kids. You’ll work nine to five, get a company car, attend conferences. Might be refreshing.

It would be…if everyone else hadn’t thought of it, too. Service partners are lining up for those jobs.

Where to go?

Nowhere. You’re stuck where you are. Let’s face it, resigning your partnership isn’t a step you’ll take lightly. You worked your ass off for the ultimate lawyer honor – to become a would-be diabolical genius. You don’t give that up.

One client – a mid-level associate – recounted being taken aside by a female partner, and given a speech about the meaning of partnership. The partner intended to inspire.  She came across as unhinged.

“She said making partner was better than I could imagine,” my client recalled. “It was the greatest day of your life. It was better than sex. It was better than getting married. It was better than having a child.”

“At some point, she got this weird look in her eyes – it creeped me out. I listened with a frozen smile and thought, I’ve got to get out of here before this happens to me.”

Okay, so some partners are a little…touched. Evil genius is a difficult job description. And maybe it isn’t better than sex. But you shouldn’t under-estimate the degree to which making partner is played up in the world of biglaw. It’s the beginning of everything – wealth, power, respect. You become a real person – someone who can hold his head up. You go to private clubs, buy bad-ass apartments and vacation on Mustique in a rented villa. You’re “in” – a made man – sitting at the table with Dr. Evil (no one mentions the discreet little button.)

The truth is, I hear a lot more partners talking about resigning their partnership than I see actually doing it. One guy who did resign from a major firm was literally covered in shingles and having a nervous breakdown when he quit. He couldn’t get out of bed or stop crying. (No, he wasn’t my client.) I got the feeling he felt obligated to reduce himself to that state to earn permission to do the unthinkable – or convince his wife (who wasn’t terribly sympathetic.)

To make partner, you elevated the goal of earning major bucks into the focus of your life for an endless string of god-awful years. Along the way, you picked up a spouse and kids and a mortgage. It ends up like everything else in biglaw – all about the money.

If the rabbi’s happy and has work for you, then you still count as a partner at a big law firm. You are evil middle-management. You can wear the fez and dark glasses each day and maintain the facade. You’re a partner. You were elevated.

Meanwhile, you daydream about killing the rabbi with an ax. You hate handing your life over to that condescending windbag.  You moan to your wife about how you can’t take it anymore. How many partnership meetings can you attend in the evil boardroom, watching him toy with that discreet little button…wondering if you’re sitting in the wrong chair…

Partner isn’t a title. It’s what you do. Unless you go out there and – by some miracle – bring in business, you’re not really a partner, equity or otherwise. You’re someone who gets called a partner for working for a partner.

Even if you have a book of business, it can be tough. I worked with a junior partner with a growing book of business.  He hates the grind.  Being on-call 24/7 triggers anxiety attacks. He debates quitting, going “part-time,” trying for a government job or taking the leap and starting his own firm. With a book of business, he’s got options.

Other partners have fewer options.

One service partner client discovered her rabbi was defecting to a notorious sweatshop. He offered to bring her with, but she couldn’t stomach it, and stayed behind.

Work dried up. Now she’s at another firm, on her own, unable to drum up business. In-house jobs aren’t materializing. She talks to her husband about moving to the country, giving the whole thing up, getting out of law…

Like many partners, she’s looking for an exit – one not involving a fatal dunk in the evil piranha tank.
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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, Way Worse Than Being A Dentist: The Lawyer’s Quest for Meaning

I also heartily recommend my first book, an introduction to the concepts behind psychotherapy, Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy

(Both books are also available on bn.com and the Apple iBookstore.) 

For some background on Dan and his work, click here.

As always, it was great to talk with Dan – he takes his time, asks good questions and knows what he’s talking about.  We explored issues around depression, talked a bit about my books, and related everything to law, lawyers and the environment of a law firm.

You can read the full interview here.

My thanks to Dan, for arranging and conducting this nice long talk about topics that fascinate and concern us both.

========

If you’re interested in learning more about the scientific and philosophical underpinnings of psychotherapy, you might enjoy my first book, “Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy”

My second book takes a humorous look at the current state of the legal profession, “Way Worse Than Being A Dentist”

(Both books are also available on bn.com and the Apple iBookstore.) 

For information on my private practice, click here.

“I study. Then I study some more. Then I go to sleep. Then I get up and study again. It’s the same for everyone.”

At least, I proposed, the subject matter was interesting.

She demurred. “Yeah, I guess…but – really? I mean…Property law? Contracts? Torts?”

Her demurrer was sustained. She had a point.

Maybe it’s your turn to demur. The subject matter of law school – law itself – not interesting!?? That’s unthinkable. It has to be the school’s fault – my client must be attending some fourth-tier degree mill, with sub-par teaching and a dull-witted student body…

But the school’s not at issue here. She’s attending one of the top places in the country. Not that it would make much difference, since every law school essentially teaches the same thing, first-tier or fourth-tier.

Then it must be her fault. If she doesn’t appreciate the study of law – if this Philistine isn’t drawn to the greatness of legal scholarship – she doesn’t deserve her seat at an exalted institution.

I’m not convinced. This young woman projects intelligence, and turns heart-felt-y and passionate discussing her real interest – international human rights law. Unlike most law students, she did an internship and reads books, so she knows what international human rights law is (even if, like most law students, she vastly over-estimates its significance.)

It’s possible things will get better next year, when she takes a course on international human rights law. On the other hand, law school courses have a way of making topics less interesting than they were before you took them.

Maybe the fault doesn’t lie with any particular school, or any particular student. Maybe it lies with the myths surrounding law school itself.

Let’s gather for a moment, and contemplate the inconceivable: Maybe law school is just…well…not that big a deal. Maybe it isn’t engrossing or life-altering or – much of anything. Maybe the whole schtick – law school as the turning point in a young lawyer’s existence – is oversold. The legal industry itself is a bubble recently popped. Perhaps the mystique surrounding law school is due for puncture.

Ask yourself – is the subject matter taught in law schools really so engrossing? Or were you taught to believe the subject matter taught in law schools is really so engrossing?

It would make sense, in the greater scheme of things, if the whole “law school experience” were massively over-hyped. Lawyers remain, after centuries of skill-honing, master bullshit artists – especially with regard to any matter touching upon their own significance. To judge from their own press, you’d think lawyers were free-lance philosophers rather than the guys who draft purchase agreements to keep holding corporations from paying taxes, or file minutiae-laden briefs to sustain Big Pharma’s eternal patent infringement battles.

Lawyers incline towards the hoity-toity the way heliotropes incline towards the sunny-sunny. Phrases such as “precise intellect,” “formidable legal mind” and “brilliant analytical prowess” get tossed about like so many croutons over a caesar.

I doubt accountants speak of a “formidable accounting intellect” or dentists praise one another for “brilliant dental prowess.” I hope not.

It follows logically that the legal world’s fetish for pretension trickles down to the law schools, and the law students themselves – who soak up all that pomposity and behave during their first year as though their cosmic entireties lay balanced each hour on a fulcrum between existential completeness and the barren void. They take it so seriously you want to smack them. No, the professor doesn’t want to stay late after lecture and argue some point of tort analysis. He wants to go home and play that new level of Angry Birds set in outer space, just like you should want to do. He’s only pretending he cares that much about tort stuff because that’s what law school is about – pretending law is the most fascinating thing in the entire world. Maintaining this illusion plays a key role in keeping law professors, and law schools, earning big bucks.

Remember the official schtick beaten into every law student’s cranium: Law school is where they re-make you. Law school is where you learn to think like a lawyer.

In case you were wondering, here is the formal definition of to think like a lawyer: verb, 1) to display a neurotic tendency to hostile, oppositional behavior; and/or 2) to obsess over unnecessary, pointless detail.

The extravagance of lawyer egotism is matched – if not exceeded – by lawyer humorlessness. The result is a professional edifice so laden with pretension that, if anyone so much as farted, the whole rig might tumble Earthward, accompanied by giggles.

For better or worse, in a room full of lawyers, no one could ever loosen up sufficiently to launch such blessed mirth. So, once again, The People’s Therapist steps into the breach – and does what he must.

Without further ado – and just in time for exams! – I present The People’s Therapist’s Three Key Rules to Surviving Law School…

Rule number one: avoid your classmates.

A 1L client refuses to so much as avail herself of the “study break” events planned by extracurricular groups at her school. Spending time with classmates pointlessly spikes her anxiety level.

“I’ll be chatting with the one friend who’s cool – shooting the breeze. Then some idiot from our section walks up and suddenly it’s like: Have you done your outline for Torts yet? Oh my God, do you think there’ll be a question on fault liability?”

Ignoring your classmates is an essential key to surviving law school. For starters, eschew “study groups.” Those other people will get you riled up and distracted, and they won’t help you do any better on the exam. And by the way – hello! – you’re competing against them. What’s the point of pretending you’re not?

Go home and study. To heck with those other people. Shun them like plague victims.

I had exactly one friend in law school. Later on, after spending time in the company of real live lawyers, I still had exactly one attorney friend and it was the same guy. That’s when it clicked, and all became clear.

(In the interests of receiving no more than my usual quota of hate mail, I’ll try to put this delicately.)

Lawyers, as a group, are pompous, uptight, miserable, or boring. That begins in law school.

(Of course you’re the exception, so yes, you can relax.)

Rule number two: use commercial outlines.

It’s that simple. One client, who attended a tippy-top school and earned lousy grades first year, told me his big mistake – embracing his professors’ snobbery against commercial outlines. He bought outlines second and third year and, predictably, his grades shot up. Unfortunately, no one cares about second and third year.

Law school is about first year. First year grades. That’s it. And that means memorizing commercial outlines from day one, then practicing essays until your fingers bleed.

The professors are charming and eccentric and amusing, but it’s rare to find one who can deliver a coherent lecture. More common are coots mumbling into their notes, or psychos who fetishize wasting class time tormenting students with the “Socratic method.” That’s another bit of schtick, where you call on people at random with confusing, arbitrary trivia questions and try to humiliate them until they cry. At least for the professor, it’s fun – and easier than preparing a lecture.

In terms of the content of the classes, law schools – all law schools – hit you with one thing – a pointless tsunami of legal doctrine. Doctrine, doctrine and more doctrine. More “three-pronged tests” than you can shake a three-pronged stick at.

For actual, practical legal skills, you’ll have to look elsewhere. Schools don’t teach that stuff. Neither does anyone else.

Happily, there’s nothing on Earth better-suited to the task of cramming an assload of pointless legal doctrine into your head than a commercial outline. They do the trick because that’s what they’re for.

A guy in my NYU section skipped lectures and crammed commercial outlines all semester. The following year he transferred to Yale. You can do it too! Just memorize everything, and practice those damned essays until you reflexively plop out something shiny and nice on command. If it’s a teensy bit shinier and nicer than what the people sitting next to you plop out, you’re golden.

(By the way – in case you’ve never contemplated the horror of grading those exams, an old friend of mine is a law professor, and he took me there. He sits on the floor with a big pile of the hideous things, dips into a few, divides them into A B and C piles, then keeps reading and sorting. The awful process takes weeks, is admittedly rather arbitrary, and the sheer drudgery of it almost justifies his bloated salary.)

If you want to act all holier-than-thou about using commercial outlines, I invite you to go ahead and read the sacred “cases” in your “casebook.” But be forewarned – the old ones were penned in Saxon dialect during the Bronze Age. I defy anyone to elucidate, without a commercial outline, what Marbury v. Madison is trying to say. Might as well be carved in stone with hieroglyphs.

(Of course, as an attorney, I am eminently qualified to discourse at length on the crucial role this seminal work of jurisprudence played in weaving the fabric of our democracy. But somehow I sense you’d rather I not.)

More recent cases remain dense, self-indulgent and circumlocutory. Of particular note are those super-annoying and utterly impenetrable “concur in part but dissent in part” Supreme Court decisions that make you want to pull your hair out trying to deduce the bottom line.

Buy an outline and save yourself the agita. Deciphering recent high court decisions is as fulfilling as trying to coax Antonin Scalia over his terror of homosexuals, or teach John Roberts how it feels to be poor. A pointless exercise.

Rule Number Three: Don’t kid yourself this is either a big deal, or going to be a lot of fun.

It’s isn’t and it isn’t. The only thing that matters to anyone in law school – including you – is your grades. Each semester amounts to a waiting period before you take exams.

A client told me he could strangle the Supreme Court Justice who advised his class (at a hot-shot law school): “Grades don’t matter anymore. You’re here. Now you can relax.”

Doh! He landed at the bottom third of his class and is still looking for a job.

Don’t fool yourself. It’s all about grades – which means it’s all about exams – and the difference between an A and a B on a law school exam can be measured under an electron scanning microscope. So good luck.

As for the material itself – there are two kinds of law students.

If you cherish and adore Civ Pro – if the subtle distinctions between subject matter jurisdiction and personal jurisdiction ignite your mind with radiant epiphanies – then kudos to you. Maybe you were born to be a lawyer.

For the rest of us, Con Law is the most interesting course, first, because there isn’t much competition – Torts, anyone? – and second, because Con Law boils down to a self-gratifying debate over values disguised as an intellectual debate over legalities. Here’s the big insight: In any Con Law case that you actually care about, Republican judges vote one way and Democrat judges vote the other way. That’s why elections matter. The rest is so much pontificating.

Con Law isn’t merely bogus – it’s also useless. It might make you feel like a better, more educated citizen, and perhaps that’s a legitimate purpose. Most Americans don’t realize there is a Constitution, or know what one is – but – as a nation – we all adore pondering the meaning of liberty. I suppose the few of us with the money to purchase a higher education ought to possess a smattering of familiarity with the foundational documents.

On the other hand, the staggering loans you’re taking out to pay for that education are real – and you’ll never get paid for patriotic navel-gazing. Maybe half a dozen times per year, a law suit actually raises an issue in the US Constitution – something like gay marriage. Then it gets voted down along party lines, and that’s that. The chances that you’ll ever litigate an issue under the First Amendment parallel the chances that you’ll win the Mega Millions – or that my client will wield the authority of international human rights law to wipe evil dictators off the globe. Not gonna happen.

You study Con Law because it’s part of the schtick – the law school gestalt. You play along and savor the ambience of hushed libraries and leather-bound tomes. The exam, and your grades, are all that matters. Then passing the bar. Then year after year after year after year in hell, paying loans.

If you’re attending Yale, you might spend third year in a seminar with a federal circuit judge, mulling “Law and the Experimental Films of Southeast Asia.” One client – a Yale grad in her 60′s – experienced paroxysms of nostalgia recalling a long-ago seminar on the “history and philosophical underpinnings of injunctions.” Yes, an entire semester plumbing the etiology, phenomenology and epistemology of injunctions.

Whatevers. It’s still law. It’s still a bit boring, and a bit pointless. You’re not splitting the atom – you’re fussing over fine distinctions, splitting hairs, exhausting exhausted arguments.

I invite you to savor a lively discussion of injunctions – among yourselves – while I grab a beer from the fridge and watch reruns of “Fashion Police.”

Law school is oversold – the law-school/law-firm establishment makes it out to be a life-altering peak experience. It’s not. The intellectual challenge is more like philosophy lite. You might find it rather ho-hum. If you do, you’ll be following in the well-worn footsteps of those who went before.

Basically, it’s college all over again – but less fun.

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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, Way Worse Than Being A Dentist: The Lawyer’s Quest for Meaning

I also heartily recommend my first book, an introduction to the concepts behind psychotherapy, Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy

(Both books are also available on bn.com and the Apple iBookstore.) 

Dear People’s Therapist

I have been a fan of your blog for a long time, and thank you for running the blog!  I have the following question:
My mother-in-law is obese.  My father-in-law just passed away a year ago from diabetes.  My husband wants to talk to his mother to get her to lose weight because he doesn’t want to lose her (she is almost 60 years old).  We tried hinting but it got no where.  We tried inviting her over to our house for healthy dinners but because I’m Chinese and my husband is Caucasian American, our Chinese diet of vegetables and tofu is not exactly her cup of tea.  We tried analyzing the situation and decided that she doesn’t eat much during meals but she snacks a lot on junk foods.  My husband wants to know how can he talk to his mother about her losing weight and not hurt her feelings or sound like we don’t like fat people (my husband and I are the only skinny people in the family)??

Thank you very much!!

Y

And here’s my response:

To submit a question to Ask The People’s Therapist, please email it as text or a video to: wmeyerhofer@aquietroom.com

If I answer your question on the site, you’ll win a free session of psychotherapy with The People’s Therapist.
========

If you’re interested in learning more about the scientific and philosophical underpinnings of psychotherapy, you might enjoy my first book, “Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy”

My second book takes a humorous look at the current state of the legal profession, “Way Worse Than Being A Dentist”

(Both books are also available on bn.com and the Apple iBookstore.) 

For information on my private practice, click here.

Your ultimate goal? Something better. A place where you might actually do good. Few lawyers receive that opportunity. Many, exposed to goodness, would burst into flames.

That’s why you’re taking the high road, escaping the pervasive cynicism and greed. You’ve got your sights set on a not-for-profit institution, dedicated to the promise of a better tomorrow.

Will it work? Can a lawyer escape pervasive cynicism and greed?

Seems unlikely.

Let’s talk about the the not-for-profit track – its ups, downs and in-betweens.

Right off the bat, we have to discuss salary. I know – you want to escape all that – the obsession with filthy lucre. But there’s a stark reality you must grasp before reporting for duty at a not-for-profit: You will earn bupkis.

Maybe that’s okay with you – like Hebrew National, you answer to a higher authority. On the other hand, if – like most young lawyers – you’re sitting on a zillion dollars in bankruptcy-proof loans, an extended period of earning zilch could prove…inconvenient.

This aforesaid stark reality also explains one of the dirty little secrets of the not-for-profit world: It’s a magnet for rich kids. If Mom and Dad have already paid off the $200k you blew on an undergraduate degree and law school, then bought you the cutest little one-bedroom in Chelsea and a brand new Prius…well, the logical next step is to save the world. It’ll be fun!

Not-for-profits are bursting at the seams with eager-beaver trust-afarians – and it doesn’t stop there. Sometimes Mom and Dad (and their friends) sit on the board. Sometimes the charismatic founder and Executive Director is a grinning, twenty-something former college lacrosse star, just back from Burning Man. You can’t hold it against him if he wants to donate a snippet of grandaddy’s styrofoam factory fortune to making the world a better place. But his white-boy dread locks and penchant for calling you “bro” in the hallway make you wince.

I’m merely acknowledging a reality. It can grate a bit, in the not-for-profit world, if you’re not in possession of a trust fund. It can feel disempowering when the Director of the One Love Institute for International Human Rights flies business class to a conference in Burkina Faso on theories of poverty and doesn’t appear to grasp that her plane ticket could feed a village there for a year. It doesn’t help when, upon her return, as she’s hopping a flight to her family’s cottage on Martha’s Vineyard, she gushes about how she adores Coney Island – a topic you awkwardly brought up because that’s where you go to the beach, via subway.

The situation might not rise to the level of “class warfare,” but working with rich kids can grow annoying – and make almost anything other than working for rich kids start to seem not so bad.

Yes, your friends in biglaw are tormented by sadistic partners and slave night and day to do the bidding of plutocrats. Yes, they despise their lives.

On the other hand, associates in biglaw can afford to take cabs, have dry cleaning done, eat out in grown-up restaurants, and buy grown-up clothes. You can’t.

Typically, your great hope for financial salvation – if you’re at a not-for-profit and not-rich – is qualifying for a loan repayment program. The mission – if you decide to accept it – is to stay continuously un-gainfully employed and cope with life as a pauper for about a decade. If you make it, your loans disappear and you achieve every young lawyer’s ultimate dream – zero net worth.

Sounds good. But there’s a leap of faith implied in this set-up.

First, not-for-profit jobs are hard to snag. It doesn’t seem like they should be. These outfits pay next to nothing, and beggars can’t be choosers. They should be drooling at the prospect of hiring someone like you – and a few years ago, they might have been. Even with the rich kids, openings existed for talented young people bringing a wealth (of commitment) to the job. But the dynamics changed after the crash of ’08. Now half the profession is out of work, and it no longer requires much wheedling for biglaw to seduce its victims – they’re lining up for mistreatment like mendicants with bowls out. Yes, your peers – and you – are the beggars who can’t be choosing. Even a $45k not-for-profit job looks good, juxtaposed against living on the street.

Second, even if you can find a not-for-profit job, you have to manage to keep it, and not-for-profits rarely provide steady, reliable employment. As I understand it, you need at least three years at a not-for-profit to qualify for loan repayment. That can be tough to pull off. Over and above the issue of nasty office politics (i.e., it’s easy to get fired), there’s another factor: Not-for-profits are typically funded by grants, which run for a stated period. If the grant runs out, or the project is finished,  or there’s “mission drift,” or they decide to head in a different direction, or the weather turns rainy – you can wind up out of a job.

At that point, you join the miserable hordes of the lawyer-underemployed, which is all fine and good – misery loves company and, like everyone else, you can try to dig up some doc review work or give up on law and tend bar…except for that other factor: Your hopes for loan repayment are on the line.

To put matters baldly, if you bet all your chips on a not-for-profit (and loan repayment), you may find yourself up a creek in sore need of paddling apparatus.

At this point it’s worth addressing an even profounder question. If you can actually pull off the feat of situating yourself in a not-for-profit and live with the attendant financial risks, what will you actually be doing there?

That’s easy. Protecting the rights of the little people – the prisoners and the disabled and the schoolchildren from poor neighborhoods, the international victims of international human rights whatchamacallit – those people. In other words, you will be doing big things. Big, change-the-world things. That’s the best part of working in not-for-profit. Instead of writing a brief defending evil, polluting, discriminating, harassing mega-corporations, you write a brief for the good guys. That means a lot.

Unfortunately, it also raises a potential pitfall of the not-for-profit world – stupid ideas. Even when you mean well, and are working for the good guys, when you’re trying to accomplish big things and change the future of humanity, it’s possible to go off the rails. Every so often – and if you’ve worked in not-for-profit-land you know what I’m talking about – you get saddled with a truly misguided project. Once it’s funded – once someone’s written the thousand page grant proposal and (against the odds) won the grant – the whole thing is frozen in concrete. Even if it kinda doesn’t really make any sense.

That’s when you find yourself opening the outreach center in the neighborhood that doesn’t really need an outreach center – or searching for plaintiffs to defend the rights of people who have more serious rights to worry about defending, or don’t need to go to court to defend them since they’d be better off protesting or meeting with the appropriate people and working out a deal (lawyers don’t work out deals – they sue people.)

You have to do what it says in the grant. You can’t go to your boss and say this isn’t working, it doesn’t make sense. You have to shut up and do it. She probably knows it doesn’t make sense, just like you – but grants are what makes the wheels go round. Maybe she’s not a trust fund baby either and that grant for a misguided project is paying her rent.

Another not-so-inspiring situation arrives when the ideas aren’t stupid, but the clients are corrupt and awful. When you’re a public defender working with street criminals you can’t expect to like each and every client. But there’s something about working for peanuts and putting in long hours to lend your voice to a struggle – then finding out the person you’re struggling for is annoying or stupid or in it for the money and exploiting you. It can be a turn-off, and it happens. Not all the time – but it can be useful to admit, it happens.

All of this stuff contributes to a key attribute of not-for-profits. For want of a better word, I’ll term it bitchiness. Not-for-profits have a reputation for being…bitchy. I don’t mean that in a sexist sense – the men at not-for-profits are bitchy too.

Why are not-for-profits often such damned unpleasant places to work? It might be because everyone there is hungry for attention. After all – if you work at a not-for-profit, you possess some not-inconsiderable claim to sainthood. You’re ignoring the temptations of biglaw, with its fatcat salaries and fancy offices and black cars home at night. You’re working hard for almost nothing – sacrificing all because you care about the little people. If the world were a just place, someone should hand you a plaque. At least they could feature you in the donor newsletter.  But they didn’t. And that pisses you off. Because that other guy at your level, who hasn’t been there as long, got in the newsletter. Which is why you hate him.

It can get to you, working for the good of the planet with no one paying attention. Your Executive Director is a community hero – the focus of a stream of accolades. But you’ve seen her in action, and everyone knows she’s a useless, spoiled princess…

Welcome to not-for-profit bitchery. It resides in a league all its own.

And don’t think the usual office bullshit – sexual harassment, competitiveness, interdepartmental chill – doesn’t exist at not-for-profits. It only grows more intense, and snippier, in these claustrophobic confines. There are times when everyone there seems to have gone martyr at once, and you wish you could go “for-profit,” double all their salaries and tell them to knock it off with the whining.

Not-for-profit administration is typically a nightmare. That’s because no one wants to be the admin at a not-for-profit. They want to save the world – not manage the budget and benefits and vacation schedules and ordering office supplies and making sure the mail server is working. If you want to do that stuff for a living, you’re probably already doing it at a for-profit company and earning more.

To heighten the delights, not-for-profits compete with one another like sons of bitches, and they’re all fighting for the same dollars. If someone manages to do something major – win a case or get some piece of legislation passed, then everyone else swoops in to gobble up the credit, like sharks feasting on a bait ball.

Then there are the donors – the real bosses. I remember my summer at the Gay and Lesbian Rights Project at the ACLU, circa 1995. Word had it Barbara Streisand’s assistant phoned in each week for a lengthy personal update from the Executive Director.  Babs was paying the bills, so Babs got a personal update.  At least Yoko Ono and Phil Donahue laid low after cutting their checks.

Raising money is the raison d’etre for not-for-profits. Without the money, there is no institution – the cart is placed firmly in front of the horse. Everything – everything – becomes about appearances. If you do something impressive, you have to convert it into marketing materials and flood the airwaves with it to raise cash. If something doesn’t pan out – a project turns out to be useless or misguided – well, you still have to make it look impressive and heroic and world-changing. You have no choice. It’s that – or everyone’s out of a job.

Yes, there are committed people out there doing good, and enjoying fulfilling careers working at not-for-profits.

But the not-for-profit world isn’t an all-purpose answer to the problem of unhappy lawyers. It presents challenges of its own. You might find yourself gazing wistfully at the other, for-profit side of the fence, where the grass begins to assume a verdant hue.
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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, Way Worse Than Being A Dentist: The Lawyer’s Quest for Meaning

I also heartily recommend my first book, an introduction to the concepts behind psychotherapy, Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy

(Both books are also available on bn.com and the Apple iBookstore.) 

I conjure a map from blank parchment.  It returns the favor – conjuring a New World from my collected observations, and serving as a trusty guide.  The expanse charted in shorthand on the map permits me to “rack focus” (as they say in film-making) – alter my gaze to take a fresh perspective, observe an unaccustomed vista. The map, as it develops, assumes a shape of its own.  Disparate regions are drawn together by common threads – the length of a river’s course, a shared coastline or mountain range.  My attention drifts to objects on the edges of boundaries, features I might have missed.  The elusive “big picture” – awareness, the ultimate goal in psychotherapy – begins to coalesce.

The first step in the process comes as a question, from the therapist.  The phrasing of that “first question” gets debated when therapists gather.  I trained with a colleague who invariably asked the same thing at each first session:  “So what brings you here today?”  That feels twisty and indirect to me.  I usually start with “So how are you?” or, depending on my mood, or yours, “So how’s it going?”  Sometimes there’s serious upset taking place in the here and now, that needs attending to right away.  Before I sketch the background – the mountains and the sea and the rivers – I need to know if there’s a battle occurring on that stony plain, a castle under siege, a forest caught fire.

This is an historical map.  I am mapping a quest – an epic voyage.  You are the hero. Ours will be the sort of map with crossed swords to mark battlefields and mythic beasts to guard those unexplored zones at the edges of awareness.

The first question doesn’t matter much, because your unconscious feelings function like a compass.  Wherever you start, you’ll find yourself where you need to be.

I have a good sense of direction, too.  If I sense we’re drifting off-course, I’ll lean my elbow on the tiller.

Your compass is guided by emotion, drawn to it as to a magnetic pole.  If I detect an increase in feeling, I might grow cautious, slow our pace and sniff the breeze, comb the sky for a cynosure – fear, anger, sadness, hurt.  Emotions guide our way.

A primary goal is to map the kingdom in which you were born and raised, to appraise its sovereign, and the manner of his rule.

Who was the elusive Wizard in your childhood kingdom?  How did one attain his Emerald City to beg an audience?  Why were witches left free to wreak havoc in the land?  When did you notice the man behind the curtain, operating levers and dials?

A good fantasy novel includes a map, preferably printed or folded behind the front and back covers.  A superior work of fantasy transports you someplace new, a land that grows familiar as you explore and memorize the features printed on that geographical survey.  It becomes, in time, an atlas to your imagination.

Children love maps and fantasy and the promise of magic, and they live within a world resembling the worlds depicted in those maps.  Everything is new to a child – they are small, helpless voyagers, stumbling upon all that’s around them for the first time.  A child comprehends there are vast reaches he has never explored –  mysteries he has yet to fathom.

Your first kingdom may have encompassed, as mine did, half a dozen front- and backyards in a suburban enclave.  One of your first acts may have been to  map these surroundings in your imagination.  Perhaps your private demesne included a series of trails through an empty lot where you played, or the path back to a dam you once constructed in a creek in the woods, or a mystifying secret passage around a wooden fence and under a hedge that magically linked two otherwise unrelated ball fields.  A wonder and a mystery.  Children start early with cartography – it is a in-born trait, an instinct innate to our species.

As you study a map, you wonder.  What is that place like?  What does it feel like to stand there and look around, to wake up in that city, to gaze from that prominence up at the nighttime sky?

In psychotherapy, I examine your personal map, pose those questions, and ask them of myself.

What was it like to live in your child-world?  How did it shape your expectations?  Do you rely still upon that map, even living elsewhere and in a different time?  Do the traces of a lost world remain, like ruins beneath the dust you tread, a palimpsest, guiding your passage in unfelt ways?

We construct a map, together.

Familiarity dulls a map-maker’s art.  You cannot accurately map your own backyard after too long a stay in the same house.  You must stand outside and recall its outlines.  You require a new perspective and fresh eyes or you’ll miss the details.

Imagine you are riding in a street car in a strange city, describing what you see into a cell phone.  The person on the other end knows the city well – and he is trying to discern, from your naive descriptions, where you must be – the buildings and shops and corners and streetlights and signs enciphered by a foreign tongue that glide past – groping for a landmark to anchor his mental sketch of your surroundings.

Someone related that image to me as a metaphor for psychotherapy – I don’t remember who.  He said it could be credited to Freud.

I don’t know if I agree with it entirely.  Can I truly recognize the landscape of your human journey, sufficiently that, if you provide me a description of where you are, I can place you on a familiar map?  Perhaps.

But the sense of dislocation rings true.  The sense of being lost, struggling to find your way by discerning details around you and relating them to an outsider.

In psychotherapy, we grope in the dark, you and I, on a linked journey.

You have to get lost to arrive someplace new.

Keep talking.  You’ll find your way.

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If you’re interested in learning more about the scientific and philosophical underpinnings of psychotherapy, you might enjoy my first book, “Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy”

My second book takes a humorous look at the current state of the legal profession, “Way Worse Than Being A Dentist”

(Both books are also available on bn.com and the Apple iBookstore.) 

For information on my private practice, click here.

The standard story is some variant of the following: You are either out of work or loathe your work. You have $180k in loans. You have either no income or an impermanent income paid to you in exchange for any joy life might offer. You see no hope.

Let me spell out the critical element here: You are one hundred and eighty thousand dollars in debt.

Just to fully drive the point home: that’s bankruptcy-proof debt.

You’ve yelled at your parents, but it’s not really their fault. You’ve wept and wailed and gotten drunk and stoned and consumed a script of Xanax. You’ve tried sleeping and pretending you don’t have to wake up.

Then comes the pilgrimage. Perhaps I can heal with a laying on of hands.

Okay, here’s the feedback I’ll receive for what I’ve written so far:

You’re exaggerating. You’re bringing me down. Law isn’t so bad. I love law.

Yeah, well good for you. I’m not exaggerating.

It’s their own damn fault. No one made them go to law school.

Yes. They. Did. Stop kidding yourself – the entire system is engineered to lead smart, conscientious kids exactly where it leads them. And get off it already with the no sympathy/blame the victim routine.

How bad are things? How many times can I pose that (at this point rhetorical) question?

Young lawyers look me in the eye and ask, how am I supposed to carry on with my life? What they mean is – how is one supposed to live a life worth living – a life that satisfies one as a human being – trapped in the hell of law and law school loans?

Sometime, I ask them what they would be doing with their lives, if they didn’t have loans. Here are some of their answers:

Teach yoga and healthy nutrition.

Play drums.

Become a park ranger.

Design clothes.

Open a bluegrass bar.

Write a science fiction trilogy.

Open an antiques store.

Become a family therapist.

Work in a bakery.

Study Marine Biology.

These answers shouldn’t surprise anyone. Young lawyers – like most young people – yearn to take a risk on something mad, creative and unknown. To learn something new. To follow a passion. But you can’t pursue those things – or, at least, it’s darn tough – when a bank is dunning you for a missed interest payment.

What can you do to escape the debt trap? I keep fielding that question. I still don’t have a decent answer.

You could try to find a day job – something bearable that will permit you to pay the minimum on your loans for the next 30 years, and still live a meaningful life. Can it be done? Maybe. It tends to boil down to concentrating on hobbies while working your way through a string of mind-numbing legal gigs (often doc review.) That might work, so long as mind-numbing legal gigs (often doc review) remain available.

Some of my clients reject the day job route. They insist the loans can never be paid – to do so would consume a lifetime, and in the attempt, you’d lose years better spent building a meaningful existence. I’ve met lawyers who plan to move abroad where the banks can’t find them. Others talk about going underground – staying in the USA, but relocating with no forwarding address so they can work under the table or using an assumed name.

It’s amazing, but true – the law school loan nightmare is turning American kids into the equivalent of undocumented aliens. Remember those “Dream Act” kids, the American 20-somethings who, after living in the USA since infancy, have to hide in the shadows thanks to vicious anti-immigrant laws? They’ve got company – young lawyers hiding from banks thanks to vicious bankruptcy laws.

For better or worse, I’m a psychotherapist. I’m not an expert in hiding from governments or banks. I have no advice to provide in that department.

So, the pilgrims ask – what’s left? What can I do that might make a difference?

In this respect, they sound like my online comment-writers, who are typically blunter:

All you do is natter on and on – bashing law. You’re like a broken record. If it’s really so bad, then how about providing answers?

Everyone wants an answer.

Well, okay. Here’s an answer. I call it the “It Gets Worse” Project.

Dan Savage responded to the suicides of LGBT kids by creating the “It Gets Better” Project. You post YouTube videos telling kids what they need to know: if you survive the homophobic hell of high school, it gets better – being LGBT can be fun.

The “It Gets Worse” Project performs the same service for young people at risk of career-suicide. You post YouTube videos telling kids what they need to know: if you survive the hell of law school, it gets worse – debt-slavery sucks.

Is this project going to help you? No, it’s too late for that. It might make you feel better, but the plan is to protect young people’s lives from the law school loan racket. That’s something. It could make a difference.

Ready to post a video?

It wouldn’t take much – you know what to do. For about five minutes, you tell the truth.

Do I expect a lawyer to take that risk? I’m not betting the farm on it. A proposal for forthright candor in a public forum appears unlikely to take the legal world by storm. Look up “lawyer” in the dictionary. The entry reads: “risk-averse.”

Still… it could happen. Here’s why: Sometimes you have nothing to lose. That’s when the impossible happens, and change becomes inevitable.

Last year I told a guy at the Occupy Wall Street protest I admired his courage for camping in the cold to make a point about social inequality. His reply said everything: “I haven’t got a choice, friend.” He believed our society was way off course, and only way to correct it was to be where he was, doing what he was doing.

That conversation took me back to the 1980′s, and the ACT-UP protests. Americans were dying of AIDS by the tens of thousands, while the government mostly ignored it. (Ronald Reagan memorably refused to utter the word, “AIDS,” for most of his presidency.) For better or worse, my friends in ACT-UP had nothing to lose. They refused to die quietly, and insisted on telling the truth, in hopes of saving lives.

When you have nothing to lose, you stop being so damned risk-averse.

There’s a growing population of lawyers with nothing to lose. It’s not like there are jobs out there for kids with so-so grades from so-so law schools with no experience and eighteen months of unemployment on their resume (which describes the majority of young lawyers.) Maybe you’re damned if you do…but you’re already damned if you don’t, so who gives a damn anyway?

Ergo, let’s do something. Let’s prevent more naïve young people from falling victim to the same scam that left you in this mess.

If you lack the chutzpah to post a personal video – how about a collective one, like those “corporate” videos inspired by “It Gets Better”? How about a “Survivors of Sullivan & Cromwell” It Gets Worse video? (Let me know – I’ll be there.) Maybe “Unemployed Doc Reviewers of Los Angeles” or “Unemployed Graduates of New York Law School”? Maybe the “We Owe Over Two Hundred Grand Club”? Use your imagination.

If someone somewhere summons the moxie to post an “It Gets Worse” video, the movement could gather steam. That could lead to further direct action against the fraud being perpetrated by law schools. I envision tuition strikes, mass drop-outs, maybe an “Occupy Law School” movement. The little Michael Moore in me would glow with pride.

I’d settle for a video. A voyage of a thousand miles begins with a single footstep…yadda yadda. C’mon, people – we’re talking about crying “Stop!” before another youngster blithely signs another loan for another sixty grand and in the process wrecks his future.

You did everything you were told and played it safe. Look where it got you. Take a risk for a change – speak the truth.
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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, Way Worse Than Being A Dentist: The Lawyer’s Quest for Meaning

I also heartily recommend my first book, an introduction to the concepts behind psychotherapy, Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy

(Both books are also available on bn.com and the Apple iBookstore.) 

This is the situation: my boyfriend of three years is an overachiever. He attended the best schools and now works in NYC. He’s in finance, from his personal office he sees most of Central Park, and I love him very much. As for me, I am currently studying for the Bar Exam. I’ll probably pass, but it’s not like I’m very confident about it. I do not have either the background or the grades to make it to a big law firm, and I am uncertain about what to do with my career. When I’m with my boyfriend, I can’t help but to compare my situation with his, and even though I don’t want to admit it, I’m jealous. My boyfriend never pressured me, and he is 100% behind me, but I still feel like a loser. How to deal then when people in your entourage succeed and you feel you’re the only one having to catch up?

Thank you, S

And here’s my response:

To submit a question to Ask The People’s Therapist, please email it as text or a video to: wmeyerhofer@aquietroom.com

If I answer your question on the site, you’ll win a free session of psychotherapy with The People’s Therapist.
========

If you’re interested in learning more about the scientific and philosophical underpinnings of psychotherapy, you might enjoy my first book, “Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy”

My second book takes a humorous look at the current state of the legal profession, “Way Worse Than Being A Dentist”

(Both books are also available on bn.com and the Apple iBookstore.) 

For information on my private practice, click here.

Aspirational purchase meant you bought the book not because you were going to read it, but because you aspired to read it. You might even convince yourself you were going to – but in all likelihood it would serve as a pretentious coffee table tchotchke, an impressive (if un-cracked) spine on a decorative bookshelf, or a useful device to prop up a little kid’s butt so he could reach the cranberry sauce at Thanksgiving.

An aspirational purchase is intended to impress – you want to be seen buying it. It tends to be something conservative as well. And long. And difficult. “War and Peace” is the classic aspirational purchase, but you might also pick up something with a political message that makes you look wise and open-minded, like “The Satanic Verses” (which, for the record, I actually read.) (No, I’ve never plumbed War and Peace. However, I embrace the fact that plenty of you certainly have read it and, yes, loved it and desire for me to acknowledge you’ve read it and how much you loved it – to which I reply, in advance, how very nice for you.)

Law school is an aspirational purchase.

You choose law because it’s more impressive than an internship or “assistant” job – which is how you’d have to start out in an ordinary career. With law you jump directly to the land of the grown-ups without passing Go. From the moment you graduate, you have a “profession.” That means (at least in theory) you wear a suit and people take you seriously. You’re an “attorney” – not someone’s assistant.

Law is conservative, too. It’s about the least imaginative thing you could do. A law degree establishes (at least in theory) that you are serious and focused and down-to-business. No more staying up all night partying for you. It’s time to retire that giant plastic bong with the “Steal Your Face” decals and step up to adulthood, dude.

Law is also difficult – or it appears difficult – an interminable slog through tedious lectures and exams, culminating in the bar exam – a difficult, interminable slog that exists for no reason other than the apparent requirement that there be a difficult, interminable slog at the end of a difficult interminable slog.

You can wrap also yourself up in saving the world, as a lawyer – or attempt to. I used to assure people my destiny was to become a “civil rights lawyer.” That lasted one year – until the ACLU lawyer at my summer internship told me I needed “big firm” experience. (This was not heartbreaking news; my classmates were stampeding to big firms and the thought of the money produced an instant adrenaline rush.)

Book stores love aspirational purchases. The books themselves are all the same – “classics” or merely obvious choices no one so much reads as aspires to read. Delightfully – from the marketer’s point of view – buyers seldom grasp that giant, fancy editions of books like “War and Peace” can be printed in quantity for next to nothing, especially because most of these titles reside in the public domain. But you can charge a lot, since they look thick and impressive, especially if you bind them in leather with gold print to produce something Alistair Cooke might clutch while introducing Masterpiece Thee-ah-tuh.

A law degree, similarly, costs next to nothing to manufacture. The “product” a law school shills consists of standardized lectures any lawyer could deliver in his sleep, coupled with the systematic grading of a pile of exams. There’s no originality involved. I haven’t practiced law in more than a decade, but I’m confident I could deliver a Contracts lecture tomorrow to a hall filled with bored 1L’s and they’d never notice the difference. Just give me a store-bought outline and a half hour to refresh my memory.

Law schools are cheap and easy to run, but the top ones (and many non-top ones) charge over $50,000 per year for tuition, room and board. As a rough calculation, if law school ran all year long, that would be nearly $1,000 per week. Since it actually only runs about 8 months of the year, let’s say law school costs around $1,400 per week. If you have seven lectures per week, that means you’re paying $200 per lecture.

Two hundred dollars per lecture. Roughly one hundred dollars per hour to sit drowsing with one hundred other weary souls, each of whom is also paying one hundred dollars per hour for the privilege.

That’s obscene – a bit like charging someone $35 for a fancy-looking leather edition of a public domain chestnut like War and Peace that costs $3.25 in paper, ink and delivery charges.

Who would be fool enough to buy it?

Well, it’s an aspirational purchase.

At New York Law School – hardly a first-tier operation, and typical as law schools go – an average student graduates with $125k in debt. They recently expanded the size of their classes. No wonder they’ve built a shiny new building and boast one of the top ten endowments in the country. They are earning mad bank – but it’s blood money, since their graduates wind up jobless and in debt up to their eyebrows. One of my clients spotted a notice recently on an ad for paralegal positions: “No J.D.’s.”

Yeah – it’s that bad.

Aspirational purchases – whether “War & Peace” or law school – are a rip-off, because the buyer doesn’t know what he’s buying. He acts on impulse, and chases an aspiration – a fantasy – rather than reality.

You aren’t going to get around to reading “War and Peace” someday when you retire. If you didn’t get to it in college, then sorry, that massive Russian tome from the 19^th century isn’t going to get read by you or anyone you know, any more than that law degree is going to earn you a massive salary – or prove “versatile” if you decide not to practice. Those are fantasies.

Aspirational purchases are usually “point of sale” items. You stack them up near the cash registers, so buyers, who are especially impulsive when bored and waiting in a lengthy queue, are liable to toss it in at the last moment. Hmmm…you ponder, standing in line holding the latest Stephen King…there’s “The Selected Poems of Robert Browning”…and there’s “The Tibetan Book of the Dead” and there’s a Dove Raspberry and Dark Chocolate Swirl Bar. Why not grab all three, while I’m here – just in case?

That’s called an “up-sell” and it’s what marketing is all about. Some clever marketing exec (like me) just convinced you (semi-consciously) to buy not merely what you actually wanted (the Stephen King), but a whole bunch of additional junk you neither want nor need.

Law school is also a point of sale item. Your early twenties resemble the checkout line. You’re out of college and killing time, unsure what you’re really looking for (besides a little romance, some excitement and a way to pay the bills.) You’re impulsive, and tend to make big mistakes because you want to do something – anything – and it seems important to get started right away. Law school sits there, staring at you, until you think – hmmm, I wonder if that would work…it’s something to do…

For the record, when I went to law school, I possessed no inkling what a “civil rights lawyer” did, or was. After my primary goal mutated into becoming a “corporate lawyer” (i.e., making money) I had even less idea what I was getting myself into. How did I pick corporate? Simple. Litigation seemed a non-starter, because I hated Civ Pro and loathe arguing. Corporate – whatever it was – was the remaining option. I had the vague sense I’d end up with a BMW and a secretary.

I repeat: I had no idea – none – what a “corporate lawyer” did. It sounded cool, and I wanted the money. The rest I’d figure out when the time came.

That, in a nutshell, defines an aspirational purchase: I grabbed something on impulse because I thought it sounded cool.

Do not do as I have done. Take your time. Figure out who you are, and what you want.

Aspirational purchases are a scam. Leave them behind, for suckers who don’t know any better.
========

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, Way Worse Than Being A Dentist: The Lawyer’s Quest for Meaning

I also heartily recommend my first book, an introduction to the concepts behind psychotherapy, Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy

(Both books are also available on bn.com and the Apple iBookstore.) 

There’s room for argument, but so far as I’m concerned, there are two chief meanings.

The first is a bit technical.  It means I integrate the two leading schools of psychotherapy – psychodynamic and cognitive-behavioral – into one eclectic approach.

Huh?

You can think of the two schools as vertical versus horizontal.

Psychodynamic work is vertical.  It involves digging down into your past, looking for the root sources of your behaviors.  When I work psychodynamically, I’m wondering when you started thinking or feeling a certain way.  I want to make you aware of how the environment in which you grew up shaped the person you are.

If you always seem to expect honesty to be received with punishment, and so avoid telling people what you really think, I’ll wonder where that pattern started.  Maybe you had a punishing parent, who responded harshly to being told the truth because she had trouble tolerating the reality of a situation.  You may have observed that response to you when you were a kid, spotted a feedback loop of sorts (telling truth = bad response), and formed expectations.  These expectations let you to adapt a strategy for survival (avoid telling truth = avoid bad response.)  These sorts of strategies – learned behaviors – may continue to take over unconsciously today and lead you to sabotage your conscious goals in life.  To address that situation, you need to understand where and when they started, so you can decide if you’d like to abandon learned behaviors which have become maladaptive to your life as an adult.

Cognitive-behavioral work, in contrast,  is horizontal.  I’m not so worried about the source of the behavior – I’m dealing with the here and now, trying to make you more conscious of your current thoughts and how they’re controlling your actions.

If you have a phobia about flying in airplanes, I will likely employ cognitive-behavioral techniques to make you conscious of the thoughts – predictions – that are frightening you.  These thoughts are like tapes that play in your head – if you become aware of them, you can turn them off, and play another tape that will soothe you instead of freaking you out.

You might have a fear of plunging from a great height if a plane crashes.  Once you understand that thought, you can reality-test it.  Yes, it could happen that you would plunge in a plane accident, but it is exceedingly unlikely, since you’d most likely die quickly or fall unconscious – and in any case, it might be a risk worth taking, once you balance the enormous benefits of air travel against the very small risks of a crash.   You could learn to formulate counter-messages to address frightening thoughts, perhaps something like “I’ve chosen to take a tiny risk because I want to see the world.  I’m okay with that small risk, and can relax now and accept that I cannot control everything, and there is risk involved in all aspects of life – risk that need not lock me up in fear.”

Some psychotherapists – especially in the past – fought over the superiority of psychodynamic versus cognitive-behavioral approaches.  That’s mostly old-hat at this point.  The two techniques are considered tools in a toolbox – options for treatment, depending on what the therapist thinks is most likely to be effective and useful for the individual client in question.  They are often complementary – two great psychotherapeutic approaches that taste great together.

Modern psychotherapy at its best is integrative, and eager to accept diverse, worthy approaches.  Speaking for myself – I’ll use anything that works and helps my clients.

The second meaning of “integrative” with regard to psychotherapy refers to the greater purpose of the entire exercise – to integrate the unconscious into the conscious ego.

Huh?

You were once a child, and you obeyed adults – probably your parents – who taught you “right” from “wrong.”

Nowadays you are an adult – or you live consciously as an adult.  But within you there is still that little child, and he can take over sometimes, when you are under stress and “regress” into earlier patterns of behavior.

Think of the time you were stressed out and lost your temper.  Or you weren’t thinking and gave in to an impulse to eat a huge ice cream cone.

That’s not the conscious adult acting – that’s the child taking over.

Similarly, the parent voices you grew up with can take over when you’re not paying attention.  These can be punishing voices that tell you no one at the party will like you, or that you should just shut up because no one wants to hear what you think.  You may have heard these voices when you were very young – and they started playing in your head on their own.  Now, if you’re not paying attention, you might let them control your behavior.  That might be the voice that keeps you too scared to open your mouth at a business meeting, or shuts you down at a social event.

In psychotherapy, we aim to make the child’s voice and the parent’s voice conscious, so you know they’re there – and you know what they’re saying.  You hear them – and put them into words, speaking them aloud in the therapy room.  At that point, they become part of your conscious world – something you can examine in an aware, rational way, and decide how to handle, perhaps by choosing to heed an old voice, or cast its message aside and move in a new direction.

Once the unconscious has percolated up into the conscious realm, it can be integrated into your aware self.

That way you can be your “best self” – your fully-aware, fully-conscious, most authentic self – the person you truly are and want to be.

Voila!  Living consciously.  Discovering your best self.  The ultimate goals of integrative psychotherapy.
========

If you’re interested in learning more about the scientific and philosophical underpinnings of psychotherapy, you might enjoy my first book, “Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy”

My second book takes a humorous look at the current state of the legal profession, “Way Worse Than Being A Dentist”

(Both books are also available on bn.com and the Apple iBookstore.) 

For information on my private practice, click here.

I told her to calculate the return on investment for the final three semesters.

She crunched the numbers.

“Debit-wise, I’ve burned $80k in savings and I’m looking at another $100k of borrowed money. On the credit side, I might find a low-salary doc review gig.” She pretended to scratch notes. “So… big loans, interest payments, inadequate cash flow…opportunity cost of eighteen more wasted months learning legal mumbo-jumbo followed by the bar exam…”

“In other words…” I egged her on.

“I’d be totally screwed.” She affixed the cap on her pen. “Thanks. I’m convinced.”

I posed the question we were dancing around: “Why are we having this conversation?”

My client laid out the background: “My dad’s a lawyer. My mom’s a lawyer. My little brother’s taking his LSAT. This is what my family does. If I quit, I feel like I’m failing.”

She added: “It seems like it was different in my parents’ day.”

That’s because it was. A generation gap has opened in the legal world. On one side there are lawyers over-50, for whom law still looks like a safe, reliable ladder to the upper-middle-class. From the other side – where their kids are perched – law more closely resembles un ascenseur pour l’échafaud.

My client’s parents live in a time warp – a world trapped in a snow globe. Mom’s worked for 25 years as an in-house lawyer for a state college – safe, not terribly stressful (or interesting) work, with a decent salary, good hours and benefits. Dad’s worked for decades as general counsel for a local business. It’s no wonder that for them – and their generation – law still epitomizes a safe, low-stress career with good pay and benefits.

These over-50 types can’t imagine how bad it gets nowadays for someone calling himself an attorney. Their Weltanschauung doesn’t encompass windowless warehouses packed with contract lawyers logging 18-hour shifts of doc review for hourly wages, no benefits. Mom and Dad haven’t seen young partners at top firms getting de-equitized and struggling to snare in-house positions. If they knew that reality, they’d also realize their own sort of safe, steady work with benefits, a decent wage and reasonable hours constitutes a pipe dream for a kid graduating law school today.

Another client of mine – a 20-something from a decent school entering her third year in biglaw – summed up her reality thus:

“Really? I spent myself into life-long debt, endured hours of property law lectures, analyzed Erie problems on brutal exams, crammed for the bar…all so I could waste two years on doc review, then wait to get laid off (with the de rigueur bad review and zero career prospects) so someone younger and cheaper can take my seat? Really?”

If she’d studied computer science, or gotten an MBA or just quit school after college, she might have become a better-paid “e-discovery provider.” As a JD, it’s strictly “e-discovery peon.” In any case, five years from now a computer program will do doc review all by itself. As one client put it: “that’s when attorneys start living in cardboard boxes on the sidewalk.”

This isn’t your grandfather’s biglaw.

It’s astonishing, the degree to which misguided Ozzie and Harriet nostalgia still convinces’ parents to pour money into law school – and only law school – for their kids. They steer their kids towards law at the expense of other degrees – any other degree – which might lead to an actual future. It’s lunacy – but I see it all the time.

One client’s father insisted he would pay his son’s tuition – but not for urban planning, only law. The kid had to get a “practical” degree, that “guaranteed him a future.” It took this twenty-something a year – with his shiny new $180,000 JD – to score a low-paying six-month fellowship at a not-for-profit. Six months later – one day for every thousand dollars his father blew on this “practical” degree – he’s back on the street, scratching for whatever he can find, which is to say, not much.

Another client’s rich uncle wouldn’t consider funding his nephew’s start-up – just law school. No wild-eyed schemes for uncle – he wanted the safe route to success for his young charge. But the kid wasn’t naïve – he saw his friends graduate from law school with zero prospects and wanted none of it. On the other hand, given uncle’s obduracy, he had no choice. The kid finally took the tuition and used his law school dorm as an office for his start-up.  After the first month or two he gave up on Law entirely, and started cutting classes. He got kicked out after a few months, but the plan worked – uncle has plenty of money, and the kid  got a few months free rent for a place to live and an office for the new business (which is progressing nicely and may soon turn a profit.)

There’s still a generation out there that thinks “safe, reliable…” and – don’t laugh – “worth the money” when they hear “law school.” These folks cling to the notion that it’s reasonable to expect your children to do what they did: finish law school, put time in at a firm, and settle into upper-middle-class contentment. It’s no different from the smug Tea Party graybeards who protest “big government handouts” while luxuriating in Medicare. If you grew up amid – and still enjoy – abundance and opportunity, it’s tough to grasp the reality of a new, younger generation for whom health insurance – and a steady job – are aspirational goals.

The generation gap in the legal world is symptomatic of a larger malady. The US has become a nation defined by the ever-widening gulf between rich and poor. The wedge creating that gulf is the collapse of social mobility. As Sarah Palin might say: How’s that “American Dream” thing workin’ out for you?

Not so good.

Even at the top – the elite biglaw shops – there’s a change. These institutions aren’t merely hierarchical anymore, as in a pyramid of command. At this point, it’s more like aristocrats and serfs. The aristocrats are the one’s with the ear of the king – the client – the Mr. One-Percenter with billions who generates business.

In the old days, if you lacked polished manners and connections with the super-wealthy, you might have become a “service partner.” Nowadays, they’re a dying breed. Good lawyers are a dime a dozen, and with more money concentrated in the hands of ever-fewer ultra-rich clients, you can either bring in a big fish, or you are expendable.

As one of my clients put it: “If you’re coming from a lower middle-class background, like me, you’re never going to fit in at my firm, because you’re never going to bring in any work.” She’s shy and bookish, and grew up in the Mid-West without much money. That never used to be a problem – she’s entirely professional and a fine lawyer. But no more.

The other day a partner at her firm proposed she learn to play golf. “He said it would help me ‘nurture client contacts’. Can you see me playing golf? I grew up in Nebraska. ‘Schmoozing’ meant knitting sweaters and baking pies for church socials.”

Back when the USA wasn’t owned by Super-PACs (thank you, US Supreme Court!), the practice of law – like medicine and other professions – was an engine of social mobility. You could work your way up as a lawyer and lift yourself out of the blue-collar world. Now firms are returning to their old role as closed preserves of the elite, resting atop sweatshops populated by disempowered laborers – just as our country as a whole is returning to its Gilded Age status as a plutocracy of billionaire monopolists.

How much have things changed? Earning a JD nowadays is typically an express train back into poverty – real poverty, as in worrying about a place to live and food to eat. Massive loans that are not dischargeable in bankruptcy are no joke, and while Law may no longer be a ladder to the upper-middle class, it can be (while I’m mixing metaphors) the empty elevator shaft you hurtle down on the way to the bottom: a new, professional-degree-bearing underclass. If you owe $180k of non-dischargeable debt and are out of work with little or no income, you disappear off the social map. You experience indentured servitude – what the esteemed sociologist and Harvard professor, Orlando Patterson, terms “social death.” His book on the topic is entitled “Slavery and Social Death.” If you don’t even have a job, you’re not even an indentured servant: You’re more like an outlaw.

If you manage to squeeze into a top Ivy League school – and somehow find the money to pay for it – then adapt to life with the elites, you might rise to riches like the hero of a Horatio Alger story. You might also win the Super Lotto – they both happen, but most commonly to people you hear about, not to you.

Otherwise, if you really want to borrow a small fortune and blow three years of your life on law school, prepare for horrors out of the Nineteenth Century. That was the last time our social safety net frayed this badly, making it frighteningly possible for just about anyone to fall into the terrible gap between this nation’s naïve view of itself – and a far harsher reality.
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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, Way Worse Than Being A Dentist: The Lawyer’s Quest for Meaning

I also heartily recommend my first book, an introduction to the concepts behind psychotherapy, Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy

(Both books are also available on bn.com and the Apple iBookstore.) 

Hi Will,

I really enjoy reading your blog, you give great insight. I have often been told that I need to focus (I do not have ADHD or any other attention disorder).My problem or what others see as a problem is that I tend have a large array of interests and life goals that are not necessarily connected for which I have much passion. There so many things I want to do, but the older I get the more I feel like everyone is right. I need to pick an area or two at most on which to focus. I have heard the arguments for and against the jack of all trades approach to life, but I am still not sold. I don’t want to focus; I want to do it all. I am I being overly idealistic? Is it necessary for one to focus on their energy on one specific passion? If so, how does one decide how to go about focusing their energy on something specific?

-DH

And here’s my response:

To submit a question to Ask The People’s Therapist, please email it as text or a video to: wmeyerhofer@aquietroom.com

If I answer your question on the site, you’ll win a free session of psychotherapy with The People’s Therapist.
========

If you’re interested in learning more about the scientific and philosophical underpinnings of psychotherapy, you might enjoy my first book, “Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy”

My second book takes a humorous look at the current state of the legal profession, “Way Worse Than Being A Dentist”

(Both books are also available on bn.com and the Apple iBookstore.) 

For information on my private practice, click here.

It happens. People forget things. Best to err on the safe side, and use a checklist.

The idea comes from aircraft pilots. It turns out they use checklists for absolutely everything – a pilot literally can’t step into a plane without a checklist. Pre-take-off, take-off, pre-landing, landing, and every possible contingency that might happen in-between is assigned a checklist. That’s because when you’re a pilot and you forget something, well…it can be a problem. Kind of like a surgeon.

Or a lawyer.

This isn’t exactly a new idea. The first thing I received at Sullivan & Cromwell when I arrived there was a checklist – and my first task was to start ticking off items. That’s how you handle a corporate deal closing – otherwise you’d never keep track of all the officer’s certificates and securities certificates and side agreements and various other bits of paper required for that six hundred million dollar acquisition of the rubber plant in Brazil (or whatever.) If you’re the junior associate and you forget something that needs to be on a closing table, well… it can be a problem.

But there’s another surprising finding in Gawande’s new book, “The Checklist Manifesto.” One required item on pilots’ checklists simply instructs them to stop and introduce themselves. During that process, they explain their responsibilities to one another, including any pertinent details regarding that specific flight. It sounds like this:

“Hi, I’m Tyrone Harris, and I’ll be pilot in control of the aircraft today for a flight to Madison on this Airbus A330-200 leaving from La Guardia airport. Weather conditions are normal but there may be some turbulence as we arrive in Madison. In case of an emergency, our initial response will be to land at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey. In case of any later unexpected event, we will be communicating directly with flight control in Columbus, Ohio for instructions.”

“I’m Norma Wong, and I’ll be the co-pilot today. I acknowledge that we are flying from La Guardia to Madison and have also acknowledged the weather conditions and our emergency plans for this flight.”

(I made all that up – I don’t know anything about flying airplanes, but you get the idea.)

Gawande translated this all-important step – the introduction and role explanation – into his checklist for surgery. Each member of the operating room staff introduces him or herself to everyone else, reviews what they are doing there that day – the nature of the operation, the name of the patient, any issues or complications that might arise and what they’ll need to know in advance to handle them.

According to Gawande, this process requires only a few minutes, and is the most important step on the entire checklist – or any checklist of this type. Its importance begins with the simple process of having the members of a team introduce themselves to one another before they begin working on a shared task. Merely knowing the names of the people you’re working with has been shown to improve the quality of the work and satisfaction of the workers in an operating room. It’s that simple – learning one another’s names and reviewing what you are doing and establishing that you are all on the same base. It’s not rocket science.

I’ve been mulling this over, and it occurs to me lawyers don’t do this. Any of it.

I remember getting “assigned” to a deal at S&C. The process was thus: the dreaded phone call arrived, you answered, and some partner you didn’t know told you to call a senior associate you didn’t know because you were on his deal. You hung up, and called the senior. He told you to come to his office, where he hunkered amid towering heaps of documents. He handed you a pile of paper and grunted an order – “take a look at this crap and make a list of blah…” or “go to the library and try to figure out what the fuck a blah is,” or the ever-dreaded “go back to your office and plan for late nights for the foreseeable future. I’ll call you when I need you.”

That was it. I generally didn’t know who the partner on the deal was, let alone the client. Obviously, I had no idea what the deal was about. And, once I received my assignment from the senior associate, I typically had no idea what I was doing.

That’s life in a big law firm.

Imagine, however, if we adopted Gawande’s checklist, and insisted all participants in the deal, or case, or whatever, gathered in a room together and emulated pilots and surgeons. It might sound a little like this:

“Hi, I’m Jane McCallister and I’m the corporate partner. We’re doing a deal for Giant Evil Bank, LLC, involving their purchase of the shares of Environmental Poisoner, Inc. To avoid paying taxes, we’re using an intentionally convoluted, quasi-legal off-shore limited partnership structure. It’s so labyrinthine our tax partner’s looking lost. I make $1.8 million per year, but desperately want to earn more and will do anything to achieve that goal.  The person I’m closest to is my cat, George.”

“Hi, I’m Moshe Horowitz, the tax partner. This deal makes me afraid, because it’s probably illegal. I’m having a hard time pushing the image out of my mind of being escorted in handcuffs by FBI agents, but the new, higher dose of anti-depressants is helping. Every cent I earn funds posh private schools in Westchester for my kids and a mortgage on the huge house my wife wanted. I rarely see the kids or the house or the wife. The person I’m closest to is my basset hound, Shlomo.”

“Hi, I’m Sam Yang, the senior associate. I don’t understand the deal, so I’m winging it, which is not atypical. My girlfriend just moved out. She said she never saw me anyway so what’s the point? Late at night I do bong hits and cruise sex sites. I owe a bank one hundred and forty thousand dollars and find myself hoping I don’t survive my next review. But then I remember how much money I owe.”

“Hi, I’m Krishna Gupta and I’m the junior. I have no idea what’s going on. I owe a bank two hundred thousand dollars. I can’t believe I have a job. I’ll do anything you ask.  Anything.”

“Hi, I’m Eduardo Garcia and I’m the paralegal.  These deals are all the same to me.  My goal is to rack up overtime so I can bank the down payment for a vintage ’92 jet black Camaro Z/28 305 T.P.I. V8 5-speed.”

“Hi, I’m Bernice Ogunde, the corporate partner’s secretary.  The partner is sleeping with a senior associate in the real estate group. I possess evidence of this affair in the form of emails I’ve copied to my home computer. Hence, I rarely show up at the office, and then I’m often drunk.”

“Hi, I’m Elaine Dogworthy, the word-processor. In real life, I’m an experimental performance artist.  In my act, I play an electric violin wearing brightly-colored paint-on latex and balance a four-foot papier-mache statue of the Hindu god Ganesh on my head.  At some point, when I book a date at an open-mike poetry slam, I’ll send you invites, which you’ll delete without opening.”

It’s that simple. Everyone takes a quick moment to introduce themselves to their colleagues, and confirm they’re all on the same page.

Voila! Increased efficiency and happiness.

All because of an item on a checklist.
========

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, Way Worse Than Being A Dentist: The Lawyer’s Quest for Meaning

I also heartily recommend my first book, an introduction to the concepts behind psychotherapy, Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy

(Both books are also available on bn.com and the Apple iBookstore.) 

My client was a nursing student, who had to pass an important math test before she could receive her degree.  She failed her first attempt, and her second was coming up.  She was getting the jitters.

I pointed out that her approach to this situation – all or nothing – didn’t make sense.  That’s because the likely outcome of this set of circumstances – like most everything in life – lay along the contours of a bell curve.

If you look out into the future, you are confronted with an array of foreseeable outcomes, some good and some bad.

My client, for example, might fail her last two tries at this exam, and be delayed in her attempt to finish her nursing program.  That seems a remote possibility, because in past years only 8% of the class failed all three times, and to date she has scored near the top of her class.  That bad outcome, while possible, exists on a narrow tail of the curve.

Out on the other tail, amid the unlikely positive outcomes, she might discover the school mis-graded her first test, and she already passed.  That would be nice, but it’s a slim possibility.

The big, fat center of the bell curve, where the most likely outcomes reside, predicts she’ll pass during her second or third try.

As things turned out, she passed on the second try – with flying colors.

People tend to ignore the bell curve.  You prefer to see yourself as the hero of your own adventure – the blessed, untouchable protagonist who sails into success.  Or you go too far the other way, towards powerlessness, and go martyr, seeing yourself as the unlucky recipient of a cruel fate, singled out for suffering at the hands of the gods.

Neither is true.  The future is a set of foreseeable outcomes that lie on a bell curve.  You can look into the future right now, from where you stand in the present, and forecast the most likely outcome, and the less likely best and worst outcomes.

If you look at things realistically, there’s no reason to “lose it” if the actual outcome isn’t what you’d wish for.  You merely fell onto a different place on the curve – but you’re still on the bell, and it’s still a foreseeable outcome.

Treating the future as foreseeable can be empowering.  You are not all-powerful, and you are not helpless – you are doing your best in a world where you metaphorically roll the dice each and every day.

An old friend of mine was recently diagnosed with inoperable cancer in his abdomen.  The doctor provided a gloomy prognosis.  My friend, who is Irish, a scholar and a bit of a fighter, decided to take that prediction with a grain of salt.  The fact is, you never know with cancer.  Like everything else in life, the final outcome is a matter of statistics and probabilities.

On one tail of the bell curve, he could drop dead tomorrow.  That happens, and he knows it.  The cancer could attack his liver or trigger a heart attack or who knows what.  But it’s unlikely – probably as unlikely as being hit by a bus tomorrow, which also happens.

On the other hand – at the other tail of the curve – he could live another 50 years.  That seems unlikely, but it happens, too. I read an interview recently with Robert von Bahr, of BIS, the Swedish classical music recording company.  Mr. von Bahr was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2008, and had surgery, but was told his chances of long-term survival were about 4.5%.  After the surgery, his doctor came to him, looking flabbergasted, with the results of a biopsy of the cancer.  It turned out the tumor was benign.  This particular outcome occurs in approximately 1 in 20,000 cases and the doctor had never encountered it during his career as a specialist in pancreatic cancer.  But it happened to Mr. Bahr, and so his cancer is entirely cured and he could live to see his 100th birthday.  He said he was as surprised as everyone else – he hadn’t realized that also happens, but apparently, sometimes, it does.

My friend will probably find himself in the big fat center of the curve, like most people.  Right now, he’s taken up residence on the luckier tail – chemotherapy has shrunken the tumors, and last week his doctor improved his prognosis.  Of course, that could change.

There are things we can control in this world – and others we cannot.  It boils down to the famous serenity prayer from the 12-Step movement:

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

Instead of “losing it” or feeling like you cannot handle the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, it makes sense to adopt a more accepting approach.  Like everyone else, you’re riding a bell curve, and you can end up, at some point, on one of the narrow tails.  Sooner or later, you probably will.

So try to relax – and don’t act surprised when something “totally unexpected” happens.

You might think of your life as aiming at a target – a goal – and firing off after it, like a cannonball.  Human beings like goals – we feel happiest chasing a dream.  It lends life purpose.

In reality, when you fire a cannonball into the air, it traces an arc, a parabola.  Yep, a bell curve.  That’s the shape of life – a narrative arc.  We peter into this world crawling on our hands and knees, soar to undreamt of heights…then peter back down on the other tail of the curve.  Eventually, we crash back to the earth (or explode in mid-air – that also happens.)  Stability, stasis, flat predictable lines – none of that is part of life’s equation.  It’s more like calculus, which might leave you scratching your head while you chase a moving target, attempt to fathom the nature of the infinite, and compute an infinite regression.

Complicated stuff.  You might be in for some surprises.

Best to sit back, and enjoy the ride.
========

If you’re interested in learning more about the scientific and philosophical underpinnings of psychotherapy, you might enjoy my first book, “Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy”

My second book takes a humorous look at the current state of the legal profession, “Way Worse Than Being A Dentist”

(Both books are also available on bn.com and the Apple iBookstore.) 

For information on my private practice, click here.

Even if you’re clerking for an obscure political hack (which is the norm), as a clerk you qualify to skip out of biglaw hell. The deal – as you probably know – is thus: you get to work non-law firm hours for a year, then return to the firm as though you’d suffered with the other monkeys. If you finish two clerkships, you double your fun and skip two years of Hell-on-Earth – then return with a third year’s salary!

Clerking gigs can be hard work – you could be researching and writing twelve hours a day. But you’re not putting in weekends (usually), and thanks to the court calendar, there are slow times built into the schedule. Your judge could turn out to be geriatric and losing his marbles (not a rare occurrence) or simply a lunatic – but you’re still doing substantive, important work – rather than, say, researching an un-busy partner’s attempt at a treatise or frying your brain with doc review.

Clerking is a sweet deal – one good reason to do litigation instead of corporate. As a clerk, you might learn something. That’s probably not going to happen as a junior doing corporate.

Yes, there’s a catch, and it’s a whopper: Most clerkships – a whole lot of clerkships – require relocating to the middle of freakin’ nowhere.

If you’re like most educated people, you’ve absentmindedly noticed at some point that the United States occupies a wide tract of land. There’s a lot of that stuff in the middle – the zone with the empty square states they use for missile practice, and those ones in the South where they sprayed black people with fire hoses and sicced dogs on them (as featured in your high school history textbook)(unless you went to high school in the South.)

Yeah, those places.

I am scrupulously non-partisan in these columns – no one can gull me into revealing my sympathies. But I will say this: the frightful wasteland situated between the civilized portions of our nation is dominated by a political party whose platform includes a Constitutional Amendment to outlaw gay marriage. Yeah. They want to alter the founding document of our nation to bash gays. Feeling all warm and fuzzy? Get used to it. If you clerk, and your judge is posted in fly-over country, then so are you.

Welcome to the “real” America. Welcome to the wackadoodles. Welcome to wackadoodleville.

How bad does it get?

Before we start describing where you’re going, remember what you’re leaving behind. A clerkship in the land of Wal-marts and trailer parks, whatever else it entails, spells one year without your spouse, life-partner, steady friend with benefits or whatever. Whomever you’re with – if you’re traveling to Lubbock, Sioux Falls or Tupelo – they’re probably staying home.

Don’t underestimate the effect of a long distance separation on a relationship. You can tell yourself it’s only nine or ten months, not even a year, really. And you can talk on Skype all the time. And you can have sex, sort of, on Skype. But long distance living is about the worst thing that can happen to a relationship. You make the sacrifices for monogamous commitment yet reap none of the rewards.

It’s going to be worse for you. She’ll be in NYC or LA, where, if she does cheat, it will be worth the effort, and, if you break up, she can meet someone else. For you… not so much. A name like “Wichita”  or “Birmingham” or “Clarksville” (wherever that is) sounds cool in a blues song, but the reality of most of these places is a burg where the available women at the local T.G.I Friday’s attend mega-churches, consider evolution a hoax and think Sarah Palin is a right-on woman (in the case of Witchita, you’ll also be visiting the corporate headquarters for Koch Industries.) What will you be doing at a local T.G.I. Friday’s? That’s where you’ll be seeking female companionship after you discover there are no other options.

First, you’ll have to find the T.G.I. Friday’s, which will be located in a strip mall amid anonymous suburban aridity. There’s no downtown in most of these places. Back in the 70′s and 80′s, the white people fled to the suburbs, along with the jobs. The poor black people who were left had no jobs, so the middle of the city became a “slum.” The answer? Slum clearance. Bulldoze the whole mess, then build a few skyscrapers and a football stadium. That’s what’s there nowadays – a few skyscrapers, a football stadium and forty acres of parking lot.

Which brings us to another issue. Other than watching tv, there is exactly one extra-curricular activity available in your new home – watching football. Opera, classical music, modern dance, ballet, jazz, theater, galleries, lectures, readings, art museums – those pastimes are reserved for communists and homosexuals. You can drink – it counts as a cultural activity – and you can watch football. That’s it. There are movie theaters in the malls, but you will need a car to get there and you’ll find a megaplex with sixteen theaters showing “Fast and Furious VIII”. No one – no one – will know who Helena Bonham Carter is. Pause, and contemplate that for a moment.

It gets worse. Americans aren’t supposed to admit this – at least white Americans – but despite what Justice Scalia says (with his astonishing legal acumen), it’s possible the issue of race hasn’t entirely melted into insignificance in this great land of ours. You know how black people are kind of mostly poorer than whites and America kind of has the highest incarceration rate in the world and a vastly disproportionate percentage of those people behind bars kind of happen to be black, and white people and black people kind of mostly live in different places and kind of don’t really see each other too much, like, socially? You know? That divide only worsens in the hinterlands. A client clerking in West Dipstick saw a famous black comedian perform at the local theater. It was something to do – a rare occurrence. The place was packed, the show was great – and he was the only white person in the theater. It was weird, having a tiny bit of fun – his first in months – while experiencing first-hand the secret poison of American apartheid.

Another annoying aspect of living in a state famous for “hollers” and “corn licker” is the classic trademark of people who live someplace no one else wants to: profound defensiveness. New Yorkers don’t rush to defend New York against detractors. They assume you’re an idiot if you don’t love it and New York is better without you. But if you’re from East Bumptruck, you’ll tackle anyone to the ground who so much as hints he might not like it there. That gets old fast. Especially when – as is usually the case – the judge hires a local clerk for appearances and that’s the guy foaming at the mouth because you hinted the nightlife in South Bumbledunk isn’t all that.

I heard about one clerk who ended up finding the closest airfield in her rural nowhere (it was in one of those “I” states…Idaho?  Iowa?  Illinois?  Is there another one?) and taking flying lessons. I guess it was something to do. Oddly enough, she’s not the first person I’ve heard of stuck in the sticks who took up flying. It kills time – and affords you the illusion of possessing a means of escape.

My advice on surviving the boondocks?  Do what you can to survive. I’d read about a thousand books, download Merchant Ivory films and pray for sweet release. That might not be your thing. Maybe you can find an airfield. Or take up knitting.

What you’ll need more than advice is someone to listen as you vent your misery. Good old Skype. Thanks to the internet, I listen to law clerk misery direct from the heartland, every week.

I feel your pain. Personally, I’m willing to venture to Brooklyn for day trips to take in local color, but cross the Hudson? Only if I’m flying to L.A. or San Fran. I don’t mess with fly-over country.
========

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, Way Worse Than Being A Dentist: The Lawyer’s Quest for Meaning

I also heartily recommend my first book, an introduction to the concepts behind psychotherapy, Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy

(Both books are also available on bn.com and the Apple iBookstore.) 

Why is psychotherapy conducted exclusively face-to-face, rather than in writing?  I find that I express myself much more clearly and precisely in writing, after having had the chance to ruminate on my response — it’s one of the reasons I’m pursuing law as a career.  I’ll bet this is something I share with other lawyers and law students.  Having time to consider my response also reduces the risk that when I happen to have my precious hour in session, I’ll be guarded and not in a very sharing mood, and the hour will be unproductive for the both of us.  Having the written word as an intermediary allows me to present myself much more honestly.

Thanks,

M

And here’s my response:

To submit a question to Ask The People’s Therapist, please email it as text or a video to: wmeyerhofer@aquietroom.com

If I answer your question on the site, you’ll win a free session of psychotherapy with The People’s Therapist.
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If you’re interested in learning more about the scientific and philosophical underpinnings of psychotherapy, you might enjoy my first book, “Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy”

My second book takes a humorous look at the current state of the legal profession, “Way Worse Than Being A Dentist”

(Both books are also available on bn.com and the Apple iBookstore.) 

For information on my private practice, click here.

A vacation might help, if you could achieve the impossible and take one. My client pulled off a week – seven whole days! – at a Caribbean resort, only to return feeling like a condemned prisoner.

“It made things worse,” she lamented. “Now I remember the outside world.”

Sometimes it’s better to live without that distraction.

You’re in it for the money.  Biglaw creates money to toss into the maw of a bank. But no one can stand this abuse forever. Change – any change – might be good, right? How about another firm? Working in a different building – working with different people – different acoustic ceiling tiles, different vertical blinds, different sound-absorbent beige carpeting, different cheap wood veneer bookshelves, different anonymous windows to stare out… Anything different counts as change, doesn’t it?

The omnipresent worry: out of the frying pan, into…someplace worse.

Could anyplace be worse?

Isn’t that what you said about law school?

Another client took the leap and fled his firm – couldn’t take it any more. Guess what? It was worse. Two months later he was begging to return to the frying pan.

Yes – it actually happened. He returned to his old firm, proving forever there are places worse than the-frying-pan-you-know. There’s the-frying-pan-you-don’t-know.

This guy was a fifth year groping for an exit from hell. Nights and weekends of endless grind congealed into a determination – no más. Anything was better than this. This – whatever this was – was killing him.

An escape hatch appeared in the form of a nearby firm (five blocks away) celebrated for “associate satisfaction.”

(He didn’t realize at the time that “associate satisfaction surveys” actually measure relative levels of associate intimidation – intimidation with regard to filling out “associate satisfaction” surveys. A melted cheese sandwich provides “satisfaction.”  Working in biglaw typically does not.)

My client was in the throes of acute law-induced discomfort, and the switch sounded feasible. A partner from his current firm was now working at the new place, talking it up. He took the leap.

Literally within minutes of switching firms, my client knew he’d made a mistake. They didn’t even pretend – there was no question of being taken out for lunch. The piling on of work began the first hour. Other associates avoided his eyes when he passed them in the hall. He worked straight through the first weekend, then every weekend that followed. Eventually, he missed his best friend’s wedding – partner’s orders – to spend all day taking notes at a meeting that partner couldn’t be bothered to attend.

That was the breaking point. He called a partner at his old firm – swallowed what he laughingly referred to as his “dignity” – and pleaded for his job back.

Two weeks later, he’s in his former office, at his former desk – more certain than ever there’s no escape.

At least at this hellhole – the original hellhole – he works for a partner who isn’t an especially bad person (in biglaw terms.) Sure, the work is piled on without mercy, but there isn’t as much arbitrary torment. That’s a fine distinction, but it can be crucial – the gulf between working for (1) an egotist who never gives your existence a second thought; or (2) a sadist who makes sport of inflicting pain. Option (1) is the “lifestyle” job.

My client still works fourteen hour days and nearly every weekend. He still hates what he does.  But now he appreciates his “lifestyle” job.

So what next? Stay in the frying pan? Try another frying pan? The legal profession provides an array of frying pans to choose from (or it used to, back when jobs existed. At this point, you should probably shut up and be glad you have a frying pan so you can keep making loan payments.)

A client at a big Midwest firm says she’s losing her mind. One day she looked around the table at the assembled staff of the “Securities Litigation Group” and thought: I don’t like these people. I don’t want to work with these people. I don’t want a life containing these people.

She’s got a clerkship coming up. But then what? How do you stay and “build a career” when you don’t like anyone you work with? She refers to them as “those douchebags.”

She could leave Chicago and move back to New York.  That was the plan, until, while researching New York City firms, she stumbled upon a passage, on one firm’s website, extolling their “emergency child care services.”  The concept made her queasy.

Because what – really – are “emergency child care services”?  ”Child care services” would mean a friendly, convenient daycare center downstairs – but this is America, and friendly, convenient daycare centers are an evil plot hatched by wild-eyed European socialists, right?  No firm would ever pay for actual childcare.  Only  ”emergency” childcare.  Well, the most common “emergency” at a law firm is the weekly “emergency” of being kept all-night or all-weekend working for some lunatic.  That would be when the “emergency childcare” swings into action.

She imagined someone driving out to her house to stay with her kids.  That was scary enough, until she asked herself the next question: Who? Who does a law firm choose to provide “emergency” childcare? A sweet older Jamaican lady from an agency? In her dreams.  More likely, a hard-bitten, moonlighting secretary from Staten Island, or a heavily indebted twenty-something hipster taking a break from doc review.  She pondered the scene: “Hey, kids. Your mom will be pulling another unplanned double all-nighter.  I’ll be staying with you again this weekend. Who wants to hear a bedtime story?”

Maybe it’d be better to stay in Chicago with the douchebags. The frying pan she knows…

Yet lawyer after lawyer tells me the same story: they don’t want the frying pan they know. Any frying pan – even an equally bad frying pan – would suffice. Just, please – make it a different frying pan (and maybe give me a week or two off – a week or two without a Blackberry, a week or two without partners, a week or two without law – before I hop into the next frying pan.)

One client concocted creative, near-convincing rationales to prefer another firm – it’s smaller and supposedly gentler (although smaller means fewer partners so she might get stuck working for a beast – and might not be able to go back to a big prestige firm after leaving to a smaller firm), the hours might be better (although they’ll probably be the same), and they take smaller cases, so there won’t be as much document production (although there’ll still be document production, with fewer people to help out.)

She knows that’s window dressing. The truth? If she stays where she is, she’ll lose her shit. Then she’ll get fired.

It is an indisputable fact that a new place – any new place – is not the old place. You have to do something. At very least, you have to try.

Of course you know the actual problem isn’t this place. It’s biglaw.

A client surprised me the other day. Last year, she fled a nightmare firm – a legendary sweatshop – for a new place. So far, things are marginally better. They give her work and ignore her. She keeps a low profile and (so far) can work evenings to avoid weekends. So far as she’s concerned, this amounts to “satisfaction.”

But now it’s getting slow. She recognizes the signs, and wonders how much longer they’ll keep her around.

I expected to talk with her about networking, headhunters, changing cities – the stuff she talked about last time she needed to flee a frying pan. She didn’t.

“If this job falls through, I’m through,” she announced.

“Meaning, what?  You’ll look for something at another firm?”

“No. I mean that’s it for law.”

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t have to. She’d had enough. I don’t know what that means, in practical terms – I don’t think she does, either. She’s batting around the idea of becoming a headhunter or taking some sort of job at an e-discovery contractor.

There comes a point when you review all your options – all your options.

Frying pan. Frying pan. Frying pan. Fire.

Given the state of frying pan, “fire” might be worth a shot.
========

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, Way Worse Than Being A Dentist: The Lawyer’s Quest for Meaning

I can also heartily recommend my first book, Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy

(Both books are also available on bn.com and the Apple iBookstore.) 

“You’re the guy who made me vegetarian!” she announced between gasps.

I didn’t know what she was talking about.

It turned out she’d worked as a paralegal, years before, at Sullivan & Cromwell.  I didn’t feel guilty about not remembering her.  We only toiled together once – a grueling all-nighter preparing for an M&A closing.

We ordered take-out burgers that night, and I opted for a veggie burger.  She asked why I wasn’t eating meat.  At first I played it down – mumbled something like “don’t feel like it.”  Carnivores can grow testy if you fail to consume meat in their presence – they take it as a personal affront.  I’ve learned to tread lightly.

But she persisted, with genuine curiosity, so I told her the truth:

“You don’t have to go there – no one’s asking you too,” I said.  ”But if you do go there, you’ll stop eating meat.”

That was it.

Ever since that night, she told me on the sidewalk, she’d been vegetarian.

All it took was going there – well, having someone tell you there was a “there ” to go to, then making the trip.

No, I’m not going to spell out where “there” is – you know perfectly well and I’m not here to preach.  I’m here to talk about consciousness-raising, not vegetarianism.  Specifically, consciousness-raising around alcohol.

You know, alcohol – those lambent elixirs stored in gleaming bottles; the all-American can of beer that pops open to seal friendship and inaugurate cherished memories; the cork shooting from a pricey bottle of champagne to harken in merriment and delight.

Yeah.  Ethanol.  Ethyl alcohol.  Let’s tackle the popular mythology surrounding this stuff. We can start with what I call the Maya Angelou rule.

Some clients tell me they can’t imagine meeting a stranger without a few drinks in them.  It “loosens you up” and “lets you be yourself.”

I asked one of these clients who he would most like to meet in the whole world, and he answered, without hesitation, Maya Angelou.

I asked him if he minded, when he met Dr. Angelou, if she’d had a few drinks.

You might or might not appreciate her poetry – but you probably reserve a modicum of respect for who she is, and I’m guessing you’d prefer that your meeting – your chance to share a few words with a celebrated poet – not occur after she’s been drinking.

The idea is distasteful.  That’s because Maya Angelou is  synonymous with dignity – and drunkenness isn’t.

You probably don’t want your meeting with President Obama to occur after he’s had a few drinks, either.  It would be shocking – and disappointing – to meet someone like that – someone important, impressive, dignified, a role model, etc. etc., after he’s been drinking.

That’s why you don’t want to make your first introduction of yourself to a stranger after you’ve “had a few drinks.”  Not unless you want to look foolish.  Because that’s how people look when they’ve been consuming alcohol.

There were two direct roots of my choice to be vegetarian.  First, I had good friends who were vegetarian.  They didn’t proselytize – they lived their lives and didn’t eat meat.

The second input was a bowl of chicken soup I ordered at a diner.  I remember staring at a piece of skin floating on the top and thinking, “that’s skin.”

Enough said.

I’ve always had friends who don’t drink.  These aren’t necessarily all people in recovery, who became sober after realizing they were alcoholic – some were simply people who decided not to drink.  Their behavior – their choice – affected me.  It made me stop and think.  That’s a healthy thing to do.

If you wish to go further, and experience a major eye-opener, try arriving at a place or event where you would ordinarily drink – and choose not to.  You’ll see what alcohol actually does.  You’ll go there.  It isn’t pretty.

No one is at his best after he’s been drinking.  They’re often at their worst.

A client once arrived for a group therapy session drunk.  He showed up late, and kept repeating – too loudly – “hey, loosen up, guys – this is the real me!”  It wasn’t.  We were all, without exception, embarrassed.  In fact, we were horrified.  It was awful.  He dropped out of group, which was probably for the best, since they weren’t eager to have him back, and it wouldn’t have been appropriate to let him return to any of my groups until he’d done a lot of work on himself – and maybe attended a twelve-step group like Alcoholics Anonymous, which is the best place to go when you think you might have a problem with alcohol.

I’m not a “perfect” vegetarian.  I’m not vegan.  I wear leather.  I eat fish and seafood sometimes, despite misgivings about the over-fishing of the oceans and the cruelty and waste involved in the seafood industry.

I make compromises, and I live with them.  But I’ll never think about meat and the exploitation of animals the way I did before I “went there.”

It’s the same with alcohol.  You might decide to drink in moderation.  Maybe you drink a glass of wine or a beer now and then.  I do.  For many people, that works just fine.

But if you’ve “gone there” with alcohol, you know the truth, and you’ll never buy into the myths again.  At very least, you’ll drink with your eyes open;  you won’t think alcohol is a magical elixir from heaven – or that it’s going to help you “be yourself.”

Alcohol isn’t necessary – it isn’t even a positive good.  In fact, it does enormous harm.  Perhaps it has its place in moderation.  But let’s all go there, and stop kidding ourselves.  There’s a big problem with the role this stuff – ethyl alcohol – plays in our collective lives.

========

Please check out The People’s Therapist’s new book, “Way Worse Than Being A Dentist”

I also recommend my first book, “Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy”

(Both books are also available on bn.com and the Apple iBookstore.) 

One group wants me to teach a workshop for young attorneys on “health and wellness.” Well, okay. Whatever. I can do that. How much?

They offered the same course in a different city last year, using another therapist-who-is-also-a-lawyer (I wasn’t aware others existed, but I’m not threatened.) To make things easy on myself, I asked how that other (lesser) therapist-cum-lawyer contrived to occupy her “workshop.”

“Oh, she gave them a list of pointers for ‘self-care’,” I was told. “You know, get enough sleep, exercise, eat right, that kind of thing.”

Piece of cake – except I’m not sure they need me to dispense said epiphanies. Richard Simmons manages to preach an identical gospel while everyone performs jumping jacks in lavender leotards.

No matter. Giving advice is what people expect therapists to do.

It’s like “sex therapy.” Remember “sex therapy”? Be honest: Did Ruth Westheimer ever teach you anything you didn’t already know? Yet you found it deeply, mysteriously satisfying each time she chirp-chortled that phrase – “with a firm greep on dee head of dee penis.” Tearing your attention from a tiny Israeli woman in her sixties discussing penises is like trying not to ogle a car wreck. Why fight the hunger?

Nevertheless, the truth remains – dispensing advice isn’t what therapists do best, or even well. As we used to say in HIV prevention circles, the real question isn’t – don’t you know how to use a condom? The real question is – why do you think you didn’t? Everyone knows how to use a condom. You know what’s good for you. If you aren’t doing it, that’s either because (a) you don’t want to; or (b) you haven’t figured out who you really are yet.

I can’t make you do something you don’t want to do. I also can’t tell you who you are.

So what use is a therapist?

I help you wake up. You take it from there.

Therapy isn’t about change – it’s about awareness. I’ll help you talk to yourself so you figure out what you’re really thinking and feeling. What you do with that information is your business.

My secret agenda should be obvious. Any time you gain awareness, it’s going to produce change. If I tell you you’re standing in a pot of water over a fire, you’re going to jump out. But the jumping part isn’t my job. It’s yours.

That said, it’s fun to give advice, and advice columns remain ever-popular. Remember Dear Abby and Ann Landers? Well, here’s The People’s Therapist’s advice column. You probably won’t “take” this advice any more than you “took” Dear Abby’s or Ann Landers’. Still, it makes for entertaining copy.

So, here’s how you – and every lawyer – can achieve three important goals:

• Not go crazy
• Not get dumped
• Not get fired

First: How not to go crazy.

You’re not going to like the answer: Physical exercise.

That’s it. Advice columnists always tell you the same thing – get off your ass. They beat this drum for a reason – it works. But you’re lazy like that, so you’ll probably go on Lexipro instead. Your choice.

Why do you need 30 minutes of cardio exercise at least twice a week to not go crazy at a big horrible law firm?

Oh, come on. You know why. Blah blah blah releases endorphins…blah blah blah relieves anxiety…yadda yadda soothes depression. If you don’t already know this stuff, pick up an issue of Cosmo.

Keep something else in mind – as you plod along on a treadmill to the Violent Femmes, you’re away from that god-awful office – as completely away as you might get for a while. Cardio exercise is like meditation, except it actually distracts you since you have to focus on gasping for breath and not stopping.

See how irritating it is to be on the receiving end of advice? That’s why Dr. Ruth and Richard Simmons morphed into self-parodies. Even as clowns they get annoying.

Next: How not to get dumped. The goal here is preservation of relationships in the face of biglaw, which permits no time for relationships.

And here’s the trick – take the time anyway. Reserve a weekend every two or three months and get away together – without the kids – to a cute little inn.

That’s it. Except – as you’ve probably noticed – you’re a lawyer, so taking a weekend off – being able to plan in advance and then actually do it – is impossible.

You have no choice. Do this, or you’ll end up like most lawyers, losing that girlfriend, divorcing that wife and ending up with no relationship except hook-ups with the tax associate who comes to your office and releases a forlorn sigh, like she isn’t into you either, but what are the options?

Before arriving at that juncture, try to avoid squandering the one meaningful element in your god-forsaken existence. Just do it. Move mountains. Reserve that weekend, drive her up to a little inn with frilly bedspreads and a porch swing. Go antiquing. Look into her eyes – not at the Blackberry – and listen to what she has to say. Then have sex – with each other.

It’s worth it. Even if you get fired.

…which brings us to: How not to get fired.

This one’s easy: see a therapist every week.

I know – seems a tad self-serving. But if you’re going to get fired in biglaw, it’s probably because you’re secretly hoping to get fired. That’s because you’re angry and hate your job. Which is where awareness comes in.

You think you are a rational, logical person who owes a bank about $150k and has no choice but to remain at a miserable grind you loathe. That is correct.

However, you also contain an Id – an unconscious child – and he’ll arrange to get you fired. For the most part, he lays low – you’ve got him under control. Then, when you’re completely burnt out and the partner announces he wants you to work all weekend, that little kid will pop out – surprise! – utter something inappropriately heartfelt in front of that partner – and get you canned.

He can be sneaky, too. When your guard is down, he’ll broadcast his misery – arranging for you to come in late every day or complain about your fate a little too forcefully before unsympathetic ears. That’ll also get you shown the door.

I’m not saying getting fired from a big law firm is a bad thing. But – if at all possible – you should get fired on your own terms. Quit if you want to. Or push things a bit and shoot for those delicious three months severance. But don’t fall asleep at the wheel and let the kid drive, or you’re asking for regrets.

That’s where therapy comes in. Sit the kid down and give him a listen. Let him get it all out. You’ll return to the firm refreshed and relieved. Relief will also be registered by the people who were about to fire you.

Final piece of breathtakingly obvious advice:

Biglaw is toxic for most human beings. If you’re unhappy and can afford to – get out.
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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, Way Worse Than Being A Dentist: The Lawyer’s Quest for Meaning

I can also heartily recommend my first book, Life is a Brief Opportunity for Joy

(Both books are also available on bn.com and the Apple iBookstore.)