There’s slow at the office. Then there’s moribund. Like, stick a fork in it, parrot in the Monty Python skit, no longer viable, kaput, over and out, flat-lining…dead dead dead.
Like you haven’t recorded a billable hour in weeks. Like you show up at 10:30 am, slide your Kindle under your computer monitor and try to look busy while you read John LeCarre novels. Then leave at 6 pm – or whenever the coast is clear and you think you can get away with it.
We all know having nothing to do at a big law firm is better than being busy. Being busy is really, really bad.
When you’re really busy, you know you will have to quit soon because you can’t bear it, and when the loans get sufficiently below $100k that will be your cue to say fuck it, I need out.
But when you’re totally dead at the office, you think…hmmm…might as well wait on the bailing out and keep those delightful loan-reducing paychecks coming in, right?
No one ever leaves because it’s too slow. You wait it out. Pay off loans. And wait. And do nothing. And wonder if the partners are noticing – or whether they somehow don’t realize you haven’t billed an hour since 1971.
One of my clients was deep in a Kurt Vonnegut novel when a partner dropped by his office.
“Your billables are a little low this month,” the partner intoned.
My client threw on his “sincere face” – a complex intermingling of dignified concern at the immediate reality presented to him in the here and now and a more generalized melancholy at the state of the world as a whole, with emphasis on the wider suffering that exists everywhere – suffering he himself is helpless to address.
“Yes, it has been a bit quiet. I’m doing what I can to make myself helpful wherever I can, but…” He let his voice trail off, helpfully.
The partner frowned, apparently in deep thought.
“I’ll let the Banking Group know. They’ll be contacting you.”
And so my client spent the rest of the week facing the looming dread that “the Banking Group” would contact him. Happily, they never did. He relaxed back into his familiar daydream-like stuporous trance state. Two weeks later, he’s charting the intricacies of “Freedom” – the recent Jonathan Franzen novel, and contemplating a switch to an iPad to read “Infinite Jest,” the 1000-page David Foster Wallace behemoth, since it’s easier to tackle long footnotes on an iPad than a Kindle. This has been the topic of much discussion with his officemate, who also has nothing to do but has been progressing through multi-volume classics of the vintage sci-fi/fantasy genre. Somehow, he’d never gotten around to reading the complete Dune series or Frederik Pohl’s HeeChee saga. That’s since been rectified. Next up: Asimov’s Foundation series.
Deadness at the office is good. You don’t have to work, you just log face time. Also, there’s a chance you’ll get laid off, maybe with one of those heavenly “soft landings” where the firm gives you three months paid (while you do precisely nada) before they you show you the door. That’s three more months of paying down loans…
Busy time at a law firm obviously sucks. There’s no debate there. But dead time has drawbacks as well.
Perhaps the ideal would be some weird mix of busy and dead – like, halfway busy. That would be like…a regular job – you know, coming in at 9 am, working on something, then leaving at 5 pm.
That doesn’t exist in law. It could never exist.
No, there are two dichotomous possibilities – the hell of busy, and the better but still problematic dead. Dead is much better, even though it sucks. But then anything at a big law firm sucks, so better to have it be dead and have that suck than be working eighty hour weeks and have that suck infinitely more.
These are the kinds of thoughts you process when it’s dead at the office. Long, twisty, repetitive time-killing thoughts. You calculate the exact day on which you could, theoretically, achieve zero net worth. Then you wonder what would happen to that date if there were a bigger bonus this year. Or no bonus.
There is one major hazard to having it be completely dead at the office, which is that your brain may die. At some point a senior associate from another department who doesn’t realize you haven’t billed an hour in months will walk up to you and try to talk about “law” and you will look up from page 673 of “Infinite Jest” and hear his mouth emitting the following sounds:
“Mrrrphph schlurphph loan agreement murrrpslurphh snurphphfffpff credit mezzanine schrluphphfff…”
You will gape at him and open and close your mouth like a fish lying on ice waiting to be someone’s dinner and try to remember what it was like being a fish, swimming around in the ocean and looking for little bits of the stuff floating in the water that fish eat….What is that stuff? Plankton? Krill? Brine shrimp? Tiny squid larvae…?
But wait. He’s still talking to you. What is it about? Does it concern work? Law? Vague, shadowy memories of distant concepts swim in your mind like a cloud of…uh…krill.
“Mrrrphph schlurphph loan agreement murrrpslurphh snurphphfffpff credit mezzanine schrluphphfff…”
It’s… resolving slowly…into something. A question. A question of some variety. Who is this person again? Where are you? A law firm? How did you get in a law firm?
Your mouth is opening and closing. Something is coming out. The senior associate appears perturbed, or worried. Unhappy. That’s it. He’s unhappy.
“Mmmmmm….ggggooooooo….schchchcllllooooooshnnooop,” you are saying.
And he leaves. And you return to your computer, and the iPad stuck beneath it.
Not working for weeks at a time, or months at a time, will destroy your brain. You will forget anything you ever learned in law school. You will grope fecklessly at knowledge you thought you’d gained in elementary school. To outsiders, you will begin to appear “learning disabled.”
There’s another hazard. You will forget that work could ever be anything other than the thing you are glad you are not doing.
That’s what happens when it’s totally dead at the office. You forget how to do work – in fact, you forget how to think.
Then you forget you want to do work.
That’s the most destructive element of the big law trap – it destroys the dignity of work. First, the labor of your body and mind is reduced to a billable hour. Then it is exploited until it becomes physically and mentally unbearable. Then it is taken away, and relief floods your system.
Then you find your are phobic to the notion of work. You loathe it. You seek only to avoid it.
All you want is for someone to pay the loans and leave you alone.
That’s a tragedy, because work is more than something unpleasant you do to pay off loans – or try to avoid while still trying to pay off loans.
Work is an expression of who you are. It is what you create during your time on Earth. It lends meaning to your days.
Please – don’t confuse the law grind with a career, or with meaningful work. One phenomenon bears no relation to the other.
Law sucks, and it might be killing you to be in debt for decades to come. But there is role out there, a place in human society that will fulfill something deep within you. It’s the reason you’re here, alive, in the world. There is a goal you want to reach – a dream you want to catch.
You’ll get out of that damn firm. You’ll pay off those loans, some day – or at least reduce them to a bill each month, like any other bill.
Don’t let law destroy the meaning of work for you. Don’t let it make you give up on the dream of doing something you love and making a difference.
Law might make you feel like your brain is dead. Don’t let it break your heart as well.
========
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.)
The People's Therapist 
Will,
Hmm… I don’t think “Law” is what destroys you/ your brain. Law can be fun, it can be helpful to people, it provides rules that keep society together… Law firms on the other hand can indeed fry your brain.
Having nothing to do in the office is hell. I have never seen anyone being able to smuggle a book there (at least not in any offices I’ve ever been in) so you fall back to the hourly, and then half-hourly facebook updating “The Fake Frog is bored at the office”, “The Fake Frog is bored out of her mind”, “The Fake Frog is pining for the weekend”, read the NYT, BBC News, check the Weather Channel three times a day…
I have to agree with you though, after a year of having had barely anything to do in the office I was completely unable to recall anything at all about corporate governance, which, at the time, was supposed to be the bulk of my work (considering that had never been my strong point in the first place probably didn’t help). It is frightening that you take a bunch of reasonably intelligent and driven people and get them to do nothing for days. It is a bit of a waste…
Still, you seem to assume that working outside of law saves you from boredom and/or working crazy hours. I’m currently giving event management/ marketing a try and, well, it’s actually longer hours than what I’ve ever done in law. Admittedly people are generally less stressed and rude than lawyers but still… Also I see friends in other industries that are bored out of their mind in their jobs as well.
My point is that it’s hard to find your dream, it doesn’t sort of appear to you over night so what are you supposed to do in the mean time? At least in law, by that point, you vaguely know what you’re doing and it pays the bills… Plus who says your next move is going to be the right one? It’s scary out there 😉
Isn’t one of the features of work (and life in general) that it is usually boring?
I can recognize the types of work that would be boring to me. Most work appears to fit this bill.
For example, without even doing it, I can tell that event management/marketing would be boring. Actually, I’d probably be bad at it, so it might be difficult and boring at the same time.
Are you serious that you have never been able to smuggle a book into a law firm? You just put it in your briefcase. Or, you just carry it straight through the door.
JP, I haven’t found work or life that boring overall. Obviously, as noted above, there have been some insanely dull times but fortunately it’s not been my whole career/ life.
As for marketing/ EM, at the moment I’m finding it a whole lot easier than law (but not been there very long). If nothing else, nobody ever shouts at me. Definitely a marked improvement on my last job as a junior associate in a small firm… It’s a bit depressing that I put the bar so low as to consider that not being shouted at is a notable improvement (as opposed to a given) though.
DW I have certainly been able to carry a book to the office, but never been able to read it at my desk during a lull.
I just wanted to let you know that I love your columns. I am always shocked at the nastiness of the comments that are posted on Above the Law. Lawyers are so full of misguided rage. If they like their jobs so much, why are they spending so much time posting hateful comments on Above the Law? I know that you are thick-skinned but I just want to let you know that you are appreciated. I look forward to all of your posts because they validate everything that I feel and are giving me the strength to plan my escape. Please keep doing what you are doing. Thanks.
♥♥♥
I second Anon’s comment – I enjoy your column and look forward to it on ATL every week. I understand the view posted by many ATL commenters that the law and law firm life is not universally awful, but it’s mystifying to me why so many ATL commenters think that because it’s not awful for them, anyone who thinks it is problematic, dysfunctional, etc. is wrong and should shut up. While my experience with law firm life has been more positive than that of many of my friends, that’s not to say I haven’t seen the toxic side of it, and even though the number of days I like my job outweigh the number I hate it, I’m glad your column is out here on those bad days. Despite what the comments on ATL might lead you to believe, there are those of us who like the law and yet also recognize the law firm industry’s love affair with brutal learning curves, interpersonal politics, and work schedules are ultimately detrimental not only to individual lawyers’ health, but also the legal profession, due to the loss of many good and talented attorneys who leave rather than put up with the garbage many firms force on them.
Why does slow time have to be stupefying time?
Why not make slow time an opportunity to do something for yourself, your employer (who is still paying you!) and maybe even society?
Presumably there was something intellectually interesting about law that made you want to be a lawyer in the first place. Act on it. Write articles. Join a bar committee. Learn. Make yourself an expert in a niche. Start laying the groundwork for the thing you want to do when you leave the firm.
Your firm will be happier with you, your options will expand and you might actually start to enjoy the practice of law. If you’re slow and stultifying it’s the fault of your own attitude. Slow might actually be a gift.
While I agree that the point of “no work is not good for you” is true, I’ve never had the stones to read a book at work. I write and get involved with Bar organizations, and then of course wonder if those activities are worth anything (because they don’t result in Immediate Almighty Billable Hours so the firm is only semi-impressed by them).
For some of us, though, law will always be a job and not a passion, regardless of how many articles we write.
Act on it. Write articles. Join a bar committee. Learn. Make yourself an expert in a niche.
Yeah, right. And make yourself a target? Been there, done that thanks. All it gets you is another heaping helping of nonbillable shitwork from partners who want you to clean up their messes in your area of “expertise.”
The hierarchy doesn’t reward knowledge and skill, it rewards rainmaking and billable hours. Becoming an expert makes neither of those any more likely. An expert without a book of business is still a worthless nobody.
Just wanted to let you know that I look forward to your columns every week. I can’t literally be in your office, but the columns are therapeutic nonetheless.
Thanks for the kind words – and thanks for reading. It means a lot.
Does anybody have some insight on why a firm would hire a slew of talented people and not ensure that all of them were sufficiently busy/continually developing their legal skills? What’s the point? My suspicion is that it has to do with petty office politics stuff, namely, some d-bag with power decides he doesn’t like the look of some or that some others remind him of himself when he was younger, or something silly like that. Everyone goes in capable of doing the work and then people are weeded out (underused) on the basis of superficial nonsense. Another question is how do you maintain your mental acuity in light of this psychological assault?
They are on the whole, poor managers, and they don’t have to be good managers to do well. When there are enough cases, everyone is slammed. When there are not, they have to hem and haw about who to fire and who to keep, and they don’t want to spend any of their valuable time encouraging associates to do pro bono or otherwise learn or build their skills.
@KM- your ‘suspiscion’ is dead on. Decisions about which associates get fast-tracked and which ones get sidelined have very little to do with merit. And it certainly isn’t about “legal skills.” During boom times, you can crank out crappy work product and no one will notice or care as long as the deal closes, but when it’s slow everything you do will be scrutinized and put in your file for the ‘performance review’ even if it’s cleaner and ‘better’ than stuff you did as a first year. As for how to keep your head together, those people smuggling novels have the right idea. Screw bar association and practice development crap- read a novel you’ve always wanted to read, or study a subject you are interested in, maybe one you could use in your post-law life. These days you can download novels to your iPhone with Amazon kindle and there are tons of websites where you can read classic novels online in text form. I’d write more but I’m in the middle of real screen-flipper…
[…] Brain Dead There’s slow at the office. Then there’s moribund. Like, stick a fork in it, parrot in the Monty Python skit, no longer […] […]
Who are these people sitting at their desks reading books? I don’t know anyone who has time to do that.
You can’t divulge it, but I’ve love to know what firm it was. I could use a vacation there.
Unfortunately, if you find yourself at BigLaw with time to read lots of novels, then you know your days are numbered and it doesn’t feel so vacation-y. It’s more like sitting in a hospital waiting room in anticipation of news on your loved one who is in a coma and finding yourself reading a tattered copy of The Bridges of Madison County because it’s the only thing there to read besides the year-old magazines. Not the kind of thing I’d envy. And I may or may not have read books under the solid wood desks of a very snotty White Shoe firm, but you can’t prove anything.
“Work is an expression of who you are. It is what you create during your time on Earth. It lends meaning to your days.”
Ummmm…. sorry, but no. In fact, that sounds suspiciously like something a partner at Biglaw would say to an associate.
What lends meaning to my days are the relationships I create and nurture with those I love.
Work — whether or not it’s in the legal field — will never be what lends meaning to my days or even an expression of who I am. It’s something I do, that I’m good at, and that I generally enjoy. But it’s not what gives my life meaning.
Actually, we all have a creative purpose that is explicitly tied to our individual (and unique) personality.
That’s what Will is trying to say when he says “work”.
JP – agreed. Each of us has a life’s work to pursue, but ufortunately, few of us get to actually “work” on anything connected to our creative purpose and personality – we live by the “son, they spell ‘work’ W-O-R-K and not F-U-N for a reason” trap.
Personally, I believe that “work” should be an expression of my unique personality and skill set, but that “day job work” is karmic punishment for misdeeds in past lives (and apparently I was Attila the Hun).
I like law. I like being a lawyer. I REALLY like being busy. Did I like missing dinner with my husband? No. Did I like canceling on everyone all the time for just about everything? No. But slow is absolutely awful. Watching the clock and being SURE an hour must have passed but it’s only been 10 min is excruciating. And when I was single, busy was really fun. I loved the other junior associates and, no, I did not like being at work until 4:00am, but for a year or so, dinners in a conference room with the other juniors on a Wednesday night wasn’t bad. It was often fun. What was not fun was just about everything else about Big Firm Life, especially the getting yelled at. But I think it’s a serious overstatement to say that law per se is bad. Some people (like me) have such bizarrely made brains that we’re most likely to be creative doing something like law. Believe me, I come from a very artistic family and I tried being creative in the traditional ways — music, fine art, theater, poetry — and I suck at them. Law, however, is a very creative thing for me.
Doing law is not being “creative”. The whole idea of law is to not have a creative thought. Rather, you’re supposed to tie everything to somebody else’s thought a/k/a precedent — the older and less creative the thought the better.
I think you just need to be more creative in determining what is and isn’t “creative.” I think JP is right on.
Great, somebody that sucks at being creative is telling people they need to be creative.
I am fricking sick of big-firm lawyers that think they know everything. And know Erin is going to enlighten people on what “creative” really means b/c apparently we don’t get it. Face it, Erin, you don’t know everything. In fact, you don’t know shit about being creative. You already admitted you “suck” at it.
Yeah, staying up all night drafting e-mails and briefs about obscure crap nobody gives a crap about .. conference calls.. reading pleadings.. copying and pasting boilerplate contract language, and generally being an annoying a-hole to push your rich clients’ immoral interests… really creative.. yeah, right.
So why don’t you go bill some hours, go screw some people over and STFU!
Wow, Creative industry Worker, you’ve got to chill! Clearly you’ve not had good experiences with lawyers, but not all lawyers (even BL lawyers) are “annoying a-holes [pushing their rich clients’ immoral interests]”. A lot of lawyers are there to enable their clients to achieve their business goals and to protect their assets. For example without me and my firm, one of my former client, a self-employed designer, would have had her designs stolen by a competitor.
There are different ways of being creative some people are good at drawing, music, dance and others are better at organization or finding new ideas for business. I have met a number of creative lawyers, people who will think out of the box and deliver solutions to their clients. It’s not all about precedents and conference calls…
Some of law is creative puzzle solving.
For example, if you are in the business of opposing a federal agency, you need to figure out how the rules work so that you can get what you want within the framework of rules.
Sometimes the rules interface so that you can use the rules to do something that, on its face, is incoherent, but it causes the system to misfire, resulting in a positive result.
Kind of like jiggling a pinball machine without making it tilt.
So you are trying to use the bureauracy’s own rules agains it. It’s fun when you lock up the system.
“Please – don’t confuse the law grind with a career, or with meaningful work. One phenomenon bears no relation to the other. Law sucks, and it might be killing you to be in debt for decades to come.”
Yeah, that pretty much nails it. I’mma file this under “shit I wish I knew in ’93”
Just don’t spend money on stuff that isn’t debt. That results in debt elimination.
After 10+ years in the legal profession, I was barely making enough to cover basic expenses, never mind pay off debt. Plus the job was wrecking my health, as it does to most lawyers (there’s a reason law has the highest rates of depression, suicide, alcoholism, etc., etc., etc.).
I finally decided to get out, and switching careers is a bitch b/c one is overeducated and underqualified. Things may very well pick up for me in my new, non-legal career, but for now I’m broke.
Like Lindsey Buckingham said, “There’s two kinds of people in this world — winners and losers.”
The world needs losers like me — Somebody’s got to pay for the vacation homes and trips of law professors and law school administrators – truly the most worthless human beings on Earth.
I had a law professor whose stay-at-home wife used to brag about how they visited visited every continent. Right now I would give anything just to visit my relatives overseas.
BEFORE law school, the schools lied about employment prospects of graduates — outright fraud. Then AFTER I went to law school, Congress made my loans non-dischargable.
Winners & losers, y’all.
Poverty Law Literally says:
“After 10+ years in the legal profession, I was barely making enough to cover basic expenses, never mind pay off debt. Plus the job was wrecking my health, as it does to most lawyers (there’s a reason law has the highest rates of depression, suicide, alcoholism, etc., etc., etc.).”
I’m doing actual Poverty Law (less stressful than corporate IP law) and don’t have this problem.
My living expenses are about $2,000/month with a family of four (with no debt or mortgage). And it’s more expensive here than I’m used to. I may pay more in taxes than I pay on living expenses. I’d have to calculate that.
Another key is to never, ever, live in a major metro area like NYC or DC (or even Altanta or Philadelphia) if you want to pay off debt.
Wow. Thank you! This article jumped into my brain and explained that mysterious anxiety that has been plaguing these slow days. I know deep down that I like to work, it’s quite a shame that this job turns it into something to be feared and avoided. Anyone out there have a solution…?
I came across your blog today and just want to say that I love it and will be following. I started a blog a few months ago that was featured on Above the Law once – some of the comments I got were so offensive it’s hilarious.
Anyway, thanks for writing!
Thanks, everyone, for reading and for your kind words and support for the blog. I hope you’ll consider giving my book a read, too – for that one-of-a-kind, The People’s Therapist full-immersion experience! http://aquietroom.com/book.html
Just imagine how bad it is for people who are stuck doing doc review. Same debt load, same brain killing tedium, but no paycheck, no hope of getting to zero equity, no career support and no societal prestige.
Will, I appreciate your writing about how the top of the profession really sucks, but at least people who grabbed the brass ring have decent exit options. There are tons of talented, creative human beings toiling in the basement of law without those options.
I disagree with you regarding document review. Doc review attorneys are probably paid the same hourly rate big law firm attorneys are paid–they just work less hours. 40 hours at about $50/hr is roughly $100K per year. 80 hours at about $50/hr is roughly $200K. I would rather work less and get paid less and have my life back. Also, doc review attorneys typically don’t have a blackberry to answer to after they leave the office. I know a lot of attorneys who left big law and are now doing doc review who are much happier. A lot of people do doc review for part of the year and pursue their real passion the rest of the year.
Even if doc review attorneys did earn the same hourly pay (contract doc review is about $32), pay isnt eveything. All else equal, lots of people would rather work less and get paid less and have a life. The problem with doc review is that it is different type of work than that given associates. The physical work atmosphere is often dismal, the work mind numbingly boring, and the work rules typically petty. The major problem though is that most of the people doing this want to be real lawyers, but are unable to find work as such. Many would work double the hours as an associate for free for the training and exit options given the choice. Congrats on leaving BigLaw. I hope you have found something better.
One of the major problems with being slow at a big law firm is that when the firm ***hole partner needs help with a case (usually because all the other associates refuse to work for him), it’s hard to say no. The usual response to this type of request is, “Wish I could help out but I’m swamped with the Smith case.” But if you’re slow and the partner knows it, you could get sucked in to a very bad situation. This is precisely the situation that I hated about working at a big law firm. You could never be really happy when you were slow. Thanks Will for the great column every week. I don’t feel so alone in my decision to leave biglaw.
When I look back on my days in the big law firm, the days that I had no work to do were 1000 times worse than the days where the work would never end. Even though I’m not longer at the law firm, I still enjoy reading your blog because I can relate so much to your posts. I felt so lonely and misunderstood by my co-workers, friends, family, and peers since I found it so difficult to articulate why I was so unhappy while I was there, but your posts sum up my feelings perfectly! I feel understood by someone I don’t even know.
I was inspired by The People’s Therapist and started a blog myself, to help other lawyers feel understood as well and to write about my experiences because I find them therapeutic. And if my blog helps even one person, I will have accomplished my goal.
Thanks for the inspiration.
Man, I hadn’t thought about the HeeChee novels in years. But they’re a perfect analogy for BigLaw life — you get sent off to this bizarre citadel of alien construction, then wait around for a crap assignment that might stuff you and four people you hate into a tiny room for months at a time. You might do no good at all in which case you get paid your wage, you might do something extraordinary for which you will get paid a bit more than your wage, and you might end up having to draw lots as to who gets their throat slit so as to make it possible for the others to continue on the same journey. Gotta read those again.
Beautiful essay, man. Your point about law firms destroying the dignity of work applies to big corporations generally. Rush Limbaugh once exclaimed, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, that companies hire people because they need work done. But he was wrong, for the most part. Generally speaking, big companies hire and keep people for political, not business reasons. There is very little connection between productive work and rewards in such environments.