Law Students

Movin On Up

By Anonymous

So, the news I alluded to, it is official. I'm now a litigator and by Monday my office will be recreated one floor up.

I'm very excited- excited in a way I haven't been excited in quite some time. I am also extremely busy. I billed 14 hours yesterday and got close to that number today. I've been given an increasing amount of responsibility on this case (the one I got drafted onto in December when the corporate section was slow and the litigation section was slammed) and even though I have absolutely no idea what I'm doing, I feel more competent than I have since I graduated law school. For example, yesterday I was asked to draft an affidavit for a director of a certain Board Committee. My first step was to google "affidavit" just to make sure it was what I thought it was. Then I did a search for all the minutes of the Committee in our 50,000 produced documents, wrote out a clear and succinct summary of each meeting, found some affidavits written by other associates who work with this partner to copy the form, printed it out and handed it over. The partner read it and and said "great, we'll send it to the client tomorrow." WHAT?! No edits, no changes, no covering the page in red pen? I almost asked her to check it again, just in case, after all my first step in this assignment was to use google- that doesn't exactly inspire confidence. But then I just got excited- I had done something well! I had written FIVE pages of my own text- no blacklines or changing party names- actual writing. Angels sung from the heavens and I knew I'd made the right decision.

I started to realize back in November that transactional lawyering might not be for me. I loved corporate and securities law and I was interested in deals in an academic sense (I liked analyzing the ones that went to hell and landed in my casebook), but the sense of relief I felt every time I avoided being staffed on one didn't seem like a good overall career move. I'd listen to attorneys around me on speaker phone, hammering out the finer points of a deal and just think, I don't want to do that- even if I understood it, I don't want to do it. I think I liked the idea of doing deals, of being a quasi-business person, but in reality I didn't care enough about the business side of things and truly had no interest in leading negotiations or figuring out corporate structure. I understand why other people like it, and I really wanted to be one of those people, but I wasn't.

It really wasn't that I actively disliked corporate work, it was finding out how much I actively enjoyed litigation work that prompted my switch. I liked digging through discovery and finding the documents to build our case, I liked researching possible defenses in the case law, and I really liked writing. Man, I missed writing. I've had enough distance from law school to realize that what I hated about legal memos wasn't the memos themselves, it was just how difficult and time-consuming they could be. And even though I loved complaining about them, I also enjoyed the process of molding case law and my own words to create an argument. I'm also very good at it, and feeling good at something can go a long way towards job satisfaction. I look at the partners and senior associates in litigation and think, "I can do that," and much more than that, I think, "I want to do that."

So last Tuesday I asked the head of the litigation section out to lunch. Despite our 25-year age difference we're good friends and he's been trying to get me on his team since he interviewed me at OCI in 2006. He was thrilled (though oddly, not surprised) by the news and said he always knew I was a litigator at heart. He then met with the head of my section and the managing partner of the Austin office and got everything approved. I sat down with the corporate head partner this morning and had a nice chat about my switch- he was supportive, but wanted to make sure I wasn't acting in response to the slow deal flow or worries about job security. As a career-long transactional attorney he couldn't fathom why anyone would want to do litigation, but he was happy I seemed to have found a reason and wished me all the best. I will genuinely miss working for him, his assignments were my favorites- researching various corporate matters and writing summaries of the legal issues for clients- and realizing how much more I enjoyed those than any deal work actually precipitated my move.

So there it is, my first career move. I'm excited and exhausted and heading to bed. I feel a little bad that after all that talk about my writing, this post is so much less eloquent than the one I wrote out in my head over the past week, but I must get some sleep and I wanted to share the news. To distract you from any possible misspellings or grammatical errors, here is a picture of Landon, also excited about his mommy being a litigator:

Well, maybe it's the beloved Ladybug Book he's so excited about, but if he knew what a litigator was I'm sure he'd be excited about that too.

Full post as published by Lag Liv on February 11, 2009 (boomark / email).