2009 was not a good year for a lot of people, lawyers included. Probably it was my least active year professionally during the past 25 years. There were times when I sat at my desk thinking that I should probably go biking, home, to the gym. But at the end of the year I found that my productivity and billings were actually not so bad and I had accomplished other things including giving several seminars at AHBL, writing an article (hopefully to be published soon), cultivating friendships and planning to build a house in Mexico – not bad in hindsight.
Positive reframing, ability to adapt and the courage to stay in the present are skills we can develop to get the most out of life. Take for example, Beverly Willett whose article appeared in the NYT Magazine – Jan. 17, 2010
"The past year brought about setbacks for many. For me, it signaled the end of my 25-year marriage, the loss of membership in the family medical plan and the necessity of re-entering the workplace at midlife after a long hiatus as a stay-at-home mom. The market crash gobbled up a big chunk of my modest retirement account, and the divorce litigation left me with a pile of bills.
So in November, when my friend Terry mentioned that the company she worked for needed extra help right away, I followed what had fallen in my path. At least I could earn enough to foot the heating bill for a couple of months while I spruced up my résumé.
“I guess you’d call it a fulfillment house,” Terry said, describing the company. People placed orders for merchandise over the Web or by phone, and Terry’s organization fulfilled the orders. The items ranged from T-shirts and teddy bears to coffee mugs and casserole dishes.
The following Monday I showed up for my part-time holiday job. The pay was $12 an hour, before taxes, with no health coverage, sick leave or other benefits. During the first few weeks, I sat in a chair all day and typed in orders, a far cry from my early days as a lawyer representing clients with household names.
Right after I got my first paycheck, my car broke down, and heating-oil money was diverted to the repair shop. During Week 2, the 20 to 25 hours I thought I’d be working dwindled to 13. But I called a halt to my pity party when I counted up all my friends who lost their jobs in 2009. And that’s when I began to feel satisfaction from the work I did get. Although the job involved inputting product codes and shipping data for several hours at a time, it somehow got me in touch with real people with real lives in real towns. And it gave me glimpses into worlds other than my own that, for at least the course of a workday, melted preoccupation with my own troubles.
The scrawl on some of the orders reminded me of my 79-year-old mother’s. As hard as it apparently was for some of my customers to hold a pen, they nonetheless included handwritten notes with their $4.99 orders that said “thank you.” Of course there were orders that came with requests to include personal notes on the packing slips; others came with meticulous instructions for sending identical gifts to a number of family members around the country. My own grandmother, who was proud but of modest means, cheerfully handed out $5 McDonald’s gift certificates at holiday time to an ever-expanding contingent of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Reading these notes made me long to be back in my grandmother’s tiny living room with my own family members, all of whom now live more than 250 miles away.
By Week 4, as the holidays approached, my duties shifted into Phase 2 of the fulfillment process. That meant I took inventory, pulled puzzles and potholders and other merchandise from the shelves, constructed and packed boxes, applied postage and hauled packages to the loading dock, where U.P.S. picked them up.
Typing in orders had made my backside ache from all the sitting; after the shift in duties, I was on my feet all day, carrying, bending, lifting and crouching. But as I bubble-wrapped breakables, something else began to register with me: all the work that went into getting the parcels I’ve received over the years safely to my door.
A couple of weeks before Christmas, the bone spur on my left foot flared up so badly from all the standing that I hobbled around for two days. All my nails broke, too, and I came home at night with compound paper cuts. My grand plans of tackling my massive to-do list in the evening after I got off work quickly fizzled: it took all my effort just to cook dinner, throw in a load of laundry and ice down my lower back. But make no mistake — my employers treated me well. They paid more than others pay for the same work and made sure we hydrated and took lunch breaks. The other part-timers I worked with smiled and always offered a hand. And at the end of each day I felt that oxymoronic “good tired.”
The job has now ended, but that’s O.K. There was no way I could begin to whittle away at my substantial debt at that pay, and my physical and mental stamina make me a better sitter than a stander. But I needed to get back on my feet, and this was a way to start.
Even with all my years raising a family and working long hours as an attorney, I can say I’ve never worked so hard in all my life. And yet it might turn out to be the best job I’ve ever had."
Beverly Willett is a freelance writer living in Brooklyn.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
Monday, January 18, 2010
Measuring "Value"
According to the “Outliers” (Malcolm Gladwell), you need about 10,000 hours to become expert. This can apply to piano, theoretical physics or law. At 4 hours per day, 300 days per year, this will take 8 1/3 years.
That is daunting. With some help, maybe it is possible to do it in 8,000 hours.
Stephen Hawking’s book “The Brief History of Time” is one of the world’s best sellers and least read books. According to 20th century physics, on the quantum level, time is reversible, ie the laws of physics apply forwards or backwards in time. On the macroscopic level time goes forwards (at least that is our perception and a cruel one). The “arrow of time” has been subject of much debate in the domain of physics. But I doubt if we would have many meaningful conversations on everyday life unless we implicitly assumed time moves inexorably only in one direction – ie forward.
Lawyers sell their time so there is a direct linear relationship between time and money. For lawyers and other professionals like accountants and architects, time is money.
Unfortunately for those of us who are slaves to this clock and have been doing time records for 20 or 30 years (regrettably even more for me). time and money have become interchangeable, in fact synonymous.
Mastercard’s advertising is truly ingenious – zoom in on a kid playing hockey - $2.00 for the puck, $25 for the stick, $200 for the skates, - watching your kid score a goal is priceless – but for everything else there is Mastercard.
If you spend each of your 5 –6 days a week in the office attributing to each hour a price, what is the price of the hour you spend watching your kid play hockey, or piano or for that matter, you playing piano.
What happens if you can’t allocate value to activities which are not “productive” ie cannot be billed out. Or if you can only prioritize activities based on monetary value.
Here is a link to an article from the New York Times in which the writer struggles with this issue. He expresses it much more eloquently and subtly than I can.
That is daunting. With some help, maybe it is possible to do it in 8,000 hours.
Stephen Hawking’s book “The Brief History of Time” is one of the world’s best sellers and least read books. According to 20th century physics, on the quantum level, time is reversible, ie the laws of physics apply forwards or backwards in time. On the macroscopic level time goes forwards (at least that is our perception and a cruel one). The “arrow of time” has been subject of much debate in the domain of physics. But I doubt if we would have many meaningful conversations on everyday life unless we implicitly assumed time moves inexorably only in one direction – ie forward.
Lawyers sell their time so there is a direct linear relationship between time and money. For lawyers and other professionals like accountants and architects, time is money.
Unfortunately for those of us who are slaves to this clock and have been doing time records for 20 or 30 years (regrettably even more for me). time and money have become interchangeable, in fact synonymous.
Mastercard’s advertising is truly ingenious – zoom in on a kid playing hockey - $2.00 for the puck, $25 for the stick, $200 for the skates, - watching your kid score a goal is priceless – but for everything else there is Mastercard.
If you spend each of your 5 –6 days a week in the office attributing to each hour a price, what is the price of the hour you spend watching your kid play hockey, or piano or for that matter, you playing piano.
What happens if you can’t allocate value to activities which are not “productive” ie cannot be billed out. Or if you can only prioritize activities based on monetary value.
Here is a link to an article from the New York Times in which the writer struggles with this issue. He expresses it much more eloquently and subtly than I can.
Saturday, January 9, 2010
Legal Mentoring
The following article recently appeared in the New York Times.
The Children of Cyberspace: Old Fogies by Their 20s
By Brad Stone, published January 9, 2010
This article deals with technology. A comment which interested me was that there are now mini-generation gaps rather than merely generation gaps. According to Wikipedia (but with a disclaimer that there is no substantiation) gender gaps means:
"The term first became popularized in Western countries during the 1960s and described the cultural differences between the young and their parents."
Although some generational differences have existed throughout history, because of more rapid cultural change during the modern era differences between the two generations increased in comparison to previous times, particularly with respect to such matters as musical tastes, fashion, culture and politics. This may have been magnified by the unprecedented size of the young generation during the 1960s, which gave it unprecedented power, and willingness to rebel against societal norms."
If a generation is about 20 years, that leaves a couple of generation gaps between me and some of the articling students. A frightening but challenging thought. The generation gap and technological advances present formidable obstacles to the "elder generation".
We (i.e., me) are so immersed in today's problems and the urgency and deadlines imposed by practice, we have even less time to contemplate the multitude of ways in which the legal world will change and we are far removed from the cultural and even physical technological changes. This is a problem which is likely faced by young lawyers too - too little time and too much to do. How are we to plan for the future while struggling to keep our heads above water today.
As a mentor, I wonder if my experience will be relevant to the practice of law as it inevitably evolves over the next 20 - 30 years?
The teenagers of the '60's and '70's thought the experience of their parents was irrelevant at best and counter-productive and tainted at the worst. I can say this with confidence having grown up in that long-ago era.
Being an optomist, I assume that I have some valuable or at least interesting ideas, stories and experiences for young lawyers.
So the purpose of this post is to invite the reader to think about how lawyers practice law, how they use technology (or don't), how they communicate within their office, with their peers and with their clients, and whether they are anticipating those inevitable changes. Also what it is that the older lawyers can communicate to newly called lawyer that they may perceive as valuable and interesting.
The Children of Cyberspace: Old Fogies by Their 20s
By Brad Stone, published January 9, 2010
This article deals with technology. A comment which interested me was that there are now mini-generation gaps rather than merely generation gaps. According to Wikipedia (but with a disclaimer that there is no substantiation) gender gaps means:
"The term first became popularized in Western countries during the 1960s and described the cultural differences between the young and their parents."
Although some generational differences have existed throughout history, because of more rapid cultural change during the modern era differences between the two generations increased in comparison to previous times, particularly with respect to such matters as musical tastes, fashion, culture and politics. This may have been magnified by the unprecedented size of the young generation during the 1960s, which gave it unprecedented power, and willingness to rebel against societal norms."
If a generation is about 20 years, that leaves a couple of generation gaps between me and some of the articling students. A frightening but challenging thought. The generation gap and technological advances present formidable obstacles to the "elder generation".
We (i.e., me) are so immersed in today's problems and the urgency and deadlines imposed by practice, we have even less time to contemplate the multitude of ways in which the legal world will change and we are far removed from the cultural and even physical technological changes. This is a problem which is likely faced by young lawyers too - too little time and too much to do. How are we to plan for the future while struggling to keep our heads above water today.
As a mentor, I wonder if my experience will be relevant to the practice of law as it inevitably evolves over the next 20 - 30 years?
The teenagers of the '60's and '70's thought the experience of their parents was irrelevant at best and counter-productive and tainted at the worst. I can say this with confidence having grown up in that long-ago era.
Being an optomist, I assume that I have some valuable or at least interesting ideas, stories and experiences for young lawyers.
So the purpose of this post is to invite the reader to think about how lawyers practice law, how they use technology (or don't), how they communicate within their office, with their peers and with their clients, and whether they are anticipating those inevitable changes. Also what it is that the older lawyers can communicate to newly called lawyer that they may perceive as valuable and interesting.
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