The Costanza Method – Part 4
February 16th, 2007 by PhilaLawyer
Ne mangez pas l’acide marron.
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So true its frightening, especially the part about how, on an hourly/quality of life basis, you’re better off as a plumber. It seems a shame, especially because if one goes back 30-40 years (before the baby boom generation took over), the practice seemed enjoyable, even honorable.
Nice….good concluding story…right on my birthday.
Cheers mate
“Repeat every 24 hours, five days a week… For 40 years.” That sounds about right. In hindsight, I can almost see my boss’s raging boner when I walked in on my first day, fresh out of college and optimistic, ready to work 60 hours a week for the promise of making good money sometime in the distant future. Keep it up PL.
Been reading since philalawyer.blogspot.com days.
I thought the original version was great, but the way you ended this edited version is more than fantastic.
awesome.
looking forward to the book.
Thanks
damn it feels good to be a gangsta
i wanna be a lawyer and smell sexy toooo
The word ‘kayfabe’ fits in nicely here…
On the note of ignorance and illogical zeal, I have this to say:
I have one thing to tell you, read my lips:
North Korea is the reason China exists.
If it was not for the North Korean bureaucracy
And its savage ideocracy,
There would be no oppression,
No famine, no depression,
Just a unified state of justice and life
Without the Earth-shattering nukes and civil strife.
No deathly speakers in each and every room,
No looming cataclysmic doom,
Just a unified, thriving state.
No debate.
So each and every time we try to appeal
To both murderious regimes and their fanatic zeal,
Remember this:
North Korea is the reason China is a nation on planet Earth.
-Andrew
What happened to the piece on legal hoodwinking? I really enjoyed it. is it going to be put back up, or will it be added to and reposted later?
This rings true of any business that is fundamentally based upon billing hours. I like to call it ‘white-collar janitorial labor’.
I work in the IT industry, and despite the fact that most of us don’t work the billable hour, I can see a lot of similarities between IT and law. This is especially true within my peers. I’m a recent college drop-out, but so many of the people I went to school with were the types of drones who will no doubt be putting in 60-hour weeks for a meager $45k/year. This is partly due to incompetence, but largely due to naievity. They think that by throwing away their social life so that they can put in more hours at work, the company is going to do better, and their going to be well on their way to management. They don’t realize that they’re simply lining upper management’s pockets with better dividends while they work themselves ragged for little to no recognition, and the same $45k/year they would be making if they only worked 40 hours/week.
There is no joy left for me in this industry. Killed entirely before I’ve even reached 25.
Hopefully I’ll find something more rewarding to do before I end up here for 40 years.
fabulous entry, quite possibly my favorite ever. Brilliant ending paragraph and sentence.
fuck i can’t wait for this book
Thank you.
Excellent summary of the trials and tribulations of the young lawyer in this business.
The Costanza Method is probably my favourite of all your stories I’ve read so far, but just one minor point, and forgive me if my memory of the original version is a bit hazy but I remember a passage about the look on Margaret’s face when Terry offered the promotion with a raise. Can’t remember the exact details but the implication was that Terry “got it” and people like Margaret never would. I can just imagine the filmed version with a quick shot back to Margaret whose jaw is involuntarily dropping as she looks at you and then Terry.
…anyway, fantastic as always, keep it up
And more than a year later…
I really, REALLY hope that either the unabridged, unedited story makes it to the book, or you add the original version somewhere along the website for your diehard fans. The exchange between you and Terry in the original version was brilliant.
In any case, bravo. I can’t wait to add the book to my library.