Lawyer Guy, we hardly knew ye

On Tuesday a funny and acerbic blawg was taken off-line by its author. I wanted to save a bit of his brain and bite on my site, so here, by permission of the blawgger, one of the final dispatches from Lawyer Guy:

I Am Jack's Complete Lack of Surprise.

"God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables; slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War's a spiritual war... our Great Depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won't. And we're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off."

So apparently law firms are struggling with the influx of Gen Y folks that don't want to be associate-monkeys. Allow me to retort.

Why the fuck would they?

Admittedly, there is a very stark generational gap right now in the legal field. You have the old battleaxes, who spin yarns about working 20 hours a day "back in the day," and then you have the younger generation, who always have one eye on the door. Both don't appreciate either's work ethic. Obviously, I can't speak for the older generation, but I can offer my two cents for us younger folk. And the Firm, like any other, is good in some places, bad in others - so this is really more a rip on the state of big-firm law and the culture you find everywhere....

1) It's not a profession, jackass - it's a business. Older attorneys will wax poetic about how the law used to be a profession, a guild, blahblahblah. What they ignore is that, in the 50s, 60s, & 70s, sure - I'll agree it probably was. But with the shift to the corporate philosophy in the 80s, and the massive firm mergers in the 90s, the law became a business. That's it - it's a job. Older attorneys end up talking about living and breathing the law & striving to improve the profession, but simultaneously demand, at all costs, under penalty of termination, that associates bill at least a couple thousand billable hours (and more) every year. The free time to read legal journals and go to things like Inns of Court vanishes when you're struggling just to keep at par with other associates so you can keep your job. We have the factory mentality because your generation made it into factory work.

2) People? What are they? With the increased size of firms, and the jacked-up fees required to meet the overhead, associates don't see other human beings. We rarely see other associates except in 10 minute increments, we never see clients (because the "press the flesh" is the domain of the rainmakers only), and we certainly never see the courtroom (clients don't pay firm rates to send an associate in front of a judge). So, associates wind up getting most personal with their computers and their phone - do you think I'd rather go out for a drink with a client, or an associate, or whatever, instead of blogging? Hell yah. You dehumanize the job, you make the associates detached - that's just how it is.

3) Bitch work - no thanks! We're breeding a whole generation of associates that will be absolutely incompetent in a courtroom. Where associates in firms started out with jumping right into court with small subro actions, now you have no hope of trying a case (even as a second chair) until you make some sort of senior associate status (or have some flukey case fall in your lap). Nobody - and I mean nobody - went to law school fantasizing about sitting alone in a cold office under flickering flourescent lights ad nauseum pushing paper. That's a fucking accounting/insurance adjusting job (sorry, accountants and insurance adjustors). Dammit, we want to be in a courtroom, blowing some silly witness up on cross-examination!!

4) Um...look at you. We're not retarded. We can see what's happened to partners - dismal family lives, no extracurricular activites (no, golf and Rotary club don't count - that's "networking"), etc. Our generation, on the other hand - we want to have the family lives that we probably didn't have growing up; we want to do other, non-job things that have meaning, be it getting involved in church more than Christmas/Easter services, or spending an afternoon at the food bank; we want to get out and blow off steam, because we've all seen the old lawyers that have had 3 heartattacks by the time they're 50; and most importantly, we want to be well-rounded - we don't want to be lame fuckers on the golf course every Saturday talking about comfortable shoes. Fuck that. We're all acutely aware that big-firm, civil litigation does not make us a better person in life.

5) Life Principle Number One. Nobody dies wishing they'd worked more.

It's a little funny this article came out today, because Replacement Associate gave me the full hour, closed-door "crisis of faith" confession today. She's simply burned out - she billed well over 200 hours last month (which had only 19 official billing days), was out of town at a meaningless, last-second depo over the long weekend when her dog died, and is watching one of her best attorney friends tear her hair out about whether she'll lose her job for taking more than a month of maternity leave (hard to make up that lost month of billables!)....she's looking around, taking an inventory, and realizing that she doesn't want to wake up at 45 and wonder, "What the fuck happened with my life?" (doing that really quickly, of course, so she only loses .1 on her billings for thinking of something other than the law).

And, honestly, I had nothing to argue with her. Every point she had (pretty much all of the above) is perfectly valid.

So, while I'm sluffing out tomorrow on those pre-meeting-meetings and huge stacks of document discovery so I can hang out with friends, watch movies, drink, and generally fuck off -

Well, I'm not going to feel bad for "the law" in the slightest.

"You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis."

Skål, Lawyer Guy. Takk for minnene.