Stay of Execution

Petunia

I have somehow picked up the habit of addressing people I like (remember, that's nearly everyone) with sweet little pet names. Like "chickadee" or "sugarplum" or "petunia" or "sweet pea." "Petunia" is maybe my favorite. I just planted a bunch of petunias, as well as pansies and little pink guys whose names I don't know, in my windowboxes and hanging baskets. Now I'm going to go to bed with dirt under my fingernails.

The Plant Ladies

We have unobtrusive plant ladies who come into our office and take care of the plants. (UCL wrote about this some time ago.) I have three of my own plants in my office -- a wandering jew, a yellow primrose, and a christmas cactus, as well as two plants rented or leased or otherwise arranged with the office plant company. However that works. The plant ladies (they are always ladies, it seems) seem to turn over pretty frequently. So the new ones ask me whether I want them to water those three plants along with the others. Sure I do, why wouldn't I? I would want them to come to my house, too, if I could.

The first one I got to know was really cool -- she would sit down and talk with me, and she would lecture me about cutting back my wandering jew and finally just hacked away at it, making it healthier (but it no longer dangled down over my whole bookcase, which I liked). I used to see her and her pit bull around town. She and her boyfriend did sound for a pretty cool club that I liked to go to and I always felt like a cool chick when I hung with the tattooed dreadlocked insider there.

Now the plant ladies who come in are so unobtrusive as to be nearly invisible. They don't talk, they whisper. I am usually pretty tuned in to people but every so often I'll look up from my work and realize a plant lady has been in my office for some time without me knowing. Or I noticed she was there and then forgot about her and she's still there. That's a rare kind of skill, being that unobtrusive. They should be spies.

Some Thoughts On Returning From A Creditor's Meeting

I just accompanied a pro bono bankruptcy client to a creditor's meeting. This is a meeting where the person going bankrupt meets the bankruptcy trustee, and creditors are free to come and ask whatever questions they want of the individual who declared bankruptcy. Usually creditors don't show up, and it's just a bunch of scared people, a few bored attorneys, and a trustee with a huge stack of files asking the same questions over and over. I always tell my clients they will be surprised at how quick and easy it is, and although I try to describe it and de-mystify it, they always leave going, "Wow, that was it? That was really quick. He was really nice. Wow. I can't believe how easy that was."

Today we were low on the trustee's list so we sat in the front row and watched about nine other debtors go through the little spiel. Mostly they didn't have any property or any assets. One had $25,000 in an IRA and a BMW and a house, which my client found amazing and somewhat horrible -- "what's she doing in bankruptcy?!" The trustee had a little spiel that he would say after asking the debtors whether they were telling the truth, whether they'd sold any property in the last year, whether they owned a vehicle or any land or buildings, etc. He'd get to the end of his questions and recite the following: "Chapter7wasdesignedtogiveyouafreshfinanicalstart. Ihopeitworksoutforyougoodluck." Generally he would remember to make eye contact with the debtors at least by the final two words. It wasn't very inspiring, especially hearing it recited, unchanged nine times before he addressed it to my client. I guess if you do these all the time as a trustee you forget the experience of being new and scared and ashamed of whatever circumstances brought this person into bankruptcy.

I also think it's a little insensitive for the trustee to joke around about going golfing with the lawyers while people who have no assets to speak of and no source of income except a minimum wage job, or disability, are sitting at the table.

Finally, I really think that young women should recognize the limitations of tattoos to intrigue or allure.

Happy Exam Time!

I must already be old and nostalgic, and my law student readers are going to hate me for this post, but I'm really envious of the law students right about now. They're under big big pressure, they are trying to synthesize a semester's worth of materials that are tricky and complicated and obscure in just a couple of days. Their classmates have turned from relatively normal, perhaps high-strung folks into pale, unshaven, sickly, half-crazed nutjobs. And they're going to have to walk in on a date certain and write their exam number and take a deep breath and turn over the exam and face their own rising panic as they read the fact pattern. Look at their watch. Re-read the fact pattern. Look at the ceiling for a minute, maybe around the room of classmates. And then start to write. A timed essay or two or six, making cogent all the fragments of knowledge you've got in your head (and the ones that just fled your consciousness and taunt you from just beyond your reach -- how do you bring them back in and get them down on paper?), in a way that's organized and well-structured and on-point. Resisting the temptation to list all the other concepts and points that you proudly mastered last night or this morning in your most recent cram session, but that don't really apply to the question at hand. (Maybe for extra credit? Or to filibuster while you are trying to think of that damn term that is escaping you right now, maddeningly? Resist.) Staying calm when you run out of things to say and everyone else in the room is writing frantically. Staying calm when it appears on the first read through of the question, and maybe even on the second read, that you studied everything wrong, that you are missing a fundamental understanding of the subject matter, that you don't really even know what the professor is getting at with the question. Keeping your eyes on the clock.

Although I dreaded, procrastinated, avoided, lurched around, and panicked about them like everyone else, I really did love exam time. I liked figuring out what I needed to learn, how I could best learn it, and then teaching myself, intensively, during study time. And I really enjoyed the adrenaline rush of the exam itself. Matching wits with something hard, for a specific and limited duration, and being completely finished with it once you handed it in, that's a rare kind of fun. Enjoy yourselves, guys.

Legal Lesson of the Day

Sometimes banks do make mistakes. It's fun when they do.

This Doesn't Happen Every Day

My assistant handed me my mail as I walked by her desk today. I said something like, "The usual junk again today?" I don't handle many matters entirely on my own, so important correspondence on the matters I'm working on usually comes in to my boss. And everything important gets faxed or emailed anyway. So the mail consists of advertisements for continuing legal education seminars, bar renewal fees, flyers for newsletters or reference books or bankruptcy services, and solicitations from my law school or the legal aid clinic for money.

So I was surprised when my assistant said, "Nope, today you got a handwritten letter from a prisoner." Hmmm. Apparently he's serving a three year term and wants to file bankruptcy; got my name from the legal aid clinic. Interesting. I wonder what he's in for. I wonder if it matters. I wonder what I think about this. I wonder if I'll take this on.

And Now, A Vain And Shallow Request

On May 8th the Hooked On Tonics girls are throwing a party (also I am walking a half-marathon on that day. And also, seeing a long-lost old flame). On May 22nd I am going to a wedding. On July 4th, I am going to another wedding that, although ostensibly the wedding of my best friend Autumn to my dear college friend Tony, I like to think of as my wedding. I introduced them, after all, so I feel the day is really best considered a celebration of me. It's a big day.

At all of these events I would like to look properly cute. Specifically, buff and toned and ready to wear little strappy dresses. Assume I am not yet there. Please send me your best strategies for getting strong and lean and toned in 10 days, 24 days, and 66 days. The countdown is on.

(Strategies that do not involve totally gnarly radical dietary and willpower transformations will be given special attention. But I am willing to stop eating M & Ms from my co-worker's candy dish, and to sweat a little bit.)

I Never Thought I'd End Up As A Lawyer....

Go read Jeremy's post, please. He writes about how strange he finds this phenomenon: many people at Harvard Law School, when sharing fond praise and generous hopes for one another, say things like, "You're too cool to be a lawyer," and "I hope you end up doing something really great -- better than being a lawyer." He wonders where the institutional self-loathing seems to come from in this career that 90% of the people saying these things to one another are affirmatively choosing for themselves. It's a pretty good question, and of course I don' t know the answer. Instead I'll give you some unsorted thoughts, from a person who never thought I'd become a lawyer, and didn't think I'd like it for this long, and who sometimes feels a little embarrassed or disappointed when meeting people and having them nod when I tell them I'm a lawyer, and who now is taking stock about whether I want to keep doing it or stop doing it or do it differently somehow.

The first thing that springs to mind is something I'm not sure how to tie in, but it feels connected somehow. A few years ago it was my dad's 25th reunion, and the Harvard class of 1969 prepared a book. Everyone in the class could submit a picture and a page of text, and I remember sitting in my parent's kitchen thumbing through this book. First I was star hunting (Tommy Lee Jones, Al Gore, etc) but then I was just reading what this group of talented people had to say about their lives 25 years out from college. And I noticed a pattern. Some people submitted their resumes, lists of achievements, etc. Most people did some of this, but talked more about other things -- families, trips, a struggle with an illness. In the aggregate, I found the essays of this group pretty reflective and pretty honest about where they had been. And almost all of them followed this form: a bit of discussion about a career that may or may not have been actively chosen ("somehow I ended up as president of a brewery"), a description of family life -- maybe a couple of divorces and some acknowledgment of the difficulty of this, or a loving description of a life partner and perhaps some children. Talk of some kind of hobby and its pursuit, maybe a description of a recent trip or achievement or event -- my barbershop quartet just recorded an album! And then a sort of reflective paragraph, saying, "Wow, our class was really talented, I thought we'd change the world in some kind of major way, and I wonder if we still will." This isn't coming out very clearly but the message I took from it is that even the most ambitious and talented people with big bold ideas get kind of distracted by life. That the major happinesses these people wrote about (even Tommy Lee Jones) were small pleasures -- time with family, a fishing trip with a son, performing music or giving a poetry reading -- rather than major career achievements. As a group they all sounded kind of puzzled about it -- "I'm really happy here managing this small horse farm in West Virginia, although I always thought I'd end up doing something important and especially that all of you guys would end up doing really interesting and world-changing things."

I Love You, But I'm Not IN Love With You

Autumn has nailed the distinction, I think.  I'll be mulling this over for a while. 

Aw, Shucks

I am scrambling around today so don't have time to post much. But I've been thinking about my demeanor with opposing counsel. UCL has a nice little essay about the relationships attorneys develop with one another, even while representing people whose interests are not aligned, and sometimes are actively hostile to one another.

It's not all sweetness and light, as UCL kind of makes it sound. There are some aggressive folks out there. You see a variety of different styles and approaches, even within a small office like this one. One attorney here routinely advises opposing counsel at the beginning of a matter, "I don't ask for extensions, and I never agree to them. If you know these ground rules at the start, we'll get along fine." I'm still developing my own style, or, more accurately, observing it manifesting through continued encounters with other attorneys.