Without A Map

This poor blog. Sad, abused, neglected piece of cyberspace, hidden from the ever-present eye of Google. I return to add fabulous musings on…

On…

Perhaps that was always the problem with this space. It was Seinfeld without Seinfeld, but a place that was mine to do as I pleased.

I sit in a chilly gazebo on campus, bundled in my “warm fuzzy,” watching huge drops of rain plop from the eaves, bobbing to the Doobie Brothers pumping into my headphones, and taking my hands from the keyboard on occasion to knead them, an idiosyncratic — and not very effective — way to keep them warm. I look up, and through the windows I see the children who are mentored here once weekly run in through the breezeway, running perhaps to their law school mentors, but more likely running to dodge the raindrops and to find a warm space where they can sit with classmates and pass the hour before they get to go home.

It’s my second semester of my second year at law school. I’m more than halfway through. In many ways I’m over law school. I have serious doubts most days of the week whether this was a good idea, actually. The legal field is glutted. I personally know people with far better grades than me who have not found permanent employment. This state’s finances are so effed that I don’t know how in the world it can ever resume hiring. Who makes an investment of thousands of dollars into something with such a poor rate of return?

The odds were much brighter two years ago. The worst recession in generations has dimmed those odds to the point where me and my classmates casually joke about wasting money, time, sweat on this extremely expensive folly.

But it’s a way to kill time, I suppose.

I could’ve stayed where I was. It’s not exaggeration to say the field is dying in gasps and spurts. I talk to former coworkers, and I can hardly recognize the place that swooped me up five years ago, nudging me to move 2,200 miles via free plane rides, a hefty increase in pay, a hefty increase in staff, and a hefty increase in awards won. Today the product is about half the size, the staff is about half the size, and people say the fear is palpable. Every day. Of every week. It has to be a terrible thing to hate the thing that you fear that is the last barrier between you and the sinking black hole of the U.S. economy.

Or, it is the last barrier, until it isn’t, and you join the ranks of thousands of others of your ilk who also are unemployed, with very few prospects of finding similar work, perhaps ever again.

The economists talk about structural unemployment. Unemployed who’ll never get a job, basically. I wonder if I’ll be one of those people. I wonder how an economy that has shed so many jobs can possibly absorb so many people back into its ranks once things get moving again.

And then I wonder about others, like my mom, who attribute this bad stretch not to the forces of the economy, but to choices made in completely different areas of life. Hovering. And armed with an “I told you so.”

But alas, those are long-range concerns. In the short term I am concerned with losing weight. Running a 5K. Flying back to the midwest in a couple of weeks. Studying for finals. Preparing for a (mock) trial in a month. Getting my comment in publishable condition in two weeks. Switching banks. Figuring out how to pay for body work for a hit and run on my car a year ago.

It’s a rainy day, this March 3, 2010. It’s a rainy day, these few years between careers. Who knows where the sun will find me once the waiting ends.

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I thought I had gotten used to being a rube.

Nope. Still a rube.

Was doing some preliminary research on fall On Campus Interviews. (OCI). The Fall OCI is muy, muy, muy importante for law students. This is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, the reason why we’ve been working our asses off. This is where the Big Law apple gets really shiny and appealing. See, these employers, off the strength of your first-year grades, invite you to an interview. Many of these employers only take the top 10%, top 20% of the class for an interview. They also want law review, moot court, all the goodies. Usually it’s the largest employers who are coming to campus to interview, though there are smaller firms and a few government agencies who come through as well.

You interview, you land your summer job. And that’s it. If you do well your summer after 2L, they invite you back to work, full time, as an associate after you’ve graduated after your 3L.

For some reason, I didn’t realize just how important the grades were. It almost doesn’t matter what you graduate with, because those who are chasing those Big Law jobs landed them two full years before graduation, more or less.

Big Law. I’ve talked about it here before. Hell, I’m working at a Big Law firm this summer. But this is where the rube part comes in.

Sure, we know they make money. But I didn’t realize the money starts early. Summers, as summer associates are called, at a large firm can expect to make at least $1,700 a week. One L.A. firm was paying their summers 3,100 a week. Starting salaries for first-year associates at these firms, of course, start at six figures. One advertised its potential of a 20K + bonus. Others will pay you a stipend as you study for the bar, and will pay for bar review courses. (This is something I definitely plan to negotiate with my first job. Bar review courses are about $3,000. *And* most people can’t work while studying for the bar. It’s too intense.)

It’s just pots and pots and pots of money. I can see why people start to pass over the 75K job, if the 175K job is just in reach. You only need to bill 1950 hours*. Who needs to live?

I knew this was the reason why people come. But I didn’t know this was the reason why people come.

Damn, what a shiny apple.

*I’m starting to figure out what “1900 billable hours” actually translates to in real-person time. I’m working now maybe 45, 50 hours a week at the internship. Manageable. If I were billing, I’d only be billing about 25-30 hours. (I’m incredibly inefficient.) That puts me only about 1400 hours. I would be fired from the firm I’m interning at if I put in that kind of time.

Or, as this article puts it:

Billing 2,000 hours a year may not seem onerous. The total can be reached in just over eight billable hours a day, setting aside four weeks of the year for vacation and national holidays. But studies consistently show that a lawyer must spend three hours in the office for every two hours of billable work. Lawyers can’t simply bill time. They have to read and respond to mail and firm memos, go to meetings, read legal publications, and eat lunch—not to mention kib-bitz with colleagues, if not friends.

To do all of this and make the 2,000-hours target, a lawyer must spend the equivalent of 12 hours in the office for each working day. Since the day hasn’t gotten longer since 1958, the honest lawyer who commits to working “full-time”—to a schedule of 2,000 billable and thus 3,000 total hours—is giving his life to the firm.

Source: http://www.legalaffairs.org/issues/September-October-2002/review_kuckes_sepoct2002.msp

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Today went amazingly quick at work today. It was the oddest thing. I left around 5:30, not quite believing I’d been there since 9.

Perhaps the illness is setting in. The “attorney works too damn much for her own good” illness.

A bit of a routine has settled in around these parts. Mel B and I (mostly Mel B) have got the duplex cleared out enough where it looks like real people live there. (It took a machete and a lot of patience. And a visit from friends where we shoved boxes and things wholesale into closets.) I still look around, excited to be surrounded by my stuff, realizing more and more each day how stressful it was to live in places that weren’t mine. Right now we sit in our den, Melissa at her computer and me at mine, listening to John Scofield, feeling the breeze through the window and being glad I’m not writing a case brief right now.

So yeah. Routine. Each weekday morning I get in my fancy (for me) duds, feed or run from the outside cat, slide behind the wheel of my car, cross my fingers for decent traffic, and pull into the parking garage of one of the tall buildings downtown. I make sure to turn down my music as I swing around the narrow aisles and concrete pillars for spaces. I’m continually being tailgated by the likes of mercedes and porches and large SUVs because somehow I should just plow through the parking garage, cars and pedestrians be damned.

Perhaps the day flew by today because I’m finally figuring out what I need to do. Writing assignments. Research assignments. Thises and thats. Trying to make a good impression because even though I don’t want to be that kind of lawyer, damn, wouldn’t it be nice to land someplace and make six figures when I get out? In any case, they’re giving me some juicy things to work on, and I appreciate the glimpse at private firm life.

But it’s got a strange flip side. Some of the other summer fellows got together for a happy hour last Thursday. It was from 4-6. I managed to leave the office around 5:30, 5:45. I parked near the bar, which was a fancy downtown establishment, and walked the couple of blocks over. I don’t remember if it was a jacket day, but I was looking very establishment, probably in black pants, my big red bag, sensible pumps. I had already dedicated 8, 9, 10 hours of that day to law, and here I was to talk with other people, probably about more law stuff. I had a pile of stuff I still needed to do at work. And I was dressed just like everybody else. I passed others on the street, with great dyed hair and tattoos and on bikes and talking and walking and I wondered what I was giving up, as I morphed into a life of rules and precedent and suits and protocol and things only being right if a court says so. Creativity be damned.

It’s an odd thing. I still want to be the girl to practice in Converses, but eventually I’ll realize that I can’t fight the system, and that, already, I am the system. Yet another cog in the litigious, crime-ridden, regulation loving machine.

Pass me a Rutter Group, please.

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Pathetic.

I’m nervous about starting my law office gig in a couple of hours. You’d think I’d never worked a job before.

Ugh. You all should laugh at my ridiculousness.

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I’m sitting on my couch in Sacramento, enjoying a cool breeze from the security door and listening to Mel. B preparing to shower.

That sentence may not mean much, but for someone who has been living among someone else’s shit for the past nine months, it’s the restoration of a certain amount of stability I’ve been craving. Finally, the various strands of my life can, once again, coexist in a logical, peaceful manner.

The duplex here in Sac is a mess. We’ve crammed a combined 60+ years of stuff into a house 3/5 the size of the one we left. There are many hours of creativity remaining, where we figure out how exactly to shoehorn ourselves in our new space.

But for right now that’s not important. Instead, I’d like to tell you the story of a truck.

This was a do-it-yourself move. Sacramento is 170 miles from Fresno, and we wanted to do it in one trip. And between a kitchen with perhaps way too many utensils/dishes/gee-gaws, the massive collection of books from Ms. Bibliophile herself, and all the various storage accoutrements needed to house all that stuff, we knew we had a *ton* of stuff. Ton. Everyone who helps us move makes fun of all the stuff we have, and this is after shedding big pieces of furniture and perhaps a bookshelf’s worth of books between the two of us.

Always shedding. Never enough.

So I knew one thing when I made the reservation for the rental truck on Budget: I need the biggest truck they had. Period. Do I know how to drive it? No. I’ll figure it out soon enough.

Because, apparently, I’m the one who drives the truck. Which truck? Doesn’t matter. It’s a truck, and I’m driving it.

We got to Budget bright and early around 8:00. The guy pulls around a truck. This truck is no joke. It’s 24 feet long, makes the gutteral noises of a semi, and whose grill begins at a point higher than my five-foot-nine frame.

Mel B. turns to me. “Ask him what kind of gas that takes.”
Gas? Man, talk about being way too cautious. Every time I’ve rented a rental truck it takes regular unleaded. When the guy comes back round I ask: “This takes regular unleaded, right?”
Guy: “No. Diesel.”

Shit. More …

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