The First Year
Thursday, April 22, 2010 at 4:20PM Last week, as I filed my first annual return with Schedule C, I realized a year had gone by. I looked at my website today, and found that my first, last and only blog entry was just over one year old. Determined not to be a one-entry-ever blogger, I sat down immediately to put down a summary of how my life has changed since leaving the "big law" world -- since cutting my billing rate in half and committing myself to helping entrepreneurs like me make it in the world of "big business."
First, I have met more interesting people than ever before, and befriended the best of them. What I used to think of only as "professional relationships" have taken on added dimension, grown deeper. I go to clients' businesses and homes, we meet over a late-night beer. They make me feel like family, not just needed, but trusted and sometimes - liked. For a lawyer, that's a powerful feeling. And it's a feeling a lawyer will get only when he is not soaking his clients for every red cent -- when the client knows that he cuts down his hours when it seems right to do so, doesn't charge for every stray photocopy made, and when the lawyer's clock isn't ticking for those everyday short calls and brief emails. The feeling goes both ways, though, and I feel more acutely the pain and stress of my clients. I have never felt so badly in my professional life when a judge recently gave short-shrift to a complex, but rightful, claim that meant the world to my Swiss client, a promising innovative company of two bright entrepreneurs. Now, I am exploring U.S. contacts for their marketing and distribution.
Second, my balance of life and work feels right for the first time in my life. This one is hard to explain, because I'm working more and harder than I ever have. Here's the best way I have of expressing this: my life is my work, and my work is my life. But not in the bad way, in that work has eclipsed my life. There is simply no longer any distinction; they are seamless, as it was for our early ancestors on Earth, those we call the "hunters and gatherers." I work in a community of good people: my wife works in our office, my clients, other attorneys, judges whom I know and increasingly know me are my "village." I work with these people because I love to, and because it is natural for me as my way of gathering what I need to sustain myself and my wife.
Third, my life is my own to live. All three of these make me more efficient and effective through morale, the heights of which I have never experienced before in my professional life. But this third one, given what I have recently experienced in the loss of my mother, is the most important of all. This is the only life I get, and the only chance I get to be with the ones I love. Now, I can be entirely honest with my clients about the outside demands of my life, and not feel shamed by the expectation that a "big law" $500-per-hour attorney should be a robot, always on, and on top of his game.
My experience of the last three months sums up all three of these major shifts in my life's past year. My mother was diagnosed in January with inoperable pancreatic cancer at the young age of 68. Although she lived in my beloved New Hampshire, and she was determined to die at home with only pain medication, I was able to take on the honor of being her primary caregiver to the moment of her death on the morning of March 31. For those three months, I lived in New Hampshire more than in Chicago. I worked much less, and billed much less than I worked, because of my inefficiency. I could have done none of this if my life was not my own to live -- if I remained beholden to a corporate law firm atmosphere that measures men and women -- and even clients -- by their latest numbers and statistics.
I worked when I could in intervals while Mom slept and between waking her for pain mediations -- first every 4 hours, then 3, then 2 -- around the clock, day after day. Mom and I would discuss my cases (to the appropriate extent), and she loved hearing about the different personalities involved in a particular problem. I got to embellish a bit, but she was Irish and would have expected that. But look, my life and work were seamless, and it felt right, no matter how exhausting.
What felt best, though, was that I did not have to hide a thing. My clients knew just what I was going through, and we could talk about it. I gained a lot of knowledge from their experiences, in how to care for my dying mother; and wisdom in how to deal with it. The fact that I was not at the top of my game at all times, or even available at all times, did not weaken relationships with my clients. It brought us closer, added depth and dimension to those relationships. And the closer I feel to those good people I represent, the better I feel every day.
One year ago, I knew that the instincts my mother taught me -- trust, loyalty, empathy -- had waned after years in this profession. Today, they are stronger than ever, and I am a better lawyer for it. Even if I only blog once a year, and each time find that the year gone by has brought me closer to my goals as a human being, I will only die having failed as a blogger. I can live with that prospect.
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who's on duty today