All At Once

I suddenly hear Whitney singing in my ears, but somehow the lyrics are different.

All at once, I'm wondering how my life came to look like this. I'm also wondering if it looks the same from the outside in as it does from the inside out.

All at once, I'm praying it was Thursday night already and I was sipping a nice glass of wine with my colleagues in Vegas.

All at once, I'm more intensely wishing I had won the lottery on Saturday night so I could tell my boss I'm never coming back, so that I could take a private plane to Vegas, and I could care far less about trivial things.

I also wish that I could have more money so that my friends who have been there for me in such amazing ways, through the good, the bad, and the law school, could be rewarded in ways they so richly deserve.

I guess this is just all hitting me all at once. This is all at once, now that I'm being replaced by a glorified legal assistant...oh yeah, and I've been asked to train her. But I think I may be blessed - since it has nothing to do with anything in which I have interest, I guess shoving me out of the nest is maybe what I need, as cold and uncalled for as it may be. Who needs a paycheck anyway? I hear it's overrated. Certainly, the student loan companies think it's overrated, right?

Dirty Tricks

I was thinking about all the tricks attorneys play, how you always get a really important motion by messenger (personal service in CA shortens your time to respond) at 4:30 on a Friday afternoon, how they always try to back door certain things, and how we (the plaintiff's side) says it's always the defense who does this kind of thing. This got me thinking about my male friend C who does defense work (I suppose everyone has to have one friend who does that sort of thing), and I'm sure he and his cohorts (co-conspirators?) think the same thing about me and my colleagues (whom he surely calls cohorts, co-conspirators, or some other equal rhetoric).

What happened to the days of honor? To when we had a noble profession? When did we all become the kind of lawyers that the jokes were about? My female friend C was mentioning that she thinks the single thing the Bar in her state could do to help lawyers was to cut down on the unauthorized practice of law, to shut down people who are undermining the quality of work that we do, and that doing so would help restore the public faith in our profession. (I apologize if I'm paraphrasing too liberally, C, but I believe that's the crux of it.)

When I was on the courthouse steps, some guy told an in pro per/pro se defendant "don't pay no evil lawyer to help you! I can help you right around the corner!" Excuse me? When you mess up this poor guy's life, and he really needs a lawyer, and you find yourself in jail and you need a lawyer for yourself, and you both end up paying lawyers far more than if the one guy had just gotten a PD in the first place and you had just gotten yourself either (a) a real job, or (b) a law degree and a bar card yourself, that's the kind of thing that makes people hate lawyers! Yes, we sometimes laugh at your idiocy, and damn it, it's our right. Suffering through law school and particularly through the bar exam has earned us the right. But when you make a mockery of all we've accomplished and then come to us expecting us to help fix it, it's not just distasteful, it's downright offensive. Cutting down on the unauthorized practice of law is high on my priority list too.

But once you have the bar card, I guess you can engage in all the dirty tricks you can figure out under the rules and some that are blatantly not under the rules but infrequently get punished. I even have a few of my own. If that sounds ominous, maybe it should. :-)

Mission Accomplished

So I got my game back from Liar Liar Pants on Fire. He came to my car where I was waiting while reading deposition testimony. He opened the passenger side door and handed it to me. I said "thank you." He said "you're welcome, and I hope your case is going well and...uh...it's good to see you." [Long pause waiting for me to say something...which I didn't.] "So you'll definitely be hearing from me...[long pause]." "Bye."

I wonder I'll actually be hearing from him or if I was being too subtle. You know, for some guys, you have to hit them over the head with this kind of stuff.

I mean, I didn't even get out of the car or respond when he said it was good to see him.

Here's the thing. He's 40 and divorced, drives a crappy car, and lives in a crappy neighborhood. I'm in my late 20's, a lawyer, have a respectable car, and am fabulous in my own right. If he can't see that, it's his loss. And as I was listening to KROQ this morning, it's absolutely true - loser guys can be with great girls all the time, but it's the guys who can't seem to get past anything superficial. Their dumb loss.

Liar and Waste

Enough said, I think. At least I decided early enough on that he's a waste. Damn my desire for evidence! LOL

Liar Liar or Just White Lies?

We all lie. The degrees of lies are what distinguish us.

There are the lies you tell when someone asks you "how much do you weigh?" or "what is your IQ?" or "what was your LSAT score?" For the record, I don't know my current IQ. I haven't been tested since I was in grade school.

Then there are the lies that people tell that rise to the Ponzi scheme level, the "I didn't kill her, but if I did here's how I would have done it" level, and the "the Holocaust never happened" lies.

Obviously, there is an endless wasteland in between.

So I went online tonight to see if my new affection interest had, in fact, deleted his online profile as he told me he had. Low and behold, it was right there, smack dab on the page when I searched. Not only was it there, but he logged on yesterday. Hmm...

I'm not sure how to handle the situation. You know, as lawyers, we are trained to somewhat cut off our emotions and check them at the door in exchange for a clean look at the evidence. A "just the facts, ma'am" kind of approach. Then again, especially as a plaintiff's lawyer, I believe in telling a holistic story including all the human details.

So riddle me this: Do I confront him on (1) having the profile up, and/or (2) signing in as recently as yesterday?

Leaping...

So I chatted over the phone with a guy I met from an online dating site. He sounded amazing on his profile. The only red flag is that he's divorced, but no one is perfect. Everyone has baggage, and I certainly have mine. So we had a blast talking on the phone for almost 2 hours today, and I'm over the moon excited about seeing him today. We're going to have dinner. I'm scared, but I'm going to take the leap. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. He already turns me on, after all. :-) WISH ME LUCK!!! Not everything should revolve around the law!

Advantage

General announcement: Don't take advantage of me, my friendship, my work, or my situation. It's not cool. It's not something you can take or leave at your leisure. I'm not here for your convenience. It's not appreciated, nor will it be forgotten.

Snap Judgments

It's kind of amazing to me how either life imitates the Bar or the Bar imitates life. Recently, a BFF of mine sent me a hypothetical, in honor of the exam, on an ethical situation. The same week, I had an ethical situation arise at the office that still makes me wonder whether or not there will be serious repercussions to deal with at some point in the near future. The thing of it is, for most of the ethical questions related to the Bar, it's fairly easy to make snap judgments and then support your position. The hypo usually starts with something like "Robin, a disbarred attorney who has a cocaine habit, has been doing work for newly-licensed attorney Leslie...." You know Leslie is going down for some stupid sh*t that Robin did. Leslie always needs to run as fast as humanly possible away from Robin, but never seems to do it in time. It's always a "don't let this happen to you," after school special kind of thing. But, then again, I guess I'm making another kind of snap judgment about those kinds of questions.