Legal Mystenigmary

Do You Know...

who's at the top of my Most Hated list? (at least for today, I mean - tomorrow's list could be totally different and likely will be topped by whatever liquor I heedlessly drank too much of tonight).

Plaintiffs' attorneys. More specifically, old, male, plaintiffs' attorneys who are acting as arbitrators in cases in which I represent a scruffy, somewhat shady but nonetheless not-really-liable defendant who happens to have the deepest pockets in the room. Even more so when the reason my client's not-so-liable is due to a somewhat novel but still valid and perfectly logical argument. Because then -- ooooh, then, when I start presenting my argument, and the attorney for the actual plaintiff (who is also, naturally, old and male) starts INTERRUPTING ME every THIRD WORD, and I start to get very calm and cool in requesting that he do me the courtesy of staying quiet until I have FINISHED TALKING, the evil plaintiffs' arbitrator starts waving his hands and turning to me with this condescending little smirk on his face and going "Whooooooa there, kiddo. Just slooooow down. Let's let Mr. Plaintiff's Counsel here have a chance to finish his sentence, cause, I mean, he really has a point here, and I promise, then it'll be your turn."

WHAT??!! It already WAS my turn! He STOLE my turn! What is this, third grade? With teacher-approved bullying? But, okay, whatever, fine. You, Mr. Snarky Arbitrator, are making the decisions at the end of the day (much as it chills me to the marrow of my bones), so I'll make nice with you. Let's let Mr. Comb-Over "finish his turn" there. Oh, good, my turn now? <Begin somewhat-novel-but-well-reasoned argument, complete with case citations to cases decided just two days ago, and get interrupted two sentences into it by -- you guess it, Mr. Comb-Over>. Oh, no, that is it! You not only had your turn, you had MY turn too, and now you want ANOTHER one?

The upshot invariably is that I lose my temper in the most restrained way possible, the plaintiff's counsel rounds out his argument premised on "Because I said so" with "And every other arbitrator I've ever had has always done it!", and my client gets found to be 50% at fault (while my older, male-r partner wins outright with the same argument in an identical fact pattern a week later). And I only very narrowly avoid throttling plaintiff's counsel on the way down in the elevator when he smarms all over me trying to look down my top. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! I must start looking into less misogynistic lines of work -- like pole dancing.

Matchy-Matchy

OK - I have been buying bikinis for the last, let's say, eighteen years and while I've now mastered the basic configurations on what I can and can't wear in that department (underwire good, thong bottoms very very heinously bad), I'm still totally puzzled about one thing -- WHY do the tops and the bottoms of the suits NEVER EVER sell out evenly? Like, not even close. It's not like there's six yellow tops and five yellow bottoms because one weird person decided to get a back up bottom or something -- there's, like, two yellow tops, a green-striped top, and then one single white bottom -- is the whole WORLD wearing non-matching bikinis? And if so, when did THOSE memos go out, 'cause I seem to have missed mine.

I Just Don't Know What to Do with Myself

Why do law schools not also hand out tiny crystal balls or mini laminated cards of career path options (kind of like  a useful cross between E. McPan's laminated J.D. card and a "Life: The Game" playing card)? Because, WOW, could I use one. I'm having simultaneous life and career crises at the moment, and I just don't see a way out. Here's the problem (or problems, at they may be):

I have been at my current firm, in Hellacious Isolated-No-Friends-ville, for three years come September. I loooove my partners (seriously. That whole missing-the-hearing situation last week? No one even got mad. They laughed at me, of course, but that was it. All good. LOVE them.), and we've all finally gotten comfortable and chatty with each other like old friends, which is awesome - but I HATE what they pay me. (And no, they really aren't able to pay me much more than my current salary with adequate yearly raises). I also hate where I live, since everyone I know lives at least two hours from me, and in some cases, more than five. I used to visit a lot, but as time's worn on, I've gotten less and less interested in spending every single weekend on a train/plane/driver's seat, and now I see my friends only perhaps once every two months. I haven't really had any luck making new friends here, since it appears to be a hard and fast rule that everyone must get married and start procreating by age 25 in this benighted corner of the universe, and those people aren't so interested in getting to be friends with a single person. This used to be not such a problem, because Irksome was in the picture and provided a minimum of local social-life-y stuff, but given his radio silence of the last ten days, preceeded by his "this doesn't feel right," it's pretty clear he's now out of the picture. So, all I've got going here is the firm where I earn just enough to pay my bills and some part of my student loans, have fabulous mentors who will are fast approaching retirement sometime in the next ten years and without whom I have no interest in continuing to be in the firm, have a great work-life balance situation but have no "life" to occupy the free time it should otherwise go in, and have no opportunity for making new friends because everyone's at least twenty years older than me.

I do not know what to do. I don't know if I should stay here for the next ten years until everyone I want to work with retires, and then move somewhere else where I do actually know people (at which point, I'd either be such a dried-up bitter old crone that I'd probably have no friends left anyway), and resign myself to having missed out on doing a clerkship, getting my LLM abroad and getting any kind of decent job (because what firm wants a 13th-year associate lateral hire with no portable book of business and dozens of conflicts?). Or if I should start applying for clerkships and LLM programs now, which carries the burden of trying to figure out how the hell to get recommendations from professors I haven't even spoken to in three years and, in the case of the LLM, how to pay for it with my already outstanding six-figure student loan debt, and resign myself to having to leave the best mentors and senior partners I could ever hope to have. Or if I should just skip the clerkship/LLM conundrum and try to lateral to another, bigger market, where I'd earn more, but would almost certainly not have the same work/life balance or love for my bosses, and would have to deal with all the manipulation and workplace drama that comes with working in a much larger firm - and that solution brings with it the concomitant problem that I'd want to work in the appellate department of whatever firm it was, which I haven't researched but have a feeling is much more difficult to do than just showing up to an interview and saying "I want to do this," or  at the very least, not continue practicing the type of law I do now, but that's also difficult, because I've never done anything else and how likely is another firm to want to hire a fourth-year associate with no experience in whatever field? yeah, not so much.

This is so frustrating. Can I just go finger-paint now? 

Senile Woman Walking

I forgot to go to an arbitration today. Let me say this again, just to underline it: I FORGOT TO GO TO AN ARBITRATION TODAY. For all you non-lawyers, this is the equivalent of forgetting to go to work. Forgetting to go to a departmental meeting. Forgetting to.. DO YOUR JOB.

I'm so embarrassed. I have never ever ever in the (admittedly short-ish) history of my career forgotten to GO TO COURT. How do you even forget that? Granted, my ab-fab secretary is out on a two-week vacation last week and this week, and my calendar is being dealt with as "extra work" by a partner's secretary (who is not quite as stellar as my secretary, in my opinion), so my calendar has been like a dirty little orphan child begging for more porridge this week. However, the partner who had asked me to do it in the first place (because, OH YES, OF COURSE, it was someone else's cases, not one of my own where I could have hopefully swept it under the rug without too much fuss) actually asked me to my face on Friday if I would cover it. We chatted about it. For, like, ten minutes. He then sent an email to his secretary and my secretary and me about it. (Although both the former two were and have been out on vacation, so it wasn't so helpful). In addition to the computerized and paper diaries my secretary keeps for me, I keep my own pocket diary with all my appointments, appearances, etc. The damn arbitration made it in to NONE OF THESE.

So I wandered into work today, already deeply cranky from being up too late crying (Irksome and I are, apparently, breaking up. More on that bag o' fun later) and having nightmares (I accidentally read this stupid NYT article about "Horror in a Sleepy Connecticut Town" where a family was tragically murdered by burglars while they, basically, slept, and it followed me around all night), and plop down at my computer to find out if that J. Crew bikini I wanted is finally on sale, because now I have to look extra-cute since I don't have a boyfriend anymore (funny, though -- I didn't even know I had a boyfriend until he told me he might not want to be my boyfriend anymore. What a lovely way to break the news of that nomenclature.)

As I'm futzing around, said partner comes in, walks by my door without comment and does a double take -- "Uh, aren't you supposed to be in court for me?" he says. "Oh SHIT!" I say. Literally, of course. Because the best thing to do when you've screwed up is curse at your boss. I rushed around calling the court, he rushed around finding his spare suit (since he wasn't planning to be in court that day, since I was going to be in court that day. oops.) and since it was going to be such a problem, he ended up going to the arbitration himself so he could personally explain the problem and hopefully, use some of his professional cred to convince the arbitrators not to automatically suppress our answer.

Just please kill me. Honestly. If it's painless, I really wouldn't mind.

I Am Whoever I Say I Am

Sometimes, I simply do not understand my own brain. Typically, I have no complaints -- I mean, come on, it got me through college and law school on thrice-weekly benders, and does an entirely respectable job of impersonating a lawyer who knows what the hell she's doing. Sometimes, it even allows for something that resembles wit. But other times - jeesh. it's like it's possessed. Which is exactly what happened at lunch yesterday (with not only two senior partners but another older attorney who in a high-powered firm, of course).

For some background, you should know I've never thought it amusing to use, as a joke premise, those gross stereotypes of marriage generally seen in common-denominator sitcoms, where the wife is the childish, manipulative, shopaholic layabout and the husband is the put-upon, harried, breadwinner who has to be tricked by his wife into buying flowers, going to dinner, and buying her what she wants. I just don't think it's funny. Fine, it may be true, somewhere out there, that there are marriages like this, but I think that's sad, and I certainly don't think any of the men I was having lunch with are in such marriages (actually, having met two of the wives, I can say that absolutely does not appear to be the case).  But, as we're eating, one of them (the non-partner) starts talking about his wife's new car, explaining that she had gotten a very sporty coupe as a replacement for the family's old van (since their four kids had flown the proverbial nest). One of the other guys started laughing, and said something that basically implied that the husband had bought his wife the sporty car to get himself out of trouble. And, having just had some kind of out-of-body experience, instead of just smiling politely and moving to a new topic, my brain decides instead to cue up some response about how many anniversaries he'd now be allowed to forget in the future. Everyone laughed and kept talking, so it's not like it was a huge social gaffe (I don't think, anyway), but I was totally shocked. Hello? Who am I? Is this just some trickledown effect of being around too many men for too long? Am I like becoming a caricature of one or something? I think I need to find one of those time-delay things they use in radio for screening curses.

That seems wrong.

Why do I always get a raging headache an hour after I run? Am I doing it wrong or something? I mean, running's supposed to be healthy and good and gets the blood and the oxygen and all the life-giving stuff circulating better -- it is not supposed to be blinding me. hmph.