It’s been said that when you’re young, you get sad, and when you’re sad, you get high. When you work in law, you’ll get angry, and when you get angry you often quit, or punch someone out, and when this happens, you get destitute. Which isn’t any fun. This is a little riff on how to avoid that – how to channel anger to your benefit.
. . .
Too many associates wear depression on their sleeves. They walk around with their shoulders slumped, frowning, staring at the carpet – the telltale signs of a problem down the road. A problem worth abusing, exploiting… terminating.
Lawyers operate like school yard bullies. They only pick on the weak. Look like you’re beaten, act like your beaten and, well, you’ll get beaten. The only way to succeed in a job you loath is to make a sport of hating it – to turn your work into performance art.
That’s vague, I know. Let me explain.
Most people internalize their frustration. They sit at their desks, stoic, polite, believing quiet resilience will inevitably earn the brass ring. In a different time, yeah, I guess that worked. Not today. Not anymore. And sure as hell not in a law firm. If you’re not self-promoting, you might as well stay home. Even in the “United States of States of Amnesia,” where nobody remembers anything before their last text message, the average lawyer’s lack of attention span is amazing.*
The sorts of pathological Type A personalities who manage law firms run from project to project like rats from one dumpster to another. Most don’t have the time, interest, or inclination to separate the advertisers from the producers. To a mind that rarely considers anything beyond the satisfaction of its owner’s Id for more than thirty seconds, feigned dedication and actually giving a shit are indistinguishable. “Angry” is easily confused with “relentlessly driven.”
If you’re part of the minority of normal of people in your firm, early in your career, you’ll find yourself so irritated by the toil you’ll have to stop and take a deep breath a few times a day, check your pulse and get your head under control… Hold yourself from smashing your Blackberry, throwing binders into the hallway, or flinging your monitor through the window.
You think it’s the stress, but it’s not. You’re bored – incurably, desperately so. All that time spent sitting at a desk, researching, writing, going to court and bleating all those tedious, niggling arguments. You know it’s a horrid existence, if you can even call it that. But how else do you keep up the cash flow? You’re trapped. Cornered.
So how do you deal with that? There’s no way to contain the disgust. Nobody’s that good an actor.
The answer’s pretty simple. Embrace your inner maniac. Run with your anger… Let it out. Just be sure to transfer it as you do – to turn it to something productive, something self-promoting. Every time you’re about to flip out – when you find yourself an inch from telling the partner you work under to fuck himself with a live cattle prod, remember these three little words: Change the Target.
Find a way to couch your eruption in terms of frustration with an opponent, as though you’re hyper-committed to the job. If you’re stalking the hallway cursing under your breath, slamming a phone receiver off your desk, kicking a filing cabinet or cracking your keyboard over your knee in anger at having to write some mindless, dictionary-thick brief, throw a reference to your opposing counsel or the court into the accompanying tirade. Where you’d complain about your firm or your boss, make it about your adversary. Make it seem like you’re truly, deeply invested in the competition – that you live for the reindeer games.
It isn’t all that hard. Not much more than simple noun replacement:
What you’re saying: “I’m going to kill [Insert opponent]. What kind of evil prick files a thirty page motion against me on a Friday at 3:00? Can you believe that shit?”
What you’re thinking: “Thanks, [Insert partner], for shoving more shit on my plate at the last second, like my life was as vacant as yours. Like I was some middle aged, twice divorced slob with nothing better to do than sit in the office, plugging out billable time answering procedural horseshit over the weekend.”
What you’re saying: “This judge has to be the stupidest son of a bitch I’ve ever had a case in front of. You couldn’t drive a jackhammer through his skull.”
What you’re thinking: “Great case, [Insert partner]. How desperate were you for short term cash when you took on this Titanic? Scrambling to make a tuition payment? Or is this for that new kitchen you couldn’t tell the wife you can’t afford?”
What you’re saying: “These appellate rules are goddamned impossible! Could they make this process any more of a fucking nightmare?”
What you’re thinking: “Can I tell you how thrilled I am you lost this case, [Insert partner]? Nothing makes me feel more alive and essential in this world than working on an appellate brief. Checking dozens of cites, spacing and page numbering to ensure compliance with a pile of arcane strictures, all to fix your fuck-up. And you want to talk strategy with me? Like this is interesting? You see this three page table of contents? These reams of rules about fonts, and the specific size of margins? If I ever found this engaging, even remotely, I’d stick a gun in my mouth. On principle.”
Sounds ridiculous, but it works. Some will suspect you’re full of shit, but most will assume you’re “intense” – just like any of the thousands of prima donna partners running around firms behaving like spoiled children every day. The angrier or crazier you act, the harder they’ll think you’re working, the more you give a damn. People will say things like, “You’ve got tremendous work ethic,” “You care more than the others,” or my favorite: “You’re committed.” That last one fits best. Because if you’re the kind of person who can use this advice, and you stay in the legal business long enough, inevitably, you will be.
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*Gore Vidal.
Nice post, i definatly can relate. Im sitting in class right now and want to throw my laptop at about three quarters of the people in the class. I know this is unrelated to the post, but I was wondering what your take is on the recent spree of firing of associate from large law firms? Thanks.
PL: BigLaw as it has been known is over. It cannot survive without constantly increasing economic growth. It was a creature of the last 25 years of growth and will contract like everything else. Expect several thousand more layoffs this year, a few firm collapses and new business model coming out of the mess, with less pay all around. I cannot see corporations absorbing the high fees in this climate, and this climate will persist for at least another 15 months. When it clears, things might improve for the larger outfits, but they probably won’t reach the compensation levels of before. Industry has been learning that it can do a lot of what outside counsel does in house, and they’ll learn this all the more in the downturn. Coming out of this mess, it will probably seek to keep the discounted rates it enjoys in the downturn constant, and firms probably won’t have much leverage in that discussion.
But on balance, you have to give it up to the legal industry. It has enjoyed a remarkably long run of charging excessive fees for largely fungible, non-complex work through sheer audacity in fee increases and clever marketing that masked the simplicity of most of what it does. Unfortunately, knowledge ruins that business model. The downturn is just accelerating a process begun by the internet, with it’s easy exchange of information, that would have inevitably occurred.
Thanks for the response. I’m just hoping that i can get a job anywhere when i graduate this summer because my only other option is moving home, and no one wants that. At this point i’ll take anyhthing, even if i have to work with those dbags in law school that i hate so much.
PL: Learn the business side of the profession. Learn tax issues, learn how to do real estate transactions, and how to bring and defend contract claims. That’s stuff’s not going anywhere, and once you learn to do it (and it’s pretty fucking simple, really), you can work for yourself if you can’t find a job.
Also get to know some personal injury lawyers. If anyone ever tells you about a friend or family getting injured, you can take their case, refer it to a PI lawyer and get a third of the recovery for nothing.
And wherever you work, always remember this: look for the way out. The lawyers who have the best lives are the guys who look at the license as an asset, rather than a badge of a way of life, or a “profession.” The wealthiest lawyers I know all made their money on the side, in development projects or by leveraging their skills to get entre into non-legal businesses.
You’ll never have a life billing hours. It’s just a springboard to other shit. Law’s a thing to be used. Nothing more.
Great and honest writing as always.
Maybe the good thing about this crisis is that it will shake out a few of these bastards.
PL: I think the age of the overpaid corporate paper pusher who doesn’t bring real value is coming to an end.
“I think the age of the overpaid corporate paper pusher who doesn’t bring real value is coming to an end.”
But I can push boxes too!
You should really think of becoming a career counselor. There is more helpful advice here than in anything written in the business section at Barnes & Noble. Then again Barnes & Noble apparently isn’t very helpful in any respect.
I am going to immediately implement this channeling of frustration to forces outside of my firm. To think we are all desk jockeys who have been whipping the wrong horse this whole time.
PL: Barnes & Noble still has the goddamned book listed under “Law.” It’s a book about law like MASH was a show about war, or South Park a show about snarky little kids.
Page, you have to admit this works with a certain personality type in a certain corporate environment. I may be wrong, but I do not think this type of attitude would work in a lot of high-tech silicon valley companies, for example.
Good stuff though. I love the notion of going out of the way to pretend and over-exaggerate a desire to “win” and all those other buzzwords managers use which are basically code for “you get next to nothing and the VP gets a new porsche as a bonus if our department meet the targets.”
Mind you, in times like these, as much as I criticize office jobs, I bet there are a lot of people who would do almost anything for a job. When I say that’s sad, I do not mean that in a condescending or haughty way.
PL: We need people to think that way, but not everybody. It’s people who do what you did (I read your email, and have a response, but just haven’t had the time) who’ll bring this country out of this hole. If we take away from this moment the lesson that we should all drop our expectations and revert back to the Men in Grey Flannel Suits and be glad we’re lucky enough to get what we get, we’re screwed. If coming out of this good risk is considered as poisonous as the bad risk we all gorged on for the last decade, that’s a country I don’t want to live in.
man, did you ever enjoy your work? you must have gotten a thrill from it at some point. What made you want to be a lawyer in the first place? are you still practicing now?
PL: Sure, I liked getting cash, and helping people, which is what I do now.
I didn’t help too many people in practice. Seemed I helped a lot of people help themselves to a good bit more than they deserved.
But yeah, I had some fun. Screwing with egomaniacal opponents was amusing.