The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

I figured I'd give a status report in lieu of the substantive blogging I'm not having time for (it's not like the Supreme Court has done anything newsworthy lately, right?): I'm working on the studying thing, and I'm working on the working thing. I'm almost through with my 30,000 documents, but I only have 4-5 working days left to finish. I've basically been working 3 days a week for as many hours as I can manage, and using the other days for studying. At least to the extent I'm able to motivate myself to. There's something about the studying that actually hurts, having to crack open my head and pour in this garbage. I suppose I'm very stressed about it, but I'm mostly pissed off. For one thing, there are so many more worthwhile things (legal things, even) I'd rather be using my brain for. And for another, I'm so not a fan of worthless standards of measure, and that's what the bar exam is. I've crunched the numbers: simply having caught one or two more issues across six essays and two performance tests and gotten six more multiple choice questions correct would have avoided this predicament. How can anyone take such an arbitrary system seriously? People come up to me now while I'm studying and say things like, "You're very bright. I'm sure you'll have no problem." To which I have to say, "Yeah, well I was bright the last time, and a lot of good that did me." Being bright obviously has nothing to do with passing the bar exam, as all the idiots out there practicing law are testament to.

But I do seem to have a certain traction among some in the lay community, who see me as intelligent and capable. Which is not to say I don't have any esteem in the legal community, but there's always qualifiers: grades, quality of law school, bar admissions, etc. Among lawyers there's always some reason people can find to tarnish your luster. But among real people, I don't generally have that problem. I'm smart, I'm educated - and people respect that.

So a while ago I'd started to think, maybe I'm trying to hang out in the wrong pond. Like the aphorism goes, isn't it much better to be a big fish in a small pond, than a small fish in a big one? Like maybe instead of being lost among lawyers I should put myself in a different world, one where I could be more important.

But that didn't feel quite right. First of all, if the analogy holds, it would mean I'd be copping out of the legal profession, somehow running away because I was unable to hack it. And that's not what I'm about. Frustrating as the legal field can be, I'm not looking to escape it. Then the other day I realized that the analogy was actually the other way around. The legal world is the small pond. The pond I want to be in is the bigger one, the broader world. What I really want is to do work that matters, and for that to happen it needs to matter to everyone.

I had a funny conversation recently with some interesting people I met at a party. Our acquaintance had begun with a debate over the single most important technological innovation in the last two hundred years. I had disagreed with their original assertion, and systematically explained why, citing both my own rationale and the work of others (e.g., James Burke). (Yes, this is the kind of conversation I tend to have at parties.) My rhetorical analysis seemed to impress them and the original antagonism evolved into a genuine respect. "What do you do?" they then asked me. But when I told them I was becoming a lawyer, it was like I'd stabbed them in the heart. In their minds I was completely wasted as a lawyer. "Well, what kind of lawyer?" they ventured cautiously. When I told them technology law, the color returned to their faces. Yes, that I was clearly right for. But anything else...

Which is kind of amusing, since all my life people have told me I should be a lawyer and I resisted for many years. So it's interesting now that I've become one to hear people tell me the opposite... But I think what they're really saying is something I'm trying to remember to tell myself, which is to not get lost in this profession. Becoming a lawyer was always supposed to be a means to an end, the ability to do something important and needed. It was never supposed to be the end itself.