Lawyerish

Due Diligence

I figured out early on in law school that I was not going to be at the top of my class.  The way the grading curve worked, a tiny percentage of students got A's, and a tiny percentage got C's (or below), while the vast majority ended up somewhere in the B/B+ realm.  For the first time in my life, I was completely fine with being one of those people in the middle.  The way I figured it, I could work my tush off and still not end up in the top teeny percent who got A's, and anyway I was at a top law school and would end up gainfully employed, so why not enjoy myself?

This meant that, along with learning about torts and property and constitutional law, I got to learn about the sights and nightlife of New York City instead of just the inside of our (rather unattractive) library.  I made a few like-minded friends, and while we put in time studying like anyone else, we could almost as often be found swing dancing at some retro joint or sipping Champagne at a velvety lounge listening to jazz. 

Toward the end of the second semester of my first year, the inevitable push to prepare cram for finals came, and I started outlining my notes and reviewing prior exams as usual.  Somehow, though, my Criminal Law class escaped my attention until a few days prior to the exam, when I looked up and said something like, "Oh, shit.  Crim Law." 

My friend Erik (not his real name), who would become my roommate for the following two years, was in my section, and we came to this stark realization around the same time.  It went something like this:  Him:  "Have you studied at all for Crim Law?"  Me:  "Uh, no. Shit.  Crim Law." 

We decided, two nights before the exam, to study together.  (I hate to use a cliche, but there is no better example in this world of the blind leading the blind.)  We printed out the professor's old exams and model answers.  We cobbled together a pathetic excuse for an outline of our own, then gathered our books and class notes and set out to find a place to study. 

We didn't want to be anywhere near campus, as the pressure-cooker environment around finals was too much for anyone to bear, especially for people like us, who tried our best to stay out of conversations involving ugly things like grades or possible test hypos or, essentially, anything related to the law whatsoever.  We settled on a bar/diner down in the East Village that's open 24 hours a day and at all times offers food and coffee, and booze, should we need it. 

We arrived at the diner around 8 PM, as it buzzed with NYU students gearing up for a night out.  We took a corner table where we could spread out all of our criminal law detritus and not be overly distracted by our surroundings.  We ordered some snacks and coffee and informed our waiter that we were in for the night.  He could sense the quiet desperation coming off of us in waves, so he kept the coffee coming and threw in a dessert for us to share on the house. 

Erik and I bantered for a while over dinner and then, reluctantly, got down to business.  We picked up the prior year's exam and decided to give it a shot, cold.  We'd each outline our answers and then compare them, and then see how they rated on the model answer.  We both scribbled furiously for a while, occasionally shaking our pencils in the air with an "a-HA!" when we thought of an especially brilliant point and thoughtfully sipping our coffee when our momentum was slowed by a wrinkle in the fact pattern.  After an hour, we put down our pencils and compared answers.  "Ohhh, nice!  Good catch!" we'd say, lauding each other's brilliance as we compiled our responses.  "That really was not so bad, was it?" we'd wonder aloud, thinking we had caught all of the professor's tricky turns of plot in the hypotheticals.

And then we picked up the model answer.  We stared, slackjawed, at the twenty-five single-spaced pages of analysis, which was so detailed, so complex and so....so impossible that we could hardly believe this was what the professor expected of a bunch of first-year law students.  We lost hope after the first couple of paragraphs.  Sure, some of our points were in there, but they were mere fragments of thoughts, suggestive of a child's understanding of the subject.  We waved our waiter over and ordered a couple of glasses of wine.  It was going to be a long night.

Working from the model answer, we waded sedulously through our notes and casebooks, sweating to retain some small part of the policy considerations and bigger-picture concepts in addition to the facts and holdings of the cases themselves.  At two in the morning, nearly spent, we closed our books, neatened the stacks of legal paper strewn about our table, and asked our waiter to watch our things.  We staggered outside, gulping the fresh air, and headed straight for the nearest bar. 

It was a candlelit lounge, awash in flowing organza and intimate banquette nooks, but it swam before our bleary eyes.  I ordered a White Russian, which I'd never had before and never did again (although it was exceedingly tasty), and Erik had a Scotch.  We stared hopelessly into space, occasionally patting each other's arms in a mindless and fruitless gesture of comfort. 

Oh, shit.  Crim Law, indeed.

At some point as we sat there, punchiness set in.  We devised a plan.  "Wouldn't it be funny," I said, "if we showed up for the exam looking like we'd  come straight from a night out, like an all-night bender of some kind?"  Erik chuckled.  "Yeah... Yeah, I'd be in a tux, with the tie undone and my shirt maybe a little torn."  I picked up the thread, "I'd be in heels, my hair disheveled and my makeup smudged, and I'd have your jacket draped around my shoulders." 

We were laughing far more than the situation warranted.  Erik sipped his Scotch and went on, "No!  No.  Here it is.  We come in, we sit down, we look around at everyone....and then we take out a cocktail shaker."  I was giggling hysterically.  "YES.  That's it!  We bring out an ice bucket and drop the ice into the shaker, piece by piece, and then we pour in something -- ginger ale, I don't know -- that looks like liquor into a martini glass --"  "And then, we look up, toast the class and drain it!"

By now, we were bent over our table, laughing so hard we could hardly see.  We were convinced of the brilliance of our idea.  We would do it.  We would go down in law school history.  No one would know what to make of it. Hell, we were going to go down in flames on this exam as it was.  The proctors -- who were curmudgeonly at best and downright cruel at worst -- would be beside themselves, but they couldn't do anything!  After all, there was no rule prohibiting ginger ale -- or cocktail shakers, for that matter -- into an exam.

We strolled back to the diner, arm in arm, chortling over our plan.  We ordered another round of food and coffee and started to study again, but we interrupted each other frequently to embellish our plot and iron out the details.  We watched other diners come and go -- including one memorable couple who were obviously on their first date and it was NOT going well -- and began the inevitable late-night pontification about philosophy and human nature and dating and psychology and all sorts of things, pretty much everything BUT Criminal Law.  Our waiter cashed out -- we gave him a massive tip, for which he thanked us profusely and we waved off his gratitude with the hubris of two people on the brink of self-destruction -- and the sun came up and the gray light spread through the emptied-out diner, and it was time to go home. 

That day, we studied some more in our respective dorm suites, and then later in the evening, we reconvened, mostly to talk about how royally screwed we were.  We thought fondly on the previous night, and we laughed some more about our big plan, but we both knew it wasn't going to happen.  We both knew we would fail alone, and in obscurity.  After all, we weren't even going to be in the same room for the test; I was at the beginning of the alphabet and he was at the end, and they split the section in half for all of our exams.  We wouldn't have even gotten in the door of the lecture hall together. 

On exam day, we suffered mightily through what was, without a doubt, the hardest test I've ever taken.  It was sixteen pages long -- that's the QUESTIONS -- and the fact patterns were so labrynthine that I barely knew my own name after reading the first hypothetical.  There were three separate questions, each of which involved about 52 subparts, and the exam was just three hours long.  If I've ever come close to having a nervous breakdown during an exam, this was it.  The final question, which I reached with two seconds left in the test period, was to DRAFT A STATUTE.  Not to spot issues or write about policy considerations.  No.  Draft a statute.  Which is just, I don't know, not something law students DO.  And, by the way, it was a statute on rape, which we had not even covered in class. 

I went home in a daze, and Erik and I never spoke about the exam, except to say something like, "Um.  Yeah.  Shit.  Crim Law."  We never spoke about our grades, although I'm sure he probably got an A, because he's, well, brilliant, and also just Like That, like he could walk into class and have no idea what was going on, and he would raise his hand and join right into the discussion.  Whereas I sat in class every day taking copious notes and hadn't the faintest clue what was going on, and if someone had asked me to join the discussion, I would have leapt out the nearest window. 

I, of course, got a B.  Or maybe it was a B+.  And one of my greatest regrets in life will be not having followed through on our plan. 

Point(e) A to Point B, Part III

I started college with goals.  Big goals.  And a plan, a serious plan.  A plan to be a psychologist for dancers.  Clearly, there's not much suspense left, since I'm not PsychologistforDancersish, but, you know.  There's still a story to tell.

I entered Michigan as a freshman in the Honors Program.  Regardless of one's intended major, we had some core requirements like Great Books and those types of high-minded dealies where you talk about the Allegory of the Cave and postmodernism and whatnot.  I loooooved them.  All those ideas!  They got to me.  I liked the rambling, meandering class discussions, and I enjoyed writing papers that pontificated about nothing in particular, dissected concepts and argued with them, or found symbolism in the most obscure places. 

That first semester, I also took an intro biopsych course.  I loved it, too, and I did very well in it.  But I observed something that surprised me:  psych was regarded as a "gut" major -- an easy thing to study, a way to pad one's GPA.  It was popular among students who came to college to party more than to study.  In fact, it was the largest major in the liberal arts college.  Something about this disturbed me -- I didn't want to be seen as intellectually un-serious, and I didn't want to go to class every day with a bunch of hungover sorority girls wearing matching outfits.

Of course, this was a ridiculous reason not to major in something in which I had a genuine interest.  I could have majored in psych and made it as challenging as I wanted it to be.  I could have worked with professors and done research and positioned myself to follow my Big Plan by getting into a top grad school.  And I could have taken plenty of other classes to satisfy my paper-writing and ideas fix. 

But, I was eighteen and for whatever reason these considerations seemed real and important to me at the time.  I also faced down the prospect of many, many more years in school, followed by a not-super-lucrative training period, followed by an entry into a fairly competitive field.  It seemed...impractical somehow. 

Looking back, these were also not the wisest reasons to make life-altering choices.  The ultimate question of what I truly wanted to do, what made sense based on who I was and everything I'd done up to that point, didn't seemed to enter into the equation.  And that was a grave error.

Another grave error came between freshman and sophomore years, when I was visiting my brother at law school.  I sat in on a couple of classes and looked around and thought, I could do this.  My brother seemed pretty happy, and he appeared to have great career prospects that promised financial security and even prosperity.  That wasn't the mistake, though.  The mistake was, sometime during that trip, when I was paging through course catalogs, pondering my fall schedule and my impending major selection, I decided -- rather on a whim -- that what I wanted was to apply to the undergraduate business school.

The wha?  I know.  I am a paper-writing, idea-loving, conceptual and argumentative person.  Where does business fit into that?  (Not that there is anything wrong with business, not at all -- it's just...it made no sense for me, personally.  NO sense.)  Again, I think it was a matter of my ultra-practical side kicking in.  My dad was and is a business man, my brother had double-majored in management and communications, and they'd both done well with it.  It seemed like a level-headed, pragmatic, useful thing to do. 

Around that time, I remember law school entering into the picture.  I don't know exactly how, other than seeing my brother's experience; I just recall it being what I was shooting for, although I did think that business school would result in a good fallback plan, as it held the most clear path to a job after college, or so I seemed to think.  So I went back to Michigan, signed up for some history and English classes, and then -- oh God -- registered for Accounting and Economics, the prereqs for applying to the BBA program.  AND, because that wasn't enough, I joined the crew team.  What followed was the worst academic experience of my life. 

I nearly failed Accounting.  I just did not get it.  I'd always done well at math, even calculus, but this was something else entirely.  Econ was also WAY beyond me.  All these...graphs...and...lines everywhere.  No idea.  Lost.  Just lost.  After midterms, I knew I was doing horribly, the worst I'd ever done in school in my life, and at one point I went into the dorm room of these three guy friends of mine, sat down on their couch, and starting crying all over the place.  I wailed that if I didn't get into the business school, I would never get into law school and I'd screwed up my GPA, anyway, so I'd probably already ruined my chances, and if I didn't get into law school, I wouldn't be married at 26 and living in Connecticut with a white picket fence and a Volvo, and my life was now officially over.  (I kid you not.  Somehow, those had become my goals.  Sigh.) 

After snotting all over my friends' couch and moping about for a while and generally annoying everyone who knew me, I snapped out of it and took Accounting pass/fail and tried to get some help with Econ. It wasn't a complete disaster in the end, although my GPA did dip significantly that term.  And when the time came to register for classes for the winter semester, I finally made a smart decision and went back to liberal arts.  I was never so happy to write long-assed papers about nothing in my life. 

I had an idea for a while that I would be an honors major in history and English (honors meant that you wrote a thesis senior year), but between rowing and working part-time and taking a boatload of credits, I ended up just picking history, non-honors, because I wanted to get at least a teeny bit of sleep maybe once a month or so. 

As senior year loomed, I knew I had to do something job-related, to move decidedly in a direction, whatever it was.  I don't know that I was still cemented to the picket fence idea, but I did at least consider some options other than law school:  I observed the history grad students and didn't feel tremendously compelled to take a vow of poverty and remain a student for the next decade of my life.  I saw ads for recruiting interviews with the big investment banks, and...feh.  With my soul-crushing experiences in Accounting and Econ, I figured anything involving the financial industry was probably not my cup of tea.  I didn't want to be a consultant and spend my best years maximizing core competencies and putting up inspirational banners.  I didn't think about government jobs, nor did I consider the Peace Corps, possibly because I am lame, or maybe because the relevant information was not shoved into my face to make it seem realistic, attainable, and, of course, practical.  I didn't think of doing non-profit work or applying to jobs in the publishing industry, probably because I thought they wouldn't pay well enough. 

So what was left?  Why, law school, of course!  The high starting salaries, the clear-cut career path, the aura of intellectual prestige.  I didn't know the first thing about what lawyers actually did or what their days were like.  But...details.  Oh, it'll be fine!  I was sure of it.  I read "One-L" and thought, This sounds so...challenging!  So many ideas!  Won't it be wonderful?  Just like The Paper Chase!  And then I took the LSAT and did well, so I figured that was some kind of sign that I was doing the right thing, and then when I got into a good law school, I chalked that up to some kind of intention of fate as well.  And the next thing I knew, I was sitting in an amphitheater-style classroom, wanting to hide under my desk to avoid being called on in Civil Procedure.

So...pretty much...there you have it:  three posts' worth of the cascade of decisions and events that led to me being a lawyer.  Or at least, a law student.  I suppose there is the part about how I became a law firm lawyer when, in my pathetic, naive little mind, I thought that I could come out of law school and do anything, just anything, I wanted, such as become an in-house lawyer for a ballet company, even though there is no such thing. But that really is not particularly gripping.  It goes something like, "I paid a king's ransom for law school and cannot afford to do anything else.  The end." 

As you can tell, I have all sorts of things I'd like to whisper (or shout) in the ear of the sixteen- to twenty-one-year old me.  Not because I'm unhappy with where I ended up -- the whole satisfaction thing is another post entirely, but overall I am happier in the law than lots of other people are; it has the stability I crave and it appeals to my anal retentive nature in lots of sick ways and I can say, to my credit, that I chose a firm wisely -- but because I didn't always have my eye on the right ball back then.  You know? 

Instead of a Volvo and a picket fence -- neither of which I have, of course -- I should have been thinking about my inner self, the real me, the Laura Ingalls loving, ballet bunheaded geek who loves to write and wants to help people.  I should have investigated LOTS more options -- I would have loved to study abroad or volunteer or do something meaningful at some point, before settling on a career.  I shouldn't have let externalities enter into my decisions so much. 

I can't say that I would necessarily be happier on the whole if I were doing something other than what I'm doing now, though.  I think that being a psychologist for dancers (or a counselor with an MSW, which is something I didn't know about AT ALL when I was in college and would have been a perfect compromise, what with the far less time-consuming grad school program and all) and an eating disorders specialist sounds amazing and fulfilling, challenging and frustrating but deeply satisfying on a personal and professional level.  But I can't know that, because I don't live that life every day.  And if I did, I'm sure I would get irritated by all sorts of things and wonder what might have happened if I'd gone to law school.  Same with doing anything else.  Work, ultimately, is work.  Some jobs are probably better than others, but when it comes down to it, as soon as you start getting paid for something, it becomes work and therefore fraught with demands and frustrations. 

In the end, I look at lots of different points in time and wonder, what if...?  Sometimes I wish I'd danced professionally or written a thesis or gone to Yale or become fluent in Spanish or...or....or... 

But then I look at where I am and who I am, and I am so grateful that I didn't choose differently.  Because I chose to go to law school and to come to New York, I have a husband I can't imagine being without, a dog I adore to the point of obsession, an apartment I love coming home to, a family who will support me no matter what happens, and friends all over the planet who make me laugh and think. 

And sometime in the not-too-distant future, I'll have a daughter to add to this fantastic mix.  What I've learned from all this, all these crazy decisions and missteps (or not) and defining moments, and what I will teach her (or try to, anyway), is that all those platitudes people roll out in valedictory speeches really mean something:  I want her to be true to herself, to find what she loves and find a way to do it, to surround herself with good, honest, real people, and not to concern herself with what others think, but to do what she feels in her core is right.  With any luck, she'll follow this advice, or not, and the decision cascade of her life will end her up in as miraculous a place as mine has. 

Point(e) A to Point B, Part II

The day after my mom and I went on our campus tour and got the full admitted students' recruiting spiel at Michigan, I had my audition for the dance department.  I knew that the focus of the program was more modern than ballet, but I'd gotten the impression somewhere along the way that the emphasis was shifting and they were attracting more classically trained people.  Like me! 

Of course, at the time I'd heard that, back in the fall when I'd picked the schools to which I was going to apply, I hadn't much paid attention, because in my mind, I was either going to Princeton or dying a slow, horrific death by dehydration due to a fatal and unstoppable flood of tears.  Or, in a distant second, I would deign to bestow my intellectual and artistic grandeur upon Indiana or Butler.  But since everyone needs a backup plan, there I was in Ann Arbor, freezing yet somehow exhilarated.

The audition was to be a class followed by a solo performance.  I had prepared a piece of my own choreography to "Gabriel's Oboe" from the soundtrack to The Mission.  True to my bunhead form, I dressed in pink tights and a white leotard, with my hair meticulously pulled back and pinned and hairsprayed into submission, wispies be damned. 

Mom and I arrived early so I could warm up before the class.  I shrugged off my street clothes, pulled some knit shorts over my leotard, and sat on the floor of the waiting room to stretch out.  Another girl wandered in as I pointed and flexed my foot against a Theraband.  She was obviously there for the audition, but it was clear that she wasn't a ballet dancer.  It's hard to explain, but you can tell the difference between a modern dancer and a ballerina.  The modern girls' thighs and calves are a little thicker, their upper bodies stronger.  They generally appear...less uptight.  She looked at me and I looked at her, and both of us wondered which of us was in the wrong place.

Our unspoken questions were soon answered.  A middle-aged woman strode into the room and sat down on one of the couches.  She clasped her hands and looked at the other girl and then looked at me.  She smiled politely, but there was a pained expression lurking under the upturned corners of her mouth.  "I see you ladies are here for the audition," she said.  We nodded.  "Well," she directed her strained voice at me. "I should tell you, before we begin, that this is a modern dance program.  If you want a ballet emphasis, you are not going to get that here."  My eager-listening face vanished as I blanched with shame and disappointment.  I felt like a grade-A fool.  I stared at a spot on the green carpet and tried not to cry -- here I'd found this school that felt right somehow; but how could I go there, or anywhere, if I couldn't dance?

My mom regained her voice first.  "Is there anything that she could do here?  Do you at least have ballet classes that she could take, even if she majors in something else?" 

The woman looked at me as you would at a small child who has insisted upon wearing her fairy Halloween costume, gauzy wings and all, even though it's February and there's five feet of snow on the ground.  "We do have a former Joffrey dancer on the faculty here, and with her permission you could register for one of her upper-level ballet classes.  Of course, dance majors do have priority to get into those courses."  Great, I thought.  I'll have to squeeze ballet into my regular schedule, and I won't even be guaranteed a spot in their crappy ballet-for-modern-people class. 

More than anything, at that moment I had to get out of there.  I had no purpose on that campus anymore, and I needed to be gone from that room, from the woman's patronizing gaze, and from the campus that had seemed so promising just hours before.  Mom and I gathered our stuff and hiked back across campus to our hotel, and then booked it to the airport.  We were able to go standby on the next flight out. 

The following weekend, my dad and I flew to Boston.  While I'd been in Michigan, I had received a generous package from Boston University.  Generous enough to take a trip up there and check it out.  There was no dance program at BU to speak of, but the Boston Ballet was a T-ride away.  Dad and I had a nice visit and I loved being back in Boston, but after having seen such grand, traditional campuses at the Big Ten schools (and, of course, at Princeton), I was wary of the lack of some cohesive center to the place. 

A week later, the Ivy League schools sent out their decision letters.  After having raced to the mailbox every day for months, one warm afternoon I ran up the driveway and swung open the metal door and saw it.  A flat envelope with that distinctive orange and black crest in the corner.  It was cream-colored and...flat.  Extremely flat.  Bad news flat.  I slid my finger under the flap with growing dread.  Thousands of applicants...many highly qualified students...waiting list.  I was on the waiting list.  It was almost worse than an outright rejection, because I had to wait.  MONTHS.  To find out my fate.

The next day, I got my acceptance to Cornell.  Whoop-de-do.  I wasn't even enthused about it, because Cornell had, in my mind, been a given.  And...Ithaca?  (Why didn't I apply to the other Ivies, you might ask?  Because my parents aren't made of money, and they knew that, even if I got into one of those schools, they would be too expensive for us -- we were right in that no-man's land where you can't get financial aid but where the full tuition would have been a real hardship.  So they had me pick two Ivies, two dance programs, and two "safety" schools.  The dance and safeties being schools that we could also afford.)  Cornell, humorously enough, gave us some laughable amount of "financial aid."  Like $250.  I kid you not.  My dad actually chuckled drily when he saw the "award," as they dared to call it. 

Now the universe of my choices was complete (sort of -- thanks, Princeton!).  I could go to Indiana or Michigan, be in an honors program, get an uber-traditional collegiate experience with big-time sports and school spirit, and take dance classes recreationally whenever I could.  I could go to Butler and be a dance major and, well, squeeze in academics whenever I could.  Or I could go to BU and be a big-city college girl and take class at Boston Ballet whenever I could. 

I wrung my hands and made pro and con lists and agonized for a good while.  Indiana seems like it would be a clear choice, since at least I could take classes within the dance department, and maybe after a year I would be accepted into the major.  But I was pretty bitter about having been rejected -- so rudely, I might add -- and the whole thing seemed tainted somehow. 

I seriously considered Butler, but in the end, it seemed impractical.  If my parents were going to spend an assload of money on my education, even with scholarships, then I should get them the biggest bang for their buck.  And coming out with a BFA in dance didn't seem like the greatest use of a college degree -- I might as well just go to New York or Atlanta and try to make it as a dancer directly, without all that tuition. 

BU was tempting, if only because they'd given me so much dough.  But, again, after seeing Michigan with its sweeping, Gothic Law Quad and its towering campanile, and Indiana with its rolling hills and arboretum-like groves, the urban non-campus thing had lost its luster.  It seemed like choosing a concrete Communist tenement building over a quaint Tudor home with a grassy lawn.

After a great deal of keening and wrending of garments, I chose Michigan.  It's weird, because Indiana would have made a lot more sense in terms of taking really good ballet classes while getting a quality liberal arts education.  Here's the thing, though:  I think a part of me knew when I chose Michigan that I wasn't going to dance when I got there.  I think on some level, I chose U of M because I wanted to be a normal girl.  I wanted to spend time meeting people and gossiping and eating, for Chrissake, without the constant fear of how that might distract or detract from my dancing, how the slightest diversion might derail me from my military-like discipline.

Looking back, I'm sad that I felt the need to break with ballet so definitively.  Ultimately, I took three years off before going back to class at a local school near campus my senior year.  I'm sad because I did have talent, and it seems a shame to have turned my back on it.  Ballet wasn't me, of course, as I'd long felt, but it was a way that I was unique, it was something that was a part of me, and if I'd known better, I would have continued on with it even on a casual level, because it was damn hard to go back, and I never regained the level that I'd reached by the time I started college.  But at the time, I guess I needed to discover other ways that I could define myself, to find out who I was without being the dancer girl.

The day I left for college, I had a plan.  The plan was to major in psychology, go to grad school, and become a psychologist for dancers.  If I couldn't be a dancer, I would be around them and help them.  I would specialize in eating disorders, but I would also help dancers with the many anxieties and pressures that are unique to the profession. 

It seemed like a really good plan...but...

Point(e) A to Point B, Part I

I've been asked several times now how and/or why I became a lawyer, especially after starting out as, of all things, a ballet dancer.  The short answer (aside from the Guatemalan gypsy curse, of course) is...well, I have no idea. 

I've tried to figure out where to start, and the only place that makes sense is my senior year of high school.  Which I cannot believe was FOURTEEN years ago.  OLD.  I am old.  So, anyway, there I was.  Sixteen and in a quandary:  should I audition for ballet companies or apply to college?  Or both?  Or hide under the bed and wait for someone to make the decision for me? 

College seemed a given because of my academic performance and my family's emphasis on education, and lots of schools appeared to be ready to receive me.  It almost seemed too within reach.  Meanwhile, ballet had never come easily for me -- I didn't have natural turnout or extension; I couldn't touch my knee to my ear beginning at birth.  But for years, I had knocked myself out to get my technique to a high level and to overcome my innate physical limitations.  By senior year, all that work had paid off, and people were taking notice -- people who could get me a job, or at least an apprenticeship, with a ballet company.

Effectively everything in my life was directed at my dancing back then.  I can't explain how something that for lots of people is a lark, a nice little hobby for girls to develop their posture and learn poise, can be so all-consuming; but I couldn't imagine my life or even myself without it.  Nothing defined me like ballet did.  That's who I was -- the tall, skinny dancer girl.  I'd been that person forever.  There was no me without ballet. 

And yet...there was.  In school, I was encouraged by our AP English teacher to pursue writing as a career -- in fact, she told me I had to use writing in some way.  Ever the people-pleaser, I didn't want to let her or my other teachers down by neglecting my potential outside of ballet.  I also felt wooed by all the leafy colleges depicted in the brochures that crammed our mailbox, and the intellectual rigor they promised -- I thought they would be the antidote to all the years I'd spent in the insular environment of my hometown.  So I filled out applications and wrote essays and took the SAT one last time, then prayed desperately that I would get into Princeton.  (I'd pinned my hopes on Princeton because I knew I could easily take ballet classes close to campus, as I'd spent a summer there for a dance program after tenth grade -- and I was madly in love with the campus.)

Torn between these two divergent options, my only hope for compromise was a college dance program.  Exactly two schools had ballet programs that would be strong enough for my purposes:  Butler and Indiana.  Indiana seemed particularly ideal, since the academics were great, the university was big and diverse, and they had an honors program for dorks like me.

I traveled to Bloomington and Indianapolis that winter to audition for both dance programs.  At Indiana, I had a very bad audition.  I'm not sure what happened.  My muscles shook and I flubbed turns; I felt inexplicably fatigued.  After class, the teacher, who wasn't even the chair of the program, came up to me in the hallway.  In heavily accented English (he was French), he said, "It was...too weak.  Need strong.  More...heavy.  Sorry."  He turned and walked away and I stood there in the hallway, staring after him.  Wha...?  I was astounded.  Did he seriously just reject me?  Right here in the hall?  That's it?  I mean, I wasn't a world-class ballerina, but I was very good -- as good as the girls I'd seen in class there -- and...the hell?  I spent the rest of my visit on the floor of a stranger's dorm room, sobbing hysterically. 

The next day, I took a bus to Indianapolis.  I stared dolorously out the window, my eyes swollen from crying all night.  A girl from my hometown ballet studio was a freshman at Butler so, mercifully, I had someone to greet me there and console me over the Indiana disaster.  She introduced me around and told me about her classes and various ballet department dramas, and regaled me with tales of frat parties in which guys held up signs rating girls' bodies as they came into the house.  Overall, it didn't seem like the right fit for me for whatever reason...except the dance department.  The program there was fantastic; dancers actually left Butler and became dancers, which is virtually unheard of anywhere else.  But if I hadn't gotten into Indiana, what would happen here?

The audition consisted of two technique classes and some pointework.  Somehow, the previous day's failure had lit a fire in me, and I rocked the whole thing.  My balance was perfect; my turns were on; my jumps were high and light.  I felt great.  Sure enough, shortly after I got home, I got a letter offering me both a dance and an academic scholarship to Butler. 

Around that time, I visited some other schools, including Michigan.  I remember setting foot on the campus with my mom and just feeling like...awesome.  It was early April, and it was fifteen degrees and snowing, and I hadn't worn the right clothes or brought gloves; but...awesome.  I can't explain it, really.  Mom and I took a tour and the enthusiasm of our guide and the other students we saw on campus was infectious.  The place just seemed to have so much to offer, academically and otherwise (although, of course, I still thought it paled in comparison to Princeton; it was so beneath me and my hifalutin' smarts).  My dad had been the one who'd suggested I apply there, and I'd dismissed the idea out of hand.  Daaaad.  That's in the MIDWEST.  I'm going to an Ivy LEAGUE school.  (Yes, somehow I assumed that I wouldn't even have to decide about the college dance programs, because I was going to Princeton, and that's all there was to it -- there was just that one small detail...)  Nevertheless, there I was in Ann Arbor, and I loved it. 

But then, I went to audition for the dance department,,,

Good gracious, y'all.  This story is getting out of hand.  Could I possibly drag this out any more?  I thought I could wrap the whole college/career thing up in one fun-filled entry, but...apparently not.  And it's not even interesting!  Gah!  But now I have to finish it, since I cannot deal with a lack of closure, so I hope you'll bear with me through another installment.  I'll roll out some funny as soon as it's over, I swear.

The Obligatory Law School Post

I slept my way through law school.

No, not like THAT.  I mean I SLEPT.  All the time. 

I started out all diligent, sitting upright at my desk, highlighting important language and making neat notes in the margins of each case.  That lasted through Legal Methods – that is, the first two weeks of school.  Once we started the real classes – Civ Pro and Contracts and Torts – I just got so tired. 

I’d start out reading at my desk; but as the night wore, I’d think, I will be more comfortable on the bed.  So I would prop up on one elbow, my Contracts book splayed in front of me, highlighter at the ready, and the next thing I knew, I was waking up with my head resting on Williams v. Walker-Thomas as a hot pink stain expanded slowly outward on my duvet cover.  This happened – ohhhh, every day.  For three years.  My roommate thought he was living with a malaria patient.  Looking back, I think I may have been possibly just a little bit depressed.  (Duh.)

During orientation, I stood in the steel-and-glass atrium of the law school, clutching a plastic cup of watery beer and listening to snippets of conversations:  “and then when I went to the K-School…”; “just as we were nearing the next Masai village, the bus flipped over!”; “after my dad made partner…”; “well, I guess if you buy into Cartesian dualism…” 

Um.  I rowed on the crew team and learned to drink $1 Long Island Iced Teas in college.  Help?

I had no direction, no clue about anything, really.  As school went on, I felt like everyone else was finding things they cared about and figuring out a career path that meant something to them.  Meanwhile, I would leave class to wander the halls because I was petrified of getting called on.  Even the cool, down-to-earth people I met were wittier, more accomplished, more focused than I was.  When I had applied to law school, I had assumed I would fit right into the school I chose, no matter how prestigious; I hadn’t accounted for just how impressive everyone would be.  And it scared the hell out of me.  I didn’t know what to do, so I just went to sleep.

As I was writing this, I was going to say that I now know what I would have done differently:  I was going to say that I would have taken time off between college, to work for a while and get more focused and confident.  I was going to say that I would have treated school more like a job, not just an extension of college.  I was going to say that I would have been more engaged in class and worked to get better grades.

But then I stopped and thought about the late nights when my roommate and I would be watching “Change of Heart” and we’d get into an in-depth conversation about relationships or philosophy.  Or the way study sessions would devolve into discussions of religion (or, um, gossip).  Or the way I became inspired to travel and to challenge myself and to think about things on a deeper level.  I didn’t get any of that from my tax textbook or my federal courts professor.  I got that from my classmates, from the friends I made, who continue to mean far more to me than my degree ever has. 

So you know what?  Forget it.  I wouldn’t change a thing.  Wait, maybe one thing:  I wish I hadn’t slept so much.  I could have learned so much more. 

Good Ass Day

I am wearing pants today that make me want to go around showing my butt to people and saying, "Doesn't my ass look amazing in these pants??" 

I'm not sure, however, if this would comport with the firm's Policy Against Harassment, Bias and Discrimination.

Faulty Towers

The New York Times Business section recently featured an article about women in law firms -- specifically, why women continue to comprise such a small percentage of law firm partners despite the ever-greater numbers of women coming out of law school each year.  Naturally, the article mentioned the departure of many women to jobs that allow greater flexibility in order for them to spend more time with their children.  Yet, thankfully, it also acknowledged that there are lots more reasons that women leave law firm practice for various jobs within the profession or, for many, outside of the profession altogether.  As I read the piece, I heard the voices of women lamenting the lack of mentoring, the opacity of one's partnership prospects, and the level of assertiveness required to advance in a large law firm setting.  But, really, aren't these issues faced by ALL law firm associates, not just women? 

The fact is, law firm turnover is incredibly high for both sexes.  Law school graduates come into their jobs as first-year associates with all sorts of expectations, hopes and goals.  Many begin knowing that they have no intention whatsoever of staying for more than a few years -- long enough to make a dent in their student loans or gain resume-building experience before departing for public interest or government work, which better suits their ideals or values.  Others start their jobs without any real intention or plan, figuring that they'll see how it goes, maybe stay on if things are going well, or else bounce from one firm to another for a few years and then go in-house somewhere.  And then there are the great minority, who come out of law school all guns a-blazing, shooting for partnership from day one.

I fall somewhere in between the second and third groups -- I really had no idea of what law firm life would be like until I was a summer associate, and even then the four-star lunches and evening booze cruises obscured the real truth, try as the firm might to give us glimpses of what the full-fledged lawyers' jobs really were.  I came out of law school not at all certain that being an attorney was for me; I'd had a rough time in law school adjusting to the linear way of thinking, the formulaic way of writing, and the daily terror of the Socratic method.  I had also been so intimidated by my fellow students that I had found myself paralyzed, unable to speak in class and utterly baffled by the many career options presented to us.  I didn't have a strong set of principles or a long-held direction, while many of my classmates seemed to have been shot out of cannons, following the trajectory that had begun the moment that they were born -- President of the Legal Aid Society!  United Nations development worker!  United States Attorneys!  I took the path of least resistance, going through countless interviews to end up with a handful of offers from perfectly respectable, but non-Cravath-grade law firms.

As it turned out, I was much better at being a law firm associate than a law student.  I clicked well with the people in my department; I received consistently positive reviews; I found mentors for myself and peppered them with questions, never afraid of how naive I might appear.  I got enviable experience, working on two cases that went to trial and handling my own pro bono political asylum cases.  I enjoyed my colleagues, befriending both partners and associates.  My mentors (who were men, by the way) were nothing but encouraging, rewarding my hard work with constructive feedback and "insider" tips on making partner. 

And yet, I was miserable.  And so were the other associates, many of whom were, from an objective point of view, also having overall positive experiences -- it's not as though the only people complaining were the ones who sucked at the job.  I ended up taking a leave of absence (I went back two years later); my class steadily dwindled until only two remained firm-wide.  People left for other firms, for other states and cities, for in-house positions, for public interest jobs, for academic pursuits. 

It would be easy to look at this phenomenon of associate attrition and just say that, well, not everyone wants to be a partner in a law firm -- which is true, and necessarily so.  Law firms simply can't hire 30 new associates each year and expect that they will all make partner.  The pyramid structure of the firm doesn't work that way.  But the fact is that law firms would benefit most from having associates stay for, say, eight years, and then move on, rather than for two or three years, which is when most associates leave their firms.  Another exodus happens around years five and six.  And certainly, a good portion of those people just find other jobs that are more appealing or more aligned with their goals or specialty areas.  Fine -- those people would leave eventually anyway.  But what about lawyers who just shift from one firm to another?  Maybe they'll change based on size or perceived opportunity; but ultimately, there must be something about the first firm that causes them dissatisfaction such that they are compelled to look elsewhere.  It's an extremely inefficient system, in which law firms are the losers, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars each year on hiring lateral candidates through placement agencies and losing out on the investments they've made in the associates who leave.

So what can we fix here, to make people stay (female AND male)?

Some of the problem is inherent to the profession, at least the profession as it is practiced now.  Law firms do BIG work.  Huge commercial litigations and bankruptcies, gigantic mergers and acquisitions.  And what do associates do in those matters?  They sit for hours and hours and days and weeks at their computers, scrolling through page after page of documents, whether it's documents being produced in discovery or documents being reviewed in due diligence.  Litigators will occasionally get to switch things up a bit with a research memo here and there; corporate associates might go to the printer for a while or draft some small portion of an agreement.  But mostly, junior associates are butts in seats, existing merely to generate a revenue stream of billable hours, and maybe they'll learn something at some point when they tag along with the partner to a deposition or a negotiation. 

Again, though, my classmates and I at our firm didn't find ourselves limited to this kind of drudgery; in fact, lots of us gained a whole lot more substantive experience than our peers at other firms, and still we found the experience not to our liking.

I think a big part of it, whatever the kind of work a baby lawyer is getting, is the fact of going from one's academic career -- where most of us thrived and excelled to some degree -- into a professional career where you are The Low People on the Totem Pole.  It's disheartening and disillusioning not to know what in the hell you're doing, especially with really minute, mundane stuff (a litigation back?  what is that?  and when do I use one?).  You're thrust into an environment in which, however smart you are, the support staff has years more experience than you do, and the tasks that senior associates and partners pass down to you seem Byzantine, insurmountable.  You are constantly reminded that you haven't the slightest idea what you're doing.  Sure, you went to law school and passed the bar exam, but you've never drafted interrogatories -- you've never seen interrogatories (in fact, WHAT THE HELL IS AN INTERROGATORY!?!, you want to scream).  School was such a comfort zone, something you'd mastered sometime around third grade, and now here you are, a rube, a babe in the woods.  And this is your JOB.  You need it.  And you have to be doing it some twelve-plus hours a day. 

Not everyone can handle this transition.  And even people who handle it well -- becoming increasingly efficient, asking the right questions, knowing who to trust, studying other people's work to find out what a partner wants -- may still find the not-knowing part of the job extraordinarily stressful and demoralizing.  It's possible that people who worked between college and law school may have an easier time of things, having been exposed before to being the low man; but I have observed that the mere fact of attending law school gives many people, experienced or not, a huge sense of entitlement and an overblown perception of their own skill.  These people tend to blame the firm -- "I am too big for this place and this kind of work" -- rather than realizing the vastness of their inexperience.

In reality, being an associate at a law firm is a prolonged, high-paying apprenticeship.  You have to learn from the experience of those around you.  And to do that, you have to be humble enough to recognize that you know very little and that you may not have much to contribute for a long while.  You have to prostrate yourself before the law firm gods, who may be found in the most unlikely places, such as in the managing clerk's office (a HUGE and VITAl resource for any litigator) and in the secretarial pool (partners' assistants have saved me from major screw-ups countless times, and caught them before the partner was any the wiser).  You also have to realize that you're not reinventing the wheel; you can use other people's work as a guide.  Perhaps above all, you have to realize that the legal profession has been doing just fine without you for hundreds of years, so don't think that you're too good for any task, however small.

Another huge source of dissatisfaction for law firm associates is, of course, the billable hour.  It just isn't enjoyable in any way to keep track of your time in six minute increments.  And yet, once you get used to keeping track, it's somewhat addictive -- you rack up hours, adding up your weekly and monthly totals, calculating your "pace" for the year before the first quarter is up.  Because you know that this is a huge metric of your performance.  Your bonus probably rides, at least in part, on how many hours you bill.  The system, of course, is hugely imperfect.  The increasing emphasis on hours is not just a problem because people have to work longer hours; it's a problem because associates are under so much pressure to bill that lots of them pad their hours, tacking on a few here and there when the anxiety of a slow or unproductive day or week sets in.  Or the inefficient are perceived as workhorses while the more proficient associates seem to be slacking off.  One person's ten hour day may yield three times as much work product as another.  And partners may not always recognize the difference. 

This tension, the constant push-pull of billing enough hours vs. churning out enough product is a major problem in the profession.  I worked for a brief while during my leave as a writer for a company that compiles surveys of law firm associates about their job satisfaction.  By an enormous margin, the most satisfied and happiest lawyers were those whose firms did not use billable hours for anything but billing clients.  A handful of firms, most of them down South for some reason, don't pass associates' hours around the department or even track them in any way except for accounting and billing purposes.  These associates were able to do their jobs without that shadow over them all the time, the shadow of their hours vs. their classmates, of their bonus dwindling when their dog was sick for a week or they had to go to two funerals in a month. 

Could this be a model for tomorrow's law firm?  A firm where associates learn to be lawyers without having to feel like billing machines?  A firm that rewards associates for their merit, that teaches people to be efficient and task-oriented, rather than numbers-oriented?  A firm where associates don't send out emails at 3am just to show everyone how hard they've been working?  Perhaps a system exists where firms could charge clients on the basis of tasks, not hours -- having a fifth-year associate write a brief on a motion to dismiss costs X amount, no matter how long it takes (which price would be determined by a historical review of bills, from which an average cost of a particular task could be gleaned).  I think this is a concept that could generate great value for clients and for lawyers.

On top of these two major phenomena, of course things like mentoring, transparency and flexibility matter a great deal.  But I think that, first and foremost, associates coming into the practice have to adjust their expectations and realize that they are coming in to learn just as much as to work; while firms have to find a way to change The System so that the emphasis for young associates can be on the learning and the working instead of on the billing of hours.  If that could happen, I believe that many more people, women and men, would find reasons to stay.