Tuesday, February 28, 2012

Working (not so) Hard

Based on my experiences so far, the stories you hear about young lawyers working sixty, eighty, or a hundred hours a week are exaggerated. I've had a few late nights at work because of after-hours client meetings, but most of my days are eight to five. I am told that we'll be a lot busier when we have a trial coming up, but that only happens a few times a year.

Maybe that 'midnight oil' lifestyle only happens at the big firms. Or maybe lawyers just perpetuate the myth of the overworked associate so they can justify billing sixteen hours a day.  Nah, they wouldn't do that.

Saturday, February 25, 2012

Blog Reborn

I decided I'm not ready to quit blogging, so I rechristened the blog 'LR Law' (get it? get it? I'm old) and will keep posting about my experiences as an attorney.

I want to use this, my first "lawyer post," to lower expectations in two ways. First, I doubt that I will have time to post twice a week as I did through most of law school. Second, I don't intend to get fired over my blog, so my posts will tend to be extremely vague. My identity is no secret to regular readers, but maybe I can stay off my boss' radar. For now, suffice it to say that I work at a small firm in downtown Little Rock.

Sunday, February 12, 2012

One Last Post About School

This blog has been more or less dormant since I passed the bar, and I haven't quite decided whether I should shutter it altogether. This I know for sure: I can't call it a law school blog anymore. But before I pack it in or change the blog's name or whatever I'm going to do, I want to ask myself the one question that sums it all up: If I knew then what I know now, would I have applied to law school at all?

I suppose so, but it's hardly a slam dunk.

Financially, law school was not a good bet.
To make law school pay (at least in the third-tier, small-market law school world I experienced), you have to be either an academic savant, a networking savant, or a lawyer's kid. I would categorize myself as an academic savant and a networking dullard, and that combination almost sank me. Those eight months of unemployment after graduation were a terrible, terrible time for me, and it's going to take a long time to forget them. Now I earn maybe twenty percent more than I did before I went to school. My long-term earning potential is good, sure, but it's going to take me a long time to make up for that lost three years.

In terms of job satisfaction, so far, so good.
I went to law school in the first place because I was burned out on the clerical and accounting jobs I've done my whole life. Practicing law is a lot more fun, but I've only been at it for a month. In five years, will I be more burned out than ever? Statistics say yes--law is just about the drinkingest, drug-abusingest, most depressed profession there is. Maybe I'll be the exception.

So law school turned out to be an okay option for the bored accountant I was four years ago, but if I really had a do-over, I'd go back and warn my eighteen-year-old self to lay off that cushy history major and take some physics or chemistry or computer science classes. I suspect I'd be more employable with most any science undergraduate degree than I am with a law degree. What's more, I'd be more employable as a lawyer if I had some kind of science background; the field is saturated with history and poli-sci majors. Stay in school, kids!