Anonymous Lawyer

The last 3L we're waiting to hear from about whether or not she'll be accepting our full-time offer called today to ask for more time to decide. She acted on the phone like she was "entitled" to more time, like it was automatic. I didn't appreciate that. We spent a lot of money on her this summer. She's entitled to nothing. She's lucky to have an offer. I told her February 1 is the latest. She asked for April 1. I told her to call me in mid-January and tell me where she stands, and we'll see. I honestly couldn't care less if we lose her, but I have to pretend. That's not completely honest. On the margins it's true, but we do need our first-year class to be the size we planned, just to replace all of the associates who leave every year. One more or one less won't affect us, but two or three or four and we'll feel it, in one way or another. The second- and third-year associates will feel it most because there won't be enough people to pass down crap work to. She said she's still exploring some public interest jobs. Again with the public interest. Every day lately someone is talking about public interest as if public interest lawyers are something other than the people from terrible law schools who can't get jobs at a place like this one. Every single lawyer at the Sierra Club would trade places with me if given the opportunity, or if not then they deserve to be at the Sierra Club, because they aren't accomplishing anything at all, and they're getting paid nothing to do it. It hit me a number of years ago, about a year before I made partner, when in a moment of weakness I felt like I was getting burned out doing this stuff and wondered if it was worth it. I called a legal recruiter to see what some other options might be. I snuck out for a couple of interviews. But then I realized it's all meaningless. Life is meaningless. No one is doing great things. Even the people who seem like they're doing great things, the older you get the more you realize their lives are no better than yours. Working fewer hours would just give me more time to realize there's nothing out there. More hours to sit around the empty house I'm going home to. More hours to waste time until I die. When I was a second-year associate, a partner once told me that when he was an associate the way he made sure he was as productive for the firm as he could possibly be is he tracked his hours in the office, but also outside the office. I never forgot this. He'd keep a diary of his time for everything he did. 0.5 hours watching TV. 1.0 hours at the gym. 1.5 hours out to dinner with his wife. And he discovered he was wasting a lot of time. He told me that he realized if he was ever going to make partner, he needed to cut down on all non-essential outside-of-the-office activities. He dedicated his life to job productivity. He didn't leave himself time to think about the meaning of it all. I don't know if I'm strong enough to leave myself any time to think. I'm not happy with the thoughts I have. I need to rededicate my thoughts toward something more productive. I need to find an unwinnable negotiation and win it. Or get some associates on it and take credit for it. That's why we need as many first-years as we can get. They don't ask for credit.