Stay of Execution

I Can Run But I Can't Hide

You thought I'd completely stopped writing about law, didn't you?  I've been surrounded by lawyers, lately, and so of course I've been thinking about the profession.  While I was in Maine after Thanksgiving a former colleague of mine took me out to lunch, and after a nice interval of gossip and small talk, he entreated me to come back to the profession.  It was unexpected, and flattering, and half-tempting.  There are things about it that I miss.  I miss bankruptcy.  I miss some of the nimble thinking that it required of me.  I miss it the way I occasionally miss Bikram yoga -- it was a practice that made me strong and flexible in a certain way that nothing else can. 

Then I got down here and immediately went to two cocktail parties for lawyers.  I was trying to identify strictly as a coach and a visitor from out of town, but I was outed by NBT and friends as an ex-lawyer.  As has happened before, a couple of lawyers expressed envy at that.  "If it weren't for my loans, that's what I'd be doing...."  Is it really?  I wonder about the people who tell me that.  What are they really saying?  Other times, lawyers have said, "I wish I had something else I loved as much as you love sailing.  Because I don't really love what I'm doing, but I don't have anything else I'd love, and the pay is good, and so I'll just stay in this for the time being until I figure out what I really want to do."  Among other things, the background chatter was about motions, and hours, and time in court, and practice areas.   I didn't miss it. 

But the day before yesterday NBT and I were talking about a research question he's working on for a summary judgment motion.  And it reminded me of the process of hunting for caselaw, formulating a query, identifying with precision what your question is.  NBT enjoys his practice, and I remembered how fun it can be to figure something out and to articulate it clearly and persuasively.  It's a particular kind of pleasure. 

And then yesterday, my musician friend admitted he's been thinking about law school and asked me for my take.  It's really fun, I said.  But don't go into debt for it.  We talked about creativity and risk, money and stability, competition and prestige, freedom and second careers.  He and I went to college together, and we talked about how many of our classmates have become lawyers and bankers and doctors, and are so far along on their paths in these professions.  We talked about how it feels to be different than those peers, and the times we doubt ourselves. 

When I was out to lunch in Maine with the bankruptcy lawyer friend of mine, I said that I was pretty sure I wouldn't go back to practicing.  The ways I could imagine going back all depended very heavily on who I would work with.  I care a lot about my mentors and my peers.  I would want to apprentice with someone I respected and liked, and in my home state there's a list of about five people who I would approach if I wanted to get back into the profession.  When I left the practice and wrote down what "wild success" meant to me it included the ability to have the time and freedom to take on new projects or goals that interested me.  The practice of law rarely leaves you that kind of autonomy.  I've become very used to a flexible life, open days, time on boats and outdoors, trips and room for relationships.  I've discovered that I care about mentoring and helping other people get good at things, even more than I care about being good at things myself.  Being a clerk is probably the only way I'd really consider going back into the law.  And even then, I can't imagine going back to a life where I was indoors all day. 

Are You Sure You Want Me On The Committee?

I've just been invited to be on the college's "Law School Advisory Committee."  In responding to the invitation, I said I would be happy to be on the committee but that I have some strong opinions for students considering law school.  I think the profession and those counseling prospective law students rarely speak as honestly as we need to about incurring a big debt burden to go to law school, and what that can mean.  I loved law school, and I liked practicing law, but I like coaching sailing a whole lot better.  Do you really want me on this committee?  And they said, yes, we do.  This should be interesting. 

Ambition

The Happy Feminist wrote about her experience of people reacting to her ambition with distaste.  I'm very interested in that take because I've thought a lot about ambition.  I've had the opposite experience. 

I'm not ambitious.

What's interesting about saying that is the reaction I get from people.  It's equivalent to the reaction that I would get if I said, "I'm not pretty."  You're not allowed to say it.  People respond as though I'm insulting myself.  They want to comfort me and reassure me that I'm okay. 

I don't think it's a loaded statement.  I don't think I'm putting myself down when I say that I'm not ambitious.  But it's really strange to see how people contort the word to try to rearrange it.  "Oh, of course that's not true!  You ARE ambitious, I know it.  You just measure it differently.  You're ambitious in a different way than most people.  You're not traditionally ambitious, but you're definitely ambitious.  You're MORE ambitious than people who care just about their career." 

The definition of "ambitious" is "having a strong desire for success or achievement."  We traditionally use it to mean a focus on professional milestones and a particular level of power or influence in a career.  That's the meaning I'm using it in when I say I'm not very ambitious.  It seems to me to be a statement of fact.  I don't measure my success or my self-esteem that way.  My sense of self doesn't come from my job title.  I like work, and I set goals, and I like to earn the respect of my colleagues, and I don't like to be bad at things.  I think I'm pretty talented, pretty smart, pretty capable.  I like the feeling of influencing people, although I think I do that best in social and informal settings, through personal storytelling and one-on-one contact.  But I'm not motivated by a strong desire for success or achievement.  And I don't feel like I'm being socially unacceptable by saying I'm not ambitious.   

And yet somehow it makes people very uncomfortable.  People act like I'm debasing myself to say it.  I think you can be ambitious without being talented, or happy.  And I think you can be talented, and happy, without being particularly ambitious.  I certainly have goals and targets I set for myself.  But they're not the primary way I measure the quality of my experience.  I think this is unusual, especially for someone who has had a lot of encouragement in a fairly elite educational system.  It's my peers who go through the strangest contortions to stretch the word "ambition" to apply to the way I'm choosing to live my life.  I'm happy without the label, though.  But unlike the Happy Feminist I find that people don't want to let me shed it. 

All Requests: Do You Need A Law Degree To Be A Sailing Coach?

JoJo poses a good question in a request for a post:

Do you find having a J.D. in your back pocket allowed you to pursue other ventures like sailing and writing, both because it provides a financial safety net and because it is proof of your professional success? Do you think you could have been a sailing coach without having been a lawyer first?

As usual with my readers' good questions, I'm not sure I have a great answer.  I think the best answer to this is sort of yes, and sort of no. 

In high school we got something like 100 characters to go under our senior picture in the yearbook.  I remember a lot of conversation and thinking about how to use those precious 100 characters.   Which private jokes would go in?  Capital or lowercase letters?  Whose initials do I want in there?  Did I want to put in a quotation or have all of the words my own?  Eventually, I decided to include a quote, and that created a whole slew of additional questions.  It may be dorky to admit this (or maybe it's cool -- I've never really known which) but I was a big Steely Dan fan in high school.  They were my favorite band and I had all their albums.  So I wanted to use a Steely Dan lyric.  And after lots of concentrated listening and thinking the one I settled on was this, from Any Major Dude:  "You can try to run but you can't hide from what's inside of you."  That's under my yearbook picture, amidst the initials and the private high school jokes. 

Now, in retrospect, I am kind of amazed by that decision.  Because the older I get the more sense that little snippet of Steely Dan lyric makes.  Was I really so wise back then?  Of course not -- look at all the stupid things I did subsequently.  Look at all the running I did.  Still, I picked those words and I'm glad I did.  I can imagine that my teenage self was an old soul.   

All Requests: Good Interviews

The other Scheherazade asks for a post answering the question:

What do you think makes a good interview/er/ee?

A good question.  I've written a little about interviewing in this post, about finding a job in a small market.  One thing that's interesting about my current job is that I meet a fair number of high school students who want to be admitted to the college.  They are with their parents.  Nobody knows quite whether or how they can make a good impression on the college admissions folks, and I'm connected to the college, and so there's this desperate desire to impress or please me that really doesn't have much to do with me or my job at all.  It's very interesting to sit on my side of the desk and talk to these folks.  Because, of course, no matter what a good impression a kid or his or her parents makes on me, I can't get them into the college.  I can help, perhaps, a tiny tiny little bit.  I suppose if I wanted to I could hurt them, but I can't imagine a scenario where I'd do that. 

Anyway, this position lets me watch nervous people who are trying to impress.  One thing that's fascinating is how or whether the parents take over the conversation.  Another thing that's interesting is how comfortable the student is in his or her own skin.  Sometimes students act like robots, which is completely ridiculous.  I expect to be talking to a 17 year old kid about something they do for fun, so a robot or a forced grown-up act is very bizarre and unwelcome.  I'm looking for signs of commitment, enthusiasm, maturity, social ease, and engagement.  I've been learning how to put parents and students at ease so that I can get a better sense of what a prospective student is like.  I've discovered that when people are nervous there is very little useful, authentic information that I can get from them.

So that's about what I would have said back when I was in the legal world or the business world.  Be yourself.  That's not to encourage inappropriate casualness or excessive familiarity.  But I think if you're reasonably prepared, you can and should forget your script or your talking points.  You should listen and react authentically.  You shouldn't be overwhelmed by the fact that it's an interview to forget that it's a conversation.  You shouldn't give the other person all of the social power -- you need to retain your own power.  It's okay to guide the conversation in a direction you think it should go, or to go back to something or even to disagree with something.  Pretending to be excessively agreeable or smart or extremely conscientious is boring and fake.  I see it with 17 year olds, and it's just silly.  But I see it with their parents, too.  And when and if I manage to relax them, by explaining that I'm an ally and not an adversary, and that I really don't have the power they imagine I do, I end up seeing much more interesting and much more impressive human beings. 

My interview "trick," if I have one, is something I use on either side of the desk, and I've found it pretty helpful in both roles.  After I've asked the questions that I wanted to ask, if there's still a good conversational feel in the room and time isn't a factor, I like to ask, "What should I have asked you that I didn't know to ask?"  You get some very interesting responses to that question.  It's worth a try. 

 

For You Lawyers Out There

Yesterday one of the students I coach asked me a question about criminal constitutional rights -- how long can a cop detain you at a Terry stop if you choose not to answer any of his questions?  I had no idea how to answer.  If you do, it would help me look smart. 

And also yesterday I thought about the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, of all things, during an athletic department meeting when we were discussing whether the athletic department should have a uniform policy across teams that addresses alcohol abuse among players, or whether the university's policy was sufficient, or whether individual coaches should each set their own policies.  The circularity and repetition during the athletic department conversation made me long for my days as a lawyer.  It's an interesting and important and complicated discussion -- how coaches model and enforce codes of social behavior on their teams, the benefits of uniformity and consistency versus the value of discretion and individualized responses, the effectiveness of the college's policy and its enforcement on campus, the risk that a hard-line policy would drive abuse underground and close off the chance for players to give coaches tips about who on their team needed help or support or monitoring -- and it was full of passion and divergent views that were worth listening to.  But it went around and around and veered off topic, too.  A roomful of lawyers would have managed the discussion differently, and used different words.  I suspect a roomful of lawyers wouldn't make better decisions on the topic.  But they would have sounded more articulate and been way way more organized when talking about it.

Now THIS is Dorky

I'm on a board, and met as part of a subcommittee last night to work on redrafting some language for a possibly controversial change in our by-laws.  The two people I was working with were also JDs -- one's a partner in a firm in town, and the other is a therapist who went to law school.  We talked through the ends we were trying to achieve, asked one another threshhold questions and then proposed language that might enable the result we wanted, tested the language with horrible hypos to see whether the language would create unintended consequences.  We created definitions and referred to them in other places in the document.  I got to use (i) and (ii).  Do you know how long it's been since I've used those?  They don't come up in everyday life, I've discovered.  And we spoke to one another like drafters.  This is redundant after the definition in section A.  Do we need to change this term in the second paragraph, or is it clear the way it is?  We did a few things that were inelegant from a drafting point of view in order to make the document clearer to non-lawyers and to change less of it -- we permitted some redundancies, and we left untouched a section of previously drafted language that could be cleaned up.

Anyway, the dorky part was that it was fun.  It was late, after practice, and I hadn't eaten dinner, but I sat there with my computer redlining a document and reading back the amended paragraphs, drinking a glass of red wine, for two hours, and I enjoyed it. 

This Is My Life

I was driving the inflatable coach boat in yesterday, near the end of practice, to pick up two sailors who'd headed in early due to the crew's knee issues.  I passed the 'No Wake' buoy at the coast guard station and throttled back, impatiently.  As I looked around at the coast guard vessels and the pelicans swooping and diving, my mind was on the sailors practicing.  They were running a plus/minus drill, which would keep them going for a while, but I wanted to get this pickup done as quickly as possible to start a couple of races.  I was hot.  The breeze was good but starting to die.  I thought about the pairings I should set up for the next day's practice.  The drive in felt slow.  I wasn't irritable, exactly, but I was impatient and distracted.

And then suddenly I pulled back for a moment and saw myself from afar and thought, "This is my life," and the whole thing seemed unbelievable and miraculous.  I could see the green lawn of the USF campus stretched out in front of me with palm trees all around, and there were my sailors on the dock, walking towards me.  I'm here in Florida, in a fast motorboat, putting in to get some college students.  I'm in a tank top, a whistle around my neck, the sun on my skin, the faint odor of Coppertone in the air.  This is what I get to do, what I'm paid to do.  I glanced up at the big ugly office buildings and imagined air conditioning, stark grey carpets, photocopy machines and fluorescent lights.  Most people work in places like that, I thought.  This is so great.   I wanted to gun the engine a little bit with delight, but it was a no wake zone, so I had to wait until I got back out into the bay to open her up. 

All Request Day: Law In My Past

My readers don't want to forget I have a law degree.  SLR requests help on law school exams, while Christine writes in asking what I think about careers in public interest law. 

My law school exam taking days were a long time ago.  Here are some posts about them: a link to studying strategy posts, and a previous request asking about take home exams, a post about how awful and wonderful I thought taking exams was, and how it's normal to be disgusted with yourself and absolutely panicked and still unmotivated.  I think that's everything I've written about exams.

You know, some of my best exams were in the classes where I knew the subject the least well.  Not knowing much about the subject forced me to be extremely structured in writing the answer.  Because I had to.  Okay, identify the issue here.  What's the issue?  Hell if I know.  Is it this?  God I hope not, I don't know anything about that.  All I know about that it might be is this.  Better write that down as clearly as I can.  Now what's the rule?  I know the rule.  Get that down, and make it super clear, so it sounds like I have some authority here.  Let's go back to the fact pattern and start sorting through it, and maybe as I filibuster along here doing that as tidily as I can I'll figure out the answer.  Yep, I guess I'm getting to the conclusion here.  Let's wrap this up tight and move on to the next question.  Hopefully I'll know something about the next question. 

Maybe that approach was helpful because my answers were spare and clear and not rambling.  I didn't know enough to throw in the kitchen sink and a bunch of marginally relevant information into the answers.  I just stuck to the basics, and tried to be well-organized and tight in my answers.  It worked for me.  I fell back to structure when I wasn't so sure of the strength of my content.  I also was rigorous about timing myself and trying to schedule the right amount of time for each answer -- not running over or skipping ahead.  Discipline and focus and basic competence were my aims, not genius or brilliance.  Hmmm.  As I write this it seems like a principle for wider application. 

And now for my thoughts on public interest law. 

All Requests: Can I Have A Dog In Law School?

Christina asks whether she can take care of a dog while in law school.  This is an easy one.  Yes. 

Your law school years are full of free time.  You can run, you can take your dog for walks, you can meet friends for coffee.  You can have a part time job.  You're in class in the mornings, maybe until 2 PM.  You've got a lot of reading to do, but you can decide when to do that.  You can do that sitting on your sofa at home, with your dog on the floor in a patch of sunlight by your feet. 

I find it sad when people use law school as an excuse for constricting their lives.  "I can't be in a relationship -- I'm in law school."  That's silly -- I've written about it before.  That elevates the work associated with law school into a place of importance and primacy that it doesn't deserve.  There's work and stress in law school but there's time for it.  And it's not more important than all the other components of a happy life.  Having a dog, as I have already written, is a good way to learn how to be happy.  You'll need to exercise, too.  You'll need to have relationships and a creative outlet distinct from school.  Don't let law school or the craziness of your classmates convince you that somehow your status as a law student will make you too important or too rushed or too pressured to do the basic maintenance of your spirit that will keep you happy.  Law school isn't that hard.  Yes, there's a lot of reading.  And yes, comprehending that reading is very hard.  But it shouldn't swallow the rest of your life. 

Here's what you'll need to remember about having a dog.  You need to be steadily there for your dog.  Feed him or her at the same time every day.  Make time for exercise and play, training and reinforcement.  Can you do that?  Do you have a stable enough platform for your life to make that commitment?  Do you have friends or family, a support network who can step in if you need to be at an event until late and can't feed and let out the dog?  Could somebody take the dog for a weekend if you take a trip?  Are you in a place where your dog will get to be outside, daily, with you?  And look forward three or four years, when you're out of law school.  Can you commit to structuring a life where you'll still be able to take care of this dog -- a steady presence, exercise, play, and time outdoors -- after law school?  You don't have to know how you're going to do it, but I think if you take on the responsibility of having a dog you need to promise THAT you will do it. 

Good luck.  Please send me a picture of the dog you get, if you end up with one.  (Else, you can find yourself a friend with a dog and offer to give it lots of walks and love.)