Anonymous Lawyer

If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it... can I still make an associate go clean up whatever mess it made?  Hey, I know it's been like six years since I last posted on this thing, but surely I'm important enough that you've all been checking it daily.  So I can just jump right back in, yeah?  Hopefully people still read blogs.  I'm not actually sure what people do anymore.  Man, I remember when I was just a "people," before I became too powerful to do much of anything that I'm not billing for.  Worrying about life and stuff like that, ha, what a crazy time that was.  It is really great to be able to pay people to do things for me that I don't want to do, and to use work as an excuse for avoiding anything else I don't feel like dealing with.

But I should catch you up on what you've missed these past six years.  First of all, I'm at a different firm.  Smaller, but just as indifferent to the needs of the people who work for us.  You know, I used to wonder if smaller firms really were selling something different to prospective associates, the whole work-life balance thing, more access to clients, more interesting work, personal attention, all of that junk.  But now I realize all those purported advantages were just trumped-up ways to paper over the truth.  There isn't a smaller firm out there that wouldn't love to be a big firm, if they could manage to procure enough work.  Smaller just means they aren't good enough to be big, that's all.  Anything else is just a story we're telling to try to convince you -- or ourselves -- of something else.  No one makes a deliberate decision to stay small.  No one.

The other update for now is that Anonymous Wife made a wonderful miscalculation about how easy it would be to get around the antenuptial agreement I made her sign before our wedding, and she now lives with a VP of marketing -- ha, marketing, the idea of that being a respectable career always makes me laugh -- in an ungentrified neighborhood that I'm almost scared to be driven through when I pick up our kids for a visit every fifth weekend.  I, of course, found someone better, almost instantly, and she was even able to convince me to let her have a child.  So we have a baby, who is some number of months old, and his half-siblings hate him, of course, because I get to do everything over again and make time for him the way I never did for them, blah, blah, blah.  Anyway, he is a demon around bedtime, so I've started teaching a class as an adjunct at a terrible law school around here just so I don't have to be home when my wife is dealing with that.  I thought I knew terrible law schools from the years I've spent recruiting mindless drones to come be my slaves -- but I never really thought about the fact that there was a whole tier of law schools far beneath even the ones we thought were far beneath our targets.  It's one thing to con people into taking a job that'll kill their souls.  At least we pay them.  It's quite another thing to con people into spending $200K to get a "degree" that is completely and utterly valueless.  So those are the people I'm screaming at a few nights a week, about whatever comes to mind, since, honestly, they are not paying me enough to prepare material, they're really not.

I'm sure I'll have more to say about all of that, especially since I told New Wife that this blog is what I "need" to be working on during bedtime the rest of the nights of the week.  She thinks it's a law review article that I'm working on.  Yeah, I married someone who thinks that someone like me would have to write law review articles in order to justify his professional standing.  I didn't say she was a genius.  So, there we are.  My return.  For real this time.

Oh-- I'm just putting this here as a placeholder for my next post-- I need to remember to write about the funniest thing that's happened to me in a while.  An associate popped her head into my office the other day and asked me about our paid family leave policy.  I don't even know which of those words is the funniest-- paid, family, or leave.  Probably leave, because I think that's what she's going to do.  Wow, I've missed having this outlet, I really have.  Talk to you again soon.