The First Year of Law Practice

Well, you finally got a job at the law firm and you're ready to begin practicing law. Unfortunately, the first year of law practice feels like the first year of law school all over again. Everything is new, and the learning curve is a vertical line that stretches straight into the clouds. Goethe spoke the truth: "Nothing is more terrible than to see ignorance in action." You discover all the things that law school failed to teach you like what lawyers really do every day. These things include:

Sitting at your desk while meeting with clients. Sitting at your desk while meeting with other lawyers. Sitting at your desk while drafting documents. Sitting in the library while doing research. Going to lunch and eating heavy restaurant food. Going back to the office and sitting around some more. Wondering why in the world you're getting so flabby.


While your body is getting softer, your mind and heart are hardening into frozen steel. You learn the lawyerly arts of denying compensation to worthy victims and of foreclosing on orphans. Yes, you are becoming a professional. This is the life you have dreamed of.

You are constantly aware of the tyranny of the time sheet. The firm has you keep track of your billable time in milliseconds. It divides time up into such small segments because you are constantly being interrupted, and on average you have to change gears about forty-seven times per second. Be sure to bill it all.

When you go to lunch, bring some clients along so you can bill the entire lunch hour to them. An accurate billing statement for the hour would read:

Reviewing menu .1 hour; conference with waiter. Today's specials .1 hour; visiting salad bar (including travel time both ways) .2 hour; eating salad .1 hour; peeling artichoke .1 hour; eating fettuccine Alfredo .2 hour; conference with clients.1 hour; legal advice .1 hour. Total 1.0 hour.

You will also bill the cost of the lunch to the clients. Lawyers NEVER pay overhead. They bill the costs of all photocopies, faxes, and postage to their clients. If they could, lawyers would bill their electric bill directly to their clients. But they can't. So they don't pay their electric bill.

After lunch you go back to the office and try to stay awake- which is always difficult, given the nature of your work. To make matters worse, the fettuccine Alfredo is causing you to go into pasta shock, a condition in which all the blood drains from your brain to try to digest the glop of paste in your stomach. In the future you will have to skip lunch.

But there is one upside to law practice. After all these years of sacrifice and poverty, you FINALLY have an income. And not only an income, but a BIG income. In your first year of practice you are making more money than your law professors. HA! So there is justice, after all.

Well, what should you spend the money on? You could pay off your staggering student loans. No, leave that until after you retire. Right now it's time to party. (Excuse me-I mean PAR-TY, a noun that suddenly, without asking anybody's permission, became a verb.) Here's what you buy (please hold your applause until the end):

1. A house. Bricks and boards attractively arranged. Caring for it will consume any spare time that you have. You soon discover that you do not "own" a house; instead, the house owns you.
   
   
2. A car. But not just a car. A Tortellini 2000. VARROOMH ! It's the nicest toy you have ever owned. It's superbly engineered, and it drives like a dream. When the turbo kicks in, the car flattens your ears back against the headrest. A voice tells you when the door is open or the fuel level is low. It says, "Left door is ajar--Excellency." The volume control on the stereo goes from 1 to 10, and above 10 it has another setting that says: "Liquefy Cerebral Cortex." It also has some other essential yuppie accessories, like a car phone, a car fax, and a car Salad-Shooter. You squeal the tires and race the car up and down the streets. You are a race-car driver. Pocketa-pocketa-pocketa. You have learned what the difference is between a sports car and a pincushion: With a pincushion, the pinheads are on the outside.
3. A satellite dish. It should be at least a few more years before all broadcasters begin scrambling their signals. When that happens, you can convert your satellite dish into a bird bath for condors.
   
   
4. A Winnebago with a ballroom.
   
   
5. A video camera. Now you can pretend to be Cecil B. DeMille, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg all rolled into one. At your last family reunion, the people with video cameras outnumbered the people without them. Everyone just stood around and filmed each other filming each other. There were some nice candid shots of a relative yelling at the children, the cat coughing up a fur ball, and people sitting in front of the TV watching videos of themselves. You can hardly remember how boring family gatherings used to be before there were video cameras to capture all the magic on film.

Well, that's enough purchases for this week. No use becoming conspicuous about it.

These things are pretty exciting at first. After a short time, however, the thrill of these purchases wears off, and you begin looking forward to acquiring some other material thing--something that's going to make you really happy. Good luck. There are remedies for a bad case of the greedies, but they do not consist of feeding your habit.

Since you have to bill a lot of hours, try not to get sick. If you do get sick, be sure NOT to reveal to the doctor that you are a lawyer. Doctors and lawyers are natural enemies. If your doctor discovers that you are a lawyer, he will lunge at you with the nearest sharp instrument--a syringe, a scalpel, anything. He will scream something like, "I pay $4,000 a month in malpractice premiums, all because of LAWYERS! Doctors never make mistakes, but lawyers are always suing them! AAAAGGHHHH!!!" He will have to be subdued by his assistants and injected with a tranquilizer. So stay away from doctors. I don't know why doctors are so upset, anyway. They just pass the insurance costs on to their patients--people like you. You should be the one who is angry. Meanwhile, if you need an appendectomy, do it yourself. It's safer.