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Archive for the ‘AboveTheLaw series’ Category

Gone Fishin’

Posted in AboveTheLaw series, tagged , , on July 21, 2010| 10 Comments »

What is it about lawyers and vacations? Like the old saying about long-horn cattle and a Texas fence – they just don’t get along so good. It’s like a physical aversion.

I worked with a client recently who was planning, in utter frustration, to quit his medium-size firm in a medium-size American city. The partner was lecturing him about his billable hours, but business was dead slow so there was nothing to bill for. The lawyer found out later that all his peers were simply billing for work that hadn’t been done yet, on the theory that they’d be laid off by the time the proverbial cow-patty and the fan were joined in unison.

He couldn’t bring himself to fake his time records to that degree, so he was stomping mad, announcing in stentorian tones that this was it, he was quitting. I urged him to stick around and see if he couldn’t get laid off with everyone else, so he could at least receive unemployment. No, he insisted – he needed out now.

Well, I reasoned, then why not take some vacation, so you can cool off and kill time simultaneously?

That was unthinkable.

It turned out he hadn’t had a vacation in 8 months – and that vacation was for 3 days.

Yes. THREE DAYS. Actually five, he said, since he took the weekend, too.

He took the weekend.

His objection to taking a vacation now? He wasn’t going out like that, on a sour note. That wouldn’t be right.

So. Quitting in a huff was okay. But taking any of his accumulated vacation time when the firm was so slow there was nothing for anyone to do and everyone was faking their hours? Inconceivable.

Flash forward six weeks. He didn’t quit. Instead he managed to convince a partner to dump a bunch of work on him, and actually managed to approach the insane billable hours requirement for last month. Now he’s totally exhausted, and his fellow junior associates are complaining he’s hogging the work.

How about a vacation? I suggested.

No way. He’d just made his hours – how could he take a vacation now?

But isn’t that the whole idea? That you’ve earned some time off?

He looked at me like I’d gone mad. If he took vacation now, all the other associates would get his work and he wouldn’t be able to make his hours. Besides, if he took vacation, he’d have to work twice as hard.

Why? I asked. If you’re off for two weeks of the month, you’re only expected to work half as many hours, right?

Wrong. It doesn’t work that way. You still have to make your hours for that month, even if you take a vacation. You just have to pull double-shifts.

Doesn’t that defeat the whole point of taking a vacation?

He shrugged me off, exasperated. I didn’t get it.

In the twisted mind of a lawyer, taking a vacation is simply bad. To take a vacation when the firm is slow rubs the unthinkable in their face – that the firm is slow. When things are busy? Well, then you’re not pulling your weight, are you?

Of course, you can’t simply “take” a vacation at a law firm – you have to clear it with the partner. At my client’s firm, the standard response was: “this isn’t a good time.”

There is no good time.

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Splitting Hairs

Posted in AboveTheLaw series, tagged , , , , , , , , , on June 30, 2010| 8 Comments »

An editor at AboveTheLaw suggested some months back that I do a piece on the US News & World Report law school rankings. For whatever reason, this stodgy old weekly news magazine – which someone must still read – has created a sideline business publishing rankings of schools, including law schools. I’m not sure what the criteria are, but at least in theory, it’s a big deal for lawyers when the list comes out each year.

The rankings seem designed to make official what everyone knows anyway, i.e., that there are “prestige” schools that are harder to get into. But like any good opinion piece, they throw in a few twists – familiar names in unexpected places. It boils down to dissing one of the big places, or unexpectedly anointing a second-rank outfit. That way everyone can get riled up over the respective rankings of my school versus your school.

It sounded kind of boring, so I filed the idea away.

Then it started to gnaw at me. The US News list seemed like a good example of the amazing lengths lawyers go to in order to distinguish themselves from one another. The entire profession splits hairs like this because the career path is so conservative there isn’t much to distinguish one attorney from another. Every lawyer lines up to take the LSAT, then get processed and distributed to law schools based on hairline distinctions. In class you sit through identical lectures, take identical exams, and head off – for the most part – to identical firms to do nearly identical work.

You end up arguing over the details.

The law school curriculum is pretty much the same thing wherever you go – it’s standardized. I doubt the property law lecture at a “top” law school is much different, let along superior, to a property law lecture at a less “prestigious” place.

But, of course the students are “better” at the more prestigious school – because they did better on their LSAT. How much better? Some tiny fraction of a percentage, probably, representing a few questions that they got right and someone else got wrong.

I worked with one lawyer who went to a “second-tier” law school in New York, but rose to the top of his class and made law review. He said he still faces resistance at top firms because of snobbery over where he went to school – even though he’s been out and working for eight years. Those Yale and Harvard lawyers at the big firms, he says, turn their noses up at his top of the class record at a “lesser” school – as well as his federal clerkship and the years of hard work that followed.

I’m currently working with a couple of young lawyers who find themselves in the odd position of trying to decide how to appraise the “value” of a “top school.” One woman was accepted at a “top” place, but offered a full scholarship at a “second-tier” institution. Is it worth $150k to go to the prestige school? The education itself will be nearly identical. Is the snob value worth it? According to one of my clients, half the kids at Columbia Law are struggling to find jobs right now, so it doesn’t sound like the “top “ places are pulling their weight. On the other hand, maybe it’s even worse coming out of a “second tier” joint. Crucially, though – with no debt, she wouldn’t be as desperate as everyone else. I see plenty of young lawyers emerging from “top schools” (and every other kind of school) with shaky job prospects, huge debt and – worst of all – the sense that going to law school was a mistake. The debt reduces them to indentured servitude, making it impossible to do anything else, at least until they’ve paid the piper.

How about the law firms themselves? Surely some are “better” than others?

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I ♥ Law!

Posted in AboveTheLaw series, tagged , , , , , , , on June 23, 2010| 28 Comments »

I feel self-conscious sometimes about the pessimism of this column with regard to law as a career path.  That pessimism reflects what I see every day in my practice – miserable lawyers.

My experiences might be skewed as a result of self-selection.  It makes sense that unhappy lawyers would seek a psychotherapist who is a former lawyer and writes a column like mine, and it makes sense that these same unhappy lawyers would write me letters and post comments on my site about their (mostly unhappy) experiences.

Also, in fairness, the country is in the midst of a deep recession.  It’s hard to be happy at any career when you can’t find a job, or half the offices on your floor are empty and there isn’t enough work to go around and you’re worrying about whether you’ll have a job next week.  I see clients from other industries who are also affected by the economic downturn, such as folks in the fashion and retail world, many of whom are struggling with long-term unemployment, and even bankruptcy and foreclosure.  They’re not exactly brimming with high spirited fun either.

The difference is that those people love what they do.  They’re just out of work.

With lawyers, even the ones who have well-paid jobs seem – mostly – unhappy.

Nevertheless, in keeping with this week’s theme of cheerful good times, we’re going to ignore them – and talk about happy lawyers.  Bouncy, perky, downright merry, good-time lawyers.

I have seen a few happy lawyers.  They exist, and they tend to fall into two groups.

The first group work in criminal law.  I’ve met Legal Aid attorneys, prosecutors and even lawyers doing white collar defense, and they are often happy and like what they do.  These are the guys who grew up wanting to be Atticus Finch or Perry Mason.  They typically love their jobs, and are proud of what they do.  Some Legal Aid lawyers have described their careers to me as a calling – they are deeply committed to their vital role in our society.

The other happy lawyers are the guys with lifestyle jobs – the ones who work normal hours, report to reasonable, supportive supervisors, and generally don’t mind being lawyers.  Some quirky small practices fall into this “lifestyle” category.  I’ve run into lawyers who specialize in employment contracts for fashion designers, run a “beverage and alcohol” group at a smallish west coast firm, or handle bi-lingual business for Chilean corporations operating in the US.  It’s not so much about the work, but the laid-back, supportive atmosphere of these places.  Going off the beaten path tends to let people relax – maybe because there’s less competition.  I’ve seen a similar effect with lawyers who work in federal agencies and sometimes in-house counsel jobs, where – at least compared to big firms – the culture is friendly, the hours reasonable and the supervisors supportive.

Those two groups are the happy lawyers.  They love the law, or at least don’t especially mind it.

The rest of the attorneys I treat – the vast majority – not so much.

So…what are the lessons to be learned from observing happy lawyers?

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Go Climb a Mountain

Posted in AboveTheLaw series, tagged , , on June 16, 2010| 37 Comments »

My patient was telling me about his new job.

On the face of things, there was nothing to complain about. He’d hated his old firm — a Biglaw institution that he called “soulless.” The new place, a New York City-based securities boutique, was different. The people were smart – practically cosmopolitan by comparison. And for the first time, he wasn’t being treated like a junior. They respected his judgment – no one was correcting his work.

I offered congratulations.

He looked thoughtful, and I asked what was wrong.

“This is going to sound crazy.”

“Crazy is my business. Try me.”

“I didn’t want to get this job. I was hoping the old place would fire me.”

“Okay. Why?”

“I wanted to be free.”

He’d gone so far in pursuit of his secret fantasy of getting fired that he’d planned a trip to India and investigated moving to Oregon, where an old friend lives. He had money saved up, and was ready to apply for unemployment and sell his apartment. It was all worked out. He was going to escape – to chase a dream of living near the mountains and surrounding himself with laid-back, creative people.

Now – by a stroke of luck – he was sitting in another big city law firm, earning a large salary, continuing with his career.

He had nothing to complain about – but he was crushed.

The problem was simple. He was going nowhere – or, at least, nowhere he wanted to be.

This guy could stick around at this firm for twenty years and end up a senior securities attorney – maybe even a partner. He’d be wealthy. He’d attend bar association thingamabobs and sit on panels. He’d have his own clients and bring in business. That was where he was headed if he stayed on his current track, passively charting the course of least resistance.

But he didn’t want any of that. He didn’t like securities law. He didn’t really like law, period. He just fell into it because he needed something to do and stayed for the money.

Now he sat in my office, crying – talking about what might have been.

“My friend owns a restaurant, in Oregon, on an old wharf. They specialize in organic, locally-grown food. I was going to move to Oregon and manage the place for him. I wouldn’t earn much, but my friend says I have the personality and the talent to run a restaurant. And I love Oregon – living near the forest and the sea.”

I asked him what was stopping him from quitting right now to pursue his dream.

“I’d never have the balls. I couldn’t give up this money.”

“Not even for your dream?”

He shook his head. That was that. It was decided.

Stasis is a trap between anger and fear. Anger that you aren’t living the life you want. Fear that if you let go, you’ll lose everything.

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Bizarro World

Posted in AboveTheLaw series, tagged , on June 8, 2010| 4 Comments »

I summered at Shearman & Sterling way back in 1996. Judging from my clients’ feedback, the summer associate “experience” at big law firms hasn’t changed much over the years. With the recession, it’s harder to get a summer associate position – but once you’re in, it’s pretty much the same old thing – or maybe the same old thing on lysergic acid diethylamide. It was a pretty weird experience to begin with.

As a summer associate, you’re entering Bizarro World, and nothing makes sense in Bizarro World. Nothing ever has, and nothing ever will.

Here’s how it works:

You show up, dressed in the new suit you probably bought with your mom. You’re a little nervous and eager to impress. The first day starts out pretty much as you’d expect, with human resources spiels – “trainings” – on stuff like how to use the library, how to turn on your computer, how to find the word-processing department, whatever.

You are presented with your desk – your own desk in a law firm! You chat excitedly with the other summers, sizing one another up, seeking allies – someone you can trust, who seems to be thinking the same things you are. There are no obvious candidates.

What now?

Eventually you are introduced to a senior associate and given your first assignment. You rush off to finish it and promise yourself it will be the best summer associate assignment in the history of the firm. As you get down to work, it turns out to be some confusing research question that either has an obvious answer that you find in about twenty minutes, or it’s not really a question at all, it’s just a broad open-ended request to poke around for cases, so you’re not sure what they want. Or it’s an inquiry regarding the income taxation of irrevocable charitable annuity trust stand-by provisions in the State of Florida under provision b(7), and you’re feeling a little out of your depth.

Either:

You finish it in twenty minutes, with a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach that maybe you did something wrong. So you wait an hour or two, re-checking everything, then poke around the library trying to look serious and busy before you hand it in.

Or you struggle through dozens of cases, trying to find something relevant, with a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach that maybe you’re doing something wrong, but determined to produce a good heap of print-outs and some sort of summary even if you suspect you might be totally off-point.

Or you try to figure out what a charitable annuity trust is and stand gaping like an idiot while the punctilious and efficient law librarian produces state law documents that appear to be written in Klingon. A cold wave of panic rolls up your spine. You wonder if it’s worth the risk to ask the senior associate for more guidance.

Let’s say you actually go back to the senior associate. You brace yourself to look like an idiot. You knock on his office door, and he’s surprisingly friendly.

“Ummmm…I’m not sure I understood the parameters of the question. Do you think I could walk through it with you for a minute?”

He smiles, and too-quickly agrees that the question was a little unclear, but says it looks like you did a great job of “taking a stab at it.” He admits he’s busy at the moment, and suggests you put it down for now, but adds that you’ve “done a great job” and he’ll have another assignment for you soon.

That was your first assignment and you’re sure all you’ve accomplished is to make the one guy you needed to impress think you’re an idiot.

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Not a baby bird

Posted in AboveTheLaw series, tagged , , on June 1, 2010| 11 Comments »

Here’s a letter I received recently. Yes, it’s real, but I’ve removed anything identifiable to protect the sender:

Hi Will,

I read your thoughts of the legal profession on Above the Law and thought you neatly summarized my situation. I wish I was the type of person who could expel all the anger but instead I feel my self esteem disintegrating. It’s starting to become apparent to my co-workers (i.e. I cry at work). There’s one other female associate in my office and she’s going through the same thing. My problem is I believe the negative things my bosses tell me. I explained this to my boss (when he asked why we were crying) and promised him I would try to develop better coping skills. How do I make myself not care when he goes off on me?

For better or worse, this letter is typical – I hear a lot of stories like this.

An institute director I used to work with – a grizzled veteran of the therapy trenches – used to tell patients he wished he could make the world a better place, but he couldn’t. He could only better prepare them to deal with the world the way it is.

That’s how I feel about law firms. They can be brutal, and I can’t do much about that. But there are ways to deal.

My advice to this woman is to stop acting like a baby bird.

Allow me to explain.

Under stress, it is natural to regress to a child-like way of relating to the world. That’s because stress makes you feel overwhelmed, which is how young children, who are small and helpless, feel all the time. Feeling small, helpless and overwhelmed takes you back to a time early in your life, and old behaviors can kick in. You can start relating to authority figures like parent figures, focusing on pleasing them and forgetting that you have an adult’s right to judge your own behavior on your own terms, and to fight back and defend yourself.

There’s a good evolutionary reason why children are such natural parent-pleasers. A child evolves to survive by pleasing a parent. That’s because nature can be brutal – and so can parents. It has been shown again and again that, lacking sufficient food, a mother bird will toss a new-born chick out of the nest to die. It happens in most species, and at some level, the parent animal is selecting the child that fails to please for culling.

Baby chicks are warm and fuzzy. Nature is not. When a little bird fails to please its parent, that chick quite rightly panics and blames herself – and frantically tries to please as though its life depended on it.

You don’t have to act like a baby chick. Not at a law firm.
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Not a Knuckle-dragger

Posted in AboveTheLaw series, tagged , , , , on May 26, 2010| 7 Comments »

I received this timely and topical letter a few weeks ago:

Hello,

Now is the time of year when all the 3L’s at every law school are enjoying the time between graduation and starting their bar review (at least for me). Do you have any advice for us on how to keep our sanity during this 10 week adventure and not go crazy or over-stress when the big day finally comes?

Thanks,

JD2010

It got me thinking about my own bar exam experience – and brought back a memory from my law school days.

Close to graduation time, I was having a final meeting with a professor with whom I’d written a journal article. It was a pleasant meeting – the article was in print and he was pleased with it. He even said he was going to use it as part of his syllabus for a seminar. I was feeling as close to a super-star as I ever got in law school.

At some point I confided my concerns about the approaching bar exam. I told him it gave me butterflies in my stomach.

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” he assured me. “Only the real knuckle-draggers fail the bar exam.”

We shared a laugh, I shook his hand and left his office, but I knew – more than anything in the world – that I needed to pass that exam. I didn’t want to be a “knuckle-dragger.” I’m guessing you don’t want to be one, either.

The bar is a weird exam. It goes on forever, deals mostly with trivia, and no one cares how they do on it – you only have to pass.

In real world terms, the exam is entirely useless. At best, it gives you a smattering of a details from state law. At worst, it’s downright bizarre. I remember blowing a practice question because – it turns out – smoke-damaged – not charred – wood, didn’t count as evidence of arson in NY State. The wood had to be burned by a flame. Or something like that. I stared at the answer, wondering how anything so impossibly obscure could make it onto a statewide, standardized exam. But there were plenty of questions like that.

Anyway – first, here’s my exam-taking advice, handed down from my old roommate at Harvard, who went to Columbia Law School and got his JD a couple years before me. My psychotherapist advice will follow.

The trick to studying for the bar is not to bother with bar review lectures – they are a waste of time. Just take all the study materials and give yourself four hours to study them every weekday morning, from 9 am – 1 pm, for about three or four weeks.

Read the outlines front to back, slowly and carefully, then do all the practice tests, and outline each and every one of the practice essay questions. Check everything, make sure you understand anything you got wrong on the practice tests and – voila! You’ll do fine. In fact, you’ll be over-prepared, which is the idea.

At some point you’ll realize you know everything – even the bar only covers a discrete universe of information. I was so over-prepared that I spent the last few days before the exam hanging out at my cousin’s beach house, relaxing. By that time, I knew what I needed to know and it was getting repetitious.

If you follow this method, you will most likely follow in our paths and do extremely well on the bar exam – better than you have to do.

For years now, I’ve shared this advice with friends and clients. To a man, they have rejected it.

One client, last week, said “that’s not going to happen.”

I asked why, and she said “because I could never do that.”

Now I’ll put my psychotherapist hat back on, and talk about the infantilizing effects of legal education.

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Stooping to Conquer

Posted in AboveTheLaw series, tagged , , , , , on May 19, 2010| 10 Comments »

It’s frustrating, trying to teach lawyers the fundamentals of doing business. Several of them arrive in my office each month, wanting advice on changing careers. But they haven’t got a clue.

That’s because they still think success is making your parents happy. Lawyers start out as the kids who do everything right. They behave. They obey. They get good grades. Typically they aren’t especially talented at anything – just good at everything. The formal education system is designed to reward that sort of bland “goodness.” It isn’t about getting an A in any one subject – it’s about getting “all A’s.”

That doesn’t make any sense in the real world. You don’t need all-A’s, you need to discover the work that you love to do.

A friend of mine at Harvard failed or nearly failed half his courses every year. His grade-point average was dismal. Why? He was in a laboratory day and night, doing PhD level, cutting-edge bio research. He used to laugh at the academic advisors who lectured him about his grades. Now, after a successful career as a scientific researcher and inventor, he’s become a millionaire venture capitalist.

He knew what he wanted to do, and knew that his GPA wasn’t going to hold him back.

A lawyer would never take that path – in fact, he couldn’t. Legal education is all about exams, exams and more exams, and being the very best on every one, even if only by a tiny percentage. From that one extra point on the LSAT to that one extra point on the bar exam, it’s about everyone doing the same thing, but beating the next guy by a hair.

With that training, you end up utterly unequipped for the world of business, which is why the transition to business is so difficult for a lawyer.

Legal education, and law firm work, is infantilizing. It regresses you into the child who instinctively desires to delight a parent. You try to please an authority figure by doing what they say. You do the work, and make them happy.

That strategy is doom for an entrepreneur. To succeed in business you must separate from the parent, and begin to parent yourself. That means letting go of pleasing others, and becoming the authority figure in your own world. You’re the boss. You follow your own instincts. You make yourself happy.

Here are some rules for stamping out the lawyer in you and embracing the business person:

Develop people skills. A young lawyer asked me to help him get out of law the other day, and I suggested group therapy, so he could work on his interpersonal communication. He nixed that idea, saying it wouldn’t be a good idea for him, since he “tends to shut down in groups.”

If you are trying to do business, you can’t “shut down in groups” – you have to “light up” in groups. Business isn’t about disappearing into your office and working all night. It’s about networking, working contacts and getting people excited about you and what you’re selling. Which brings me to another rule…

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The Terrible Twos

Posted in AboveTheLaw series on May 12, 2010| 26 Comments »

You pass through a stage when you’re about two years old – the famous “terrible twos.” It’s marked by stubborn refusals to obey orders, and sometimes downright tantrums.  The infant is growing into a person. For the first time, he wants control over his own life.

It’s called personal autonomy. You go where you want to go, do what you want to do, and refuse to do what you don’t want to do.  A crucial phase of human psychological development, it marks the inception of an independent identity, a sense of purpose – and a sense of self.

This week I worked with a young second year from a big firm. She related a hellish story of law firm life.

This past Saturday morning she was at the airport in line with a boarding pass, heading to her best friend’s wedding, when her cellphone rang. It was a partner. He needed her in right away.

She explained that she was about to step on a plane.

He asked, “Well, are you actually in the wedding?”

She said no.

“Then you don’t have to be there.”

You’ve heard stories like this. One of my clients admitted to a partner that it was actually his step-grandmother’s funeral he was leaving the office to attend. This old woman had been married to his grandfather for 30 years and was the only grandmother he’d ever known, but he lost on a technicality. He couldn’t be at that funeral because she wasn’t family. Some court filing was more important.

Young attorneys at big firms don’t have personal autonomy.

Even for a two-year old, it is degrading to be treated like an infant.  But at least a two year old can throw a tantrum.  You don’t have that option. You have to contain all that anger, and often it gets turned inward, triggering low self-esteem and depression.

You know this problem exists – we all do. The question becomes what to do about it.

I have two suggestions:

First, lawyers can treat one another like adults instead of infants.

Virtually nothing that has to be done by Monday really has to be done by Monday. That is a law firm myth.

I remember, in the business world, my boss demanding that a contract be re-drafted by our outside counsel for Monday morning. It was Friday afternoon.  I interrupted the call to say I wanted to take a look at the current draft before then, and that I’d get it to the outside counsel by Monday morning so she could sign off on my changes.

I was lying. But I could almost hear her body collapse in relief. I knew the outside counsel. She was 27 years old and had been planning to go skiing that weekend with her boyfriend.  I’d worked as a lawyer at a big law firm. I knew she would be devastated if we trashed her weekend. I also knew it wasn’t that important – so I did what I had to.

I approached my boss, a Vice President of Marketing, a few days later, and talked to him about it.

“Don’t you realize how much they bill us an hour for her time?” He said. “She should work on weekends.”

When money is made more important than people, someone always suffers.  I didn’t care what they billed us for her hours. I was worried about her. She was a person.

I’m making a plea here for lawyers who have had their weekends ruined to do whatever it takes to make sure someone else’s weekend isn’t ruined, too.

That means partners can try to make things more transparent, so associates have a heads-up sooner.

That means instead of pulling in some poor junior who’s going to his grandmother’s funeral, call in a paralegal, who’d probably love the over-time and can do most of the same work anyway.

That means realizing that other people are people, too, and they deserve to have some control over their lives.

My second suggestion is to you lawyers out there whose autonomy is being taken from you.

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The Golden Trough

Posted in AboveTheLaw series, tagged on May 5, 2010| 7 Comments »


When I summered at Shearman & Sterling back in the late ’90s, the partners had just voted on whether to install a gym in the building or create a formal dining room.

Needless to say, they went with the dining room.

It was strictly lawyers-only. At the center stood a buffet fit for a cruise ship, replete with heaping chafing dishes. On certain days, they even had a “prime rib station,” manned by a guy wearing a toque.

This was the golden trough. We fed with complete abandon – at least on days when we weren’t being whisked off to The Four Seasons by a partner pretending to remember our names.

The joke was that all summer associates at Shearman gained 15 pounds.

It wasn’t a joke. We did.

Almost overnight a relatively in-shape pack of law students morphed into a fresh, pudgy litter of big firm attorneys.

It’s no secret law firms ply you with food to address the fact that they’re denying you everything else.

You’re giving up a social life and working around the clock – but there’s a smorgasbord only steps away, and free cookies in the conference rooms! If it gets really late (which happens a lot), you can order anything you want – anything! – from the 75 take-out menus stuffed in your secretary’s desk drawer.

One late night at S&C, we decided to push the envelope. We all ordered take-out “surf-and-turf” platters. It was absurd – bleary-eyed associates tearing into steak and lobster tails with plastic forks and knives, sitting around a table cluttered with closing documents.

That was, admittedly, taking things to extremes. But eating at law firms is always something of a parody of a true dining experience. It amounts to exacting revenge for the fact of your presence there when you’d rather be somewhere else.

In my day, at least, the financial printers was the ultimate example of what we used to call “punitive billing.” They knew you resented spending your night in that place proofing offering documents, and the client was paying the bill. So they outfitted their proofing rooms like suites on a yacht, with menus elegantly bound between leather covers.

If you nodded in the direction of a printer employee at 1 am when he asked if he could get you anything, you’d probably end up with a $300 plate of sushi from the best joint in TriBeCa.

I know – it happened to me.

I stuffed myself until I felt ridiculous, then simply gave up. I hope somebody ate it.

Ultimately, lawyers eat their anger. They pig out at the client’s expense – or the law firm’s – because they hate the way they’re treated.

Ironically – and I know this because in the business world I dealt with outside counsel – clients resent how much their lawyers charge, and punish them by demanding insane deadlines and making them work nights and weekends.

The wheel of bad karma just keeps turning.

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Where you eat

Posted in AboveTheLaw series, tagged , , , , on April 28, 2010| 23 Comments »

Office romances are endemic in the legal profession. I see them constantly with my patients.

Why is there so much fooling around at law firms?

Triangulation.

A partner in a couple “triangulates” – looking to a third party to replace what’s missing in his relationship.

For lawyers, that boils down to time spent together.

One married lawyer told me she flirts with a junior associate at her office. She loves her husband, but never sees him. Flirting with the junior satisfies her craving for sexual attention. Lately, though, they’ve been going out for drinks, and she’s afraid something will happen she’ll regret.

Single lawyers experience the same romantic isolation. One said she hadn’t been to a bar or club – let alone a party – for over a year. She keeps canceling dates because of work, and her friends no longer ask her out because she always says no. This month she’s been working late nights with another associate at her firm and they’ve started hooking up.

Most people divide their days in three equal parts: You work. You play. And you sleep.

Lawyers sleep – sometimes. But they don’t play – they just work. Then they work some more.

When work replaces play, you find yourself playing at work: taking Facebook breaks, creating candy games to get through doc review…or letting things turn jiggy with co-workers.

Is there a problem with getting it on at the office?

If you’re married, or in a committed relationship, the answer is easy: yes. That’s because, if you’re sleeping around, you’re lying to someone.

There’s nothing sacred or holy about monogamy. But you can’t have your cake and eat it too. You wouldn’t want someone to lie to you, so you shouldn’t lie to him.

For single lawyers the issues are subtler, but the answer is still yes – there is a problem.

The dysfunction created by a law firm romance is epitomized by the archetypal hook-up between a 40-something male partner and a 20-something female associate.

I see it all the time, and yes, sometimes it’s a female partner and sometimes it’s between two men or two women. Doesn’t matter. It’s a train wreck.

The partner is riding out a power trip. He’s on his second or third wife, using status and money to avoid other issues like personal insecurities and fear of commitment.

The associate gets a rush of power, too. Suddenly she’s the center of attention for a guy earning seven figures – and he’s hinting that things are falling apart with the wife.

Two big problems…

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Get a job

Posted in AboveTheLaw series, tagged , , , , on April 20, 2010| 11 Comments »

I’ve written a fair amount about lawyers at the office in this column.

Right now a lot of lawyers aren’t at the office.

They’re at home, out of work.

Unemployment is tough on lawyers because they tend to be pleasers – they have to be, to earn the grades to make it into law school.

It’s all about pleasing others at a firm, too. You submit to the whims of a partner and work around the clock.

Like all pleasers, lawyers get used to looking outside themselves for affirmation of their worth.

When you’re unemployed, there’s no one to please but yourself. You’re alone with you – and for a pleaser, that can lead to a plunge in self-esteem.

That’s why, during unemployment, you have to be especially good to yourself.

You can’t afford to fall into a hole right now – you need to stay strong. That means reminding yourself of your achievements – your grades, your degree, your accomplishments at a firm.

If things get truly dire – remember the bottom line: you’re doing your best. That’s all anyone can ask.

This is no time to beat yourself up. Remember to be you – your best self – the person you really are. That’s more than just a lawyer – that’s a person. Spend time with friends, and people who like you. You’re worth something and you know it – and you need all the support you can get.

You also need some time off.

The worst thing about being unemployed, as one of my unemployed lawyer clients put it, is that “when you’re unemployed, you’re always working.”

Unemployment can turn into a 24-hour/day grind. Give yourself permission to relax sometimes. Activity is important – but so is taking time off to get your head together.

Job interviews, in my experience, can be particularly difficult for lawyers.

Pleasers never learn to sell themselves – you just do what you’re told and hope good things happen.

That doesn’t work in a job interview.

You might remember those mass interviews the law school placement departments arranged back in the boom years. They typically consisted of a handshake, a dutiful glance at a resume, and a pointless chat about nothing.

Those weren’t real job interviews. Those firms were hiring your resume. They just wanted to make sure you could dress yourself. The interviewers often seemed as clueless as the candidates.

It’s different now, during a recession. You have to sell yourself actively.

That can be tough for a lawyer. (more…)

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No rest for the weary

Posted in AboveTheLaw series, tagged , , , on April 14, 2010| 8 Comments »

My lawyer clients sometimes arrive at my office complaining about their awful work hours. They talk about how worn out they are, how they pulled all-nighters, came in on weekends, etc.

Other times they come in with a different complaint – there’s nothing to do.

Why would that be a problem? Couldn’t they just relax a bit and catch their breath?

No. Because at big law firms, no one is ever supposed to admit there’s nothing to do.

The big firms endlessly remind you of their ridiculous demands for “billable hours” – but they never so much as whisper that they might not always have sufficient work to keep you there that long.

If you’ve ever attended a partner’s meeting, you’ll know the rainmakers aren’t just sitting around gossiping about associates. They’re pressuring one another – and especially the young partners – to cultivate clients and drum up work.

One more secret: partners hog the work during dry times. That’s why associates feel the drought so severely.

The real issue here isn’t that workflow is variable at law firms. It’s variable at any business. That’s the way the world works. Of course there will be downtime.

The problem is that this reality isn’t acknowledged at law firms. That creates an atmosphere, at least for associates, in which rest, downtime, slow-downs – whatever you want to call it – are never permitted to happen. There’s no work – but the associates cannot enjoy that situation and catch their breath. Instead of resting, you switch from one intense pressure to another. Instead of having too much work and being exhausted – you’re exhausted with worry.

When there’s nothing to do, an associate is placed in a quandary.

No one admits it and says, “Hey, it’s slow this week – why don’t you take a couple days off?” That doesn’t happen at law firms.

Curiously, it does happen elsewhere. When I was in the business world, it was considered a matter of course to grab your coat and head home if things were slow. People respected the work you did, and there was no point in “face time.” If things were slow, you took off.

A friend of mine who worked at McKinsey consulting for years told me they had a phrase for these periods. You were said to be “on the beach” for a few days or weeks, while the partners drummed up business. It was acknowledged that this was the case, and no one expected you to do anything but rest up and be on call for the next project.

Law firms are different. Here is a culture that abhors rest above all else.

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Maybe you’re not cut out for this place

Posted in AboveTheLaw series, tagged , , , , on April 7, 2010| 36 Comments »

It seems like the cruelest thing they could say to you, but according to lawyers I work with as a therapist, they say it all the time:

Maybe you’re not cut out for this place.

There are variations, of course. There’s the old favorite:

Maybe you’re not cut out for this work.

Or – to put the knife in and twist it:

Maybe you’re not cut out to be a lawyer.

You’ve taken the LSAT, applied to law school, borrowed the budget of a small African nation, sat through endless lectures and countless exams, passed the atrocious trivia contest known as the bar, and now you’re in a big, powerful law firm – sinking like a stone.

And they’re letting you know it’s not a fluke, either – it’s you.

Maybe you’re not cut out for this place.

There’s always a smug half-smile on the face of the partner who says it, too.

Nice of him to tell you now, right?

At least with the “not cut out for this place” line, you can kid yourself life would be better with another employer. There are headhunters lining up to pocket a fee by packing you off to a “lifestyle” firm, where life is sweet and easy.

But you’re not that naive. Not after what you’ve been through. If “lifestyle” law firms exist, they are the holy grail of the legal profession – known only to a sacred few, not to every headhunter in the phone book.

The real question is why you run in horror from “maybe you’re not cut out for this place,” instead of asking yourself whether you really are cut out for this place.

You probably feel that – after all you did to get here – you have to be cut out for this place, and you have to be cut out for this job. You have to be a lawyer because you’ve sunk too much time and money into it to do anything else. You have no choice, no options, no future.

That’s not true.

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Mental health and the bar

Posted in AboveTheLaw series, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 31, 2010| 8 Comments »

The People’s Therapist received an interesting and important letter a few weeks ago from a 3L (I’ve redacted it and altered some details to preserve anonymity):

Mr. Meyerhofer,

I have a question (or perhaps a topic suggestion for a post, as I’m sure many students are wondering about this) about the character and fitness part of the NY bar application.

I have seen a therapist several times over the years for issues relating to depression, eating disorders, and self-injury. On the NY bar application it asks whether you have any psychological issues that might effect your ability to perform as a lawyer. I have absolutely no idea whether I’m required to disclose my psychological treatment history, or if I do, how much of it. Is the determination based on what I personally think, or is it a reasonable person standard?

As I’ve had to go to the ER several times over the years, objectively I could see how someone could interpret that as something that could affect my performance. However, I personally don’t think that it does.

I don’t really know who I could ask about this, as I don’t really want my school administrators to know about my issues. Any information you might have would be much appreciated. Thank you so much for your help!

Sincerely,

“Stumped in Syracuse”

To begin with, here is a passage from a pamphlet, entitled “Are you fit to be a Lawyer,” published by the New York State Lawyer Assistance Trust:

Neither receiving treatment for alcoholism, drug addiction or mental health concerns, nor the status of being a recovering alcoholic or recovering addict are grounds for denial of admission to the bar.

In New York, the focus of the inquiry is on whether chemical abuse or addiction or a mental health condition impairs the applicant’s current ability to practice law.

The bar application asks whether the applicant has “any mental or emotional condition or substance abuse problem that could adversely affect” the “capability to practice law”, and whether the applicant is “currently using any illegal drugs.”

While honesty in disclosing past conduct (for example, arrests and convictions) is essential, disclosure of past treatment is not required. No questions are asked about past treatment. The Committees encourage law students who are experiencing drug, alcohol or other addiction or mental health issues to address those issues as soon as possible, regardless of when the student plans to seek admission to the bar.

The bottom line seems clear – there’s no legal duty for Stumped in Syracuse to disclose his past history of treatment on his bar application unless his mental illness currently impairs his ability to practice law. Under this standard, it would require a severe mental health condition to trigger this duty, and the majority of situations involving mental illness – certainly the ones described in Stumped in Syracuse’s letter – would not require disclosure.

The real issue here – as Stumped suggests – is stigma. Stumped, like any rational person, is afraid someone will find out about his condition and jump to the unfair assumption that he is unfit for his job. That would be a disaster for anyone interested in preserving his professional reputation. For Stumped, the ignorance surrounding mental illness may pose a greater threat than the illness itself.

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You’re in trouble

Posted in AboveTheLaw series, Thoughts and Musings, tagged , , , , , on March 17, 2010| 48 Comments »

Remember when you were a kid, and you got caught doing something you shouldn’t, and a big cloud formed over your head?

You were “in trouble.”

The other kids sort of inched out of your path and exchanged looks. They didn’t want any piece of what you had coming. Mom was going to talk to you later. Or dad. You’d done something wrong.

It feels that way sometimes at a big law firm – in fact, a lot of the time.

Maybe you forget to ask a crucial question during a deposition. Or you wrote a memo that didn’t have the answer your partner wanted. Maybe – and this happened to me once – you ended up getting berated for being “too friendly” to the other side at a drafting conference. Maybe you’re still not sure exactly what you did wrong, but it must have been something. It’s always something.

The cloud hangs over you in the office and follows you home. When you were a kid, it eventually dissipated, but now it lingers indefinitely. What’s really going on?

A little dose of anxiety is being injected into you, in the form of a thought.

Anxiety is triggered by cognition – predictive thoughts. You predict something bad is going to happen, so you clutch up in preparation – tense up and prepare for attack.

At a law firm, the standard predictive cognition – the expectation – is that you are going to be criticized. They do that a lot at law firms. It is a fair guess that if something goes wrong, you are going to be blamed – and things go wrong all the time.

It got to the point for me, at Sullivan & Cromwell, that I felt my entire body clench in preparation for attack just walking through the doors of 125 Broad Street and stepping into that elevator.

When you spend long periods of time tensed up, on alert for attack, it takes a toll on your nervous system. In fact, it can produce lasting damage.

In World War I, soldiers spent weeks in trenches under fire, crouched in terror, waiting for that next bomb or bullet with their name on it. Those were some of the first documented cases of what was called “shell shock” then and PTSD now – Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

It might seem a stretch to suggest that lawyers at big law firms suffer from PTSD symptoms.

But that’s exactly what I’m doing.

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Popping pills at the office

Posted in AboveTheLaw series, Thoughts and Musings, tagged , , , , , , , , on March 10, 2010| 19 Comments »

A New York Times article from a few weeks ago holds enormous potential ramifications for lawyers bent over their desks at big law firms. The tentative conclusion of the piece was simple: if you are dealing with minor depression, or in fact, with anything other than massive, serious depression, popping anti-depressant pills is probably a waste of time. In fact, a placebo might do you more good.

How many lawyers are currently taking anti-depressants? According to the admittedly anecdotal evidence from the lawyers I’ve seen over the years in my private practice, quite a few.

It’s such a lawyerly thing to do. You figure out you’re depressed, so you do something about it – march over to your doctor, or maybe a high-powered shrink with a top reputation, get diagnosed, and get your pills. The whole thing takes a few minutes, and you’re back on the job. No wasting billable hours, no whining and complaining on a therapist’s couch – you take care of the problem and move on. Take a pill and knock it off with the martyr routine.

However, there are a few problems with anti-depressants…

First, like I said, they might not work. Don’t believe me? Here’s an excerpt from the article:

Some widely prescribed drugs for depression provide relief in extreme cases but are no more effective than placebo pills for most patients, according to a new analysis released Tuesday.

The findings could help settle a longstanding debate about antidepressants. While the study does not imply that the drugs are worthless for anyone with moderate to serious depression — many such people do seem to benefit — it does provide one likely explanation for the sharp disagreement among experts about the drugs’ overall effectiveness.

Second, the side-effects. This includes the “sexual side-effects” – which might mean, if you’re a guy, erectile dysfunction, and whichever gender you are, inability to reach orgasm. And there are “regular” side effects, too – like weight gain.

Third, anti-depressants only work while you’re on them. I’ve heard of people staying on anti-depressants for decades, but I have no idea what the long-term effects are because no one knows. If you’d like to experiment on yourself, I’m sure the pharmaceutical industry would be fascinated to find out.

Fourth, to the extent they do work, it’s by erasing feelings. Anti-depressants tend to narrow the bandwidth of what you feel, chopping off the top and the bottom – no more highs, no more lows. That can bring relief, but at a cost.

Fifth, other than the vague explanation that they “affect neurotransmitter levels,” no one really understands how they work. Anti-depressant medications, especially the new generation of drugs, are a relatively recent development, and the exact mechanism that produces the results isn’t fully understood.

Is there another option?

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Alone in a crowd

Posted in AboveTheLaw series, tagged , , , , on March 3, 2010| 53 Comments »


Last week I did a first session with a typical client – a young lawyer worried about starting at a big firm.

I couldn’t do real psychotherapy with this guy. Some lawyers are like that – they don’t trust anyone enough to open up. It was more like an awkward coaching session. When I tried to explore his feelings, he cut me off and got down to business.

He was fine, he assured me. He’d already decided he was going to take the money. He just wanted some advice. Then he related bad experiences from the summer program, and asked for my take on big firm life.

I suggested ways to maintain emotional insulation from the worst aspects of a big firm. I also proposed that he do psychotherapy, and maybe group psychotherapy, for emotional support while he was there. This didn’t make much of an impression. His mind seemed elsewhere.

He mentioned wistfully that he “wanted to be a writer, but couldn’t make a decent living at it.” I waited for more, but he changed the subject.

Eventually he left my office, and I thought that’s that. I’d never hear from him again – another unhappy lawyer who’d contacted me in a moment of weakness, then retreated back to his cave, alone.

The next day I received an email that pretended to be a thank you, but was really a warning from this guy not to mention his story in my column. It was a curt, condescending note which ended like a law firm letter, with “best regards.” Only a lawyer could write a note like that to a therapist.

I’ve received a few of these threatening notes over the years. I consider them a by-product of working with lawyers.

I know what you’re thinking. Yes, I’m a therapist, and I charge people for my services. And of course I disguise identities in this column to preserve confidentiality. He has a right to send me any letter he wants, and to have his confidentiality preserved.

But there’s a larger issue here. Trust. And sharing. And honesty.

My column and my work as a psychotherapist are intended to help people. I work with plenty of patients – most of them non-lawyers – who open up to me and find relief.

It’s always tougher with lawyers. They hesitate to trust anyone. That makes things harder for me – but incalculably harder for them.

Big firm attorneys live in a closet. Inauthenticity is the rule at these firms – it pervades the culture. No one admits what they’re feeling because no one is supposed to trust anyone else. The result is isolation, which exacerbates every other toxic element of that life.

It’s a kind of macho code: Act like you’re doing fine. No matter what.

One of my patients said she broke down in tears last week in the bathroom stall at her firm, after a partner tore into her for some screw-up. She chose the bathroom because of her firm’s “open door policy.” She wasn’t allowed to close her office door for privacy.

I asked her how everyone else at her firm was holding up.

She shrugged.

“Fine, I guess.”

According to her, about two-thirds of the associates were fleeing after three years. I doubt they’re all doing fine.

Lawyers are good at hiding things. Especially how they feel.

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Fighting back from a bad review

Posted in AboveTheLaw series, tagged , , , , , , , , , on February 24, 2010| 36 Comments »

My patient, a senior associate doing IP litigation at a downtown firm, brought me the bad news.

“I got a terrible review last week.”

She seemed calm about it, considering. That’s because she knows how law firms work.

“I’m expensive, and they’re preparing for lay-offs. So they told me I’m terrible. It was ridiculous. They made stuff up off the top of their heads.”

I had to hand it to her. I wish I could have been so cool when the same thing happened to me.

My first year review at Sullivan & Cromwell went fine. Mostly, they didn’t seem to notice me. I wasn’t important enough to review.

Then, in the second year, it was suddenly a horror show. Nothing I did was right. The partners didn’t fool around at S&C – they give it to you with a sledgehammer.

Even then, I remember wondering about that one partner who seemed to like me. Of course, he wasn’t mentioned at the review.

Years later, after I’d given up on a legal career, I realized the truth. They’d probably given identical reviews to ten or fifteen percent of my class that year. We were the ones who left. It was a lay-off. Those terrible reviews were the partners’ way of creating a paper trail in preparation for letting us go – covering their tracks in case we sued.

My patient – an experienced senior associate at her second law firm job – knew how to handle this sort of thing. You don’t let them throw you.

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When the emptiness swallows you whole

Posted in AboveTheLaw series, Current Events, Thoughts and Musings, tagged , , , , , on February 16, 2010| 35 Comments »

Last October, a law school placement director friend of mine forwarded me an email with a juicy piece of big law gossip. A former associate at Sullivan & Cromwell had offed himself. He was 39.

The body was discovered beneath a highway bridge in Toronto. A few days earlier, it was revealed that since the mid-90’s, he and a co-conspirator made ten million dollars on an insider trading scheme. He’d stolen insider information from S&C, arriving early in the morning to dig through waste baskets, rifle partners’ desks and employ temporary word-processor codes to break into the computer system.

“You can’t make this shit up,” was my friend’s comment. “Wasn’t he from around your time?”

It took a minute to locate the face. Gil Cornblum. Jewish, a bit pudgy, with big round glasses. Gil, in that ridiculous little office two doors down from mine.

What was Gil like? Mild-mannered, pleasant, always smiling.

I should have known something was wrong.

The pieces fit together.

Gil kept weird hours. He used to chuckle that he liked to get in early so he didn’t have to stay late. It turned out he was in at 5 am, combing the firm for insider tips.

The lavish wedding, too. A mutual friend was invited up to Canada to watch Gil tie the knot, and was blown away.

As people do in these situations, I stopped for a moment to contemplate Gil’s death. His body was discovered at the bottom of a highway bridge. He was still breathing, according to the bits of news I found online.

So far as I could tell, that meant portly, lovable Gil Cornblum threw himself off a bridge on a Canadian highway in the middle of the night and lay on the bottom – of what? A rocky riverbed? – shattered and dying.

Suicide amounts to punishing whoever is supposed to take care of you because you feel their care is inadequate.

Certainly, the care we all received at S&C was inadequate, and we committed suicide a little each day just by staying there and putting ourselves through that abuse as our lives passed us by. Our slow suicide manifested in other ways as well. Most of us mistreated ourselves by neglecting our health, letting our friendships die off, ignoring our families, our hobbies, our lives.

Maybe insider trading was Gil’s grand suicidal gesture, his protest against the abuse he received. He put his entire life on the line, knowing he might well be caught, end up in jail and lose everything. He was playing Russian roulette, and maybe he knew he’d kill himself if he got caught.

And all for what? Money.

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