The Great Change: Turning Cathy into a Lawyer

My blog has been languishing lately, due to a combination of several forces. One is logistical: I've been working a lot, but without a set schedule, so it's been hard to establish a routine that will give me enough of the calm and reflective time I need to construct decent posts.

Some of it is ethical, for lack of a better way to describe it. As I mentioned before, now that I'm finally working in a law office I'm zooming up the learning curve and nearly daily gaining new insights into what it means to practice law. These are absolutely important lessons that belong in a story of the Great Change, but I hesitate in posting about them because I don't want to inadvertently divulge client confidences (very, very bad) or even inadvertently compromise the general interest of the firm (also bad, though not disbar-able necessarily). So at minimum I try to take some time to think over what I'm inclined to share, which is prudent, but what's been happening is that too much time ends up passing and I lose the original spark that would have allowed me to make an interesting post.

Another consideration is self-interested pragmatism. Part of the Great Change story is figuring out how *I* fit inside this profession. But these posts tend to be the more navel-gazing and moody posts. Potentially well-written and moody posts, absolutely legitimate (indeed, perhaps integral) posts as part of the Great Change story, but: I'm looking for a job. Even if I didn't have my blog on my resume I'd still have to operate under the assumption that an employer could find it. Which raises the direct concern of the impact that negativity can have on my chances. If you wouldn't express negativity in an interview, are you as a candidate well served if that negativity you held back is otherwise so exposed and available to the interviewer? Probably not. However, I do think there's something to be said for honesty as an author, which I think translates to honesty as a person. I don't think all negativity or candor is necessarily adverse to my interests, including these vocational ones. I don't think I have to falsely portray myself as some sort of Pollyanna for whom nothing is ever bad and who only ever has happy thoughts to share. Because that would be a lie, and everyone would know it. So I think there is a path to be hewn here, where honesty and candor can be expressed in a non-detrimental way, but it's a narrow path that must be traveled carefully. Hence the pulled punches and slower posting as I try to take that care.

And there's another consideration, which I'm not entirely sure how to describe, but for now I'll call "political." This has to do with a general sense that now that I'm out of law school, it's "game on." When you're a student, I think a lot can be forgiven. You're learning, everyone knows that, and while you may stumble onto some brilliant insights I think people are willing to grant mulligans if you at times veer down some wayward paths. But as a full-fledged capable, educated adult - now what you do is supposed to matter. You need to get it right.

To an extent these "political" considerations are connected to the job hunt. If I make assertions of personal belief that seem inconsistent with too many clients' interests, a firm may not want to hire me. But my larger concern is based on a longer view, because more than a job what I really want is influence in the world. If I'm going to make it better, then I need to have a voice that will be listened to. And that's where my hesitation lies now, because I see myself crafting with my writing my (for lack of a better term) political persona. And that's a tricky thing to do. I think my actual political persona is a good one: idealistic but open-minded, tenacious but thoughtful, etc. Like I'm sure many people's are, it's an effective mélange of seemingly paradoxical qualities that aren't actually so paradoxical when put into play. But a specific writing inherently captures only a single glimpse of this personality, so over the span of many writings it may seem like there's a lot of inconsistency or hypocrisy based upon these potentially conflicting and incomplete glimpses. Over many, many writings a more complete and accurate picture of the author might be gleaned, certainly, but as an author you can't count on a reader to take that much trouble to be such a student of your work. Each writing really needs to be able to stand on its own as a reasonably accurate (if not oversimplified) representation of the writer. This is especially important because it's so easy to have certain writings be so prominent in the attention they receive that you end up being forever labeled by them. Or, even worse, because it's so easy to have certain writings be misinterpreted, meaning that not only do you become labeled by them, but you get labeled incorrectly.

This prospect to me is very scary, as there's a limit to how brilliantly I could possibly write to forestall such mislabeling from happening. Even the most brilliant writers have readers who miss the point, even of their most meticulously-written and edited tomes. And I'm not writing novels; I'm a developing writer writing quickly-written blog posts. The odds that something may go wrong in trying to transmit my thoughts from my head to my readers' is really quite high. And that may be the biggest reason why I've been posting so scantly lately.

So what to do? Well, initially there is the "muddle forth" approach that has served me in good stead before. At some point my schedule will stabilize, but in the meantime I'll do the best I can with it. While this may sound odd, given the other important priorities in my life, I do need to make more of an effort to write. When I don't write, I start to fear writing as it always starts to appear more and more as some looming laborious chore I can't even begin to surmount. When I do write, though, I remember that I like writing and it helps stoke my confidence in all the writing I need to do (cover letters, anyone?). Watching my words slide off my brain and onto the page makes me feel like a potent master of language, something I'll need to be if I'm going to get done all the things in life I want to get done.

Still, I'm not sure how quickly I'll be able to churn out the meaty posts given the other concerns mentioned above. Thus there may be more "cheese" around here as I just play around with language and try to keep readers reasonably entertained. I hate having long gaps between posts. Not only do I feel worried that the people who came to read yet found nothing new won't ever come back, but I also feel guilty, like I've let people down. I really like the idea that people enjoy my writing; it pleases me in a way I didn't know I could be pleased until I started doing it. So I hate, hate, hate not offering people that pleasure when they come by to read me, and hope that I can at least offer readers small tidbits in the meantime so that they don't feel like they were wasting their time by visiting.

And eventually - probably sometime within the next few months - I will break from this blog and go to the next. I am committed to telling the Great Change story, and there is clearly more to tell of it, but I'm also beginning to regard it as something of a shackle that I'd like to break free of. This whole "becoming a lawyer" thing is a skin that's becoming a little too tight. I'm due for a molting... and can't wait to try out my brand new grown-up lawyer body. As well as write in a way that reflects that new stature. So I will find an appropriate moment to make that change in both personal and blog identity, although it won't be quite yet.

Today is the calm before the storm. Tomorrow BarBri begins. And I'll be working full-time along with it, at least for the next two weeks, while I fill in for someone on vacation at a different legal organization than I've been working at. I'm really excited about the job, if not also dreading how much my days are going to suck, what with going to work all day and BarBri lectures all night (well, four hours of it or so). Plus in the middle of all of this I actually have another job that will necessitate out of town travel. Then again, I'm looking forward to that too, since both jobs have me working in an area of law I'm really interested in.

The scary thing is just the bar. But what I'm hoping is that because I've studied for it once before, and because I passed it, I can leverage that experience to make this study round saner. For one thing, in theory there's already a lot of knowledge rattling around in my brain somewhere. Presumably the lectures will simply help me get back in touch with it and won't have their own learning curves to nearly the extent that they did last summer. Secondly, I have a better idea of just what sort of effort it takes to study for the bar. I know I didn't do much other than attend the lectures at the very beginning of the summer, and yet that was ok.

I also think that, by and large, there's less material on the California bar than the New York one. There at least seems to be fewer subjects, although I don't know how much depth there is to learn for them for California's purposes. Where I've heard California is trickiest is that you have to be able to write better on its essays and performance tests. So I'm worried about them to the extent that I have no idea what they'll be like, but I'm not worried about them to the extent that I have confidence in my ability to write essays and do performance tests (note, though, that these are different performance tests than I did before).

The bigger challenge will just be fighting exhaustion. When I'm done with the aforementioned work I can go back to the firm where I've been working, although the lawyers there have expressed some concern that I not undermine my bar study by working there. Which is very nice of them, but I need to do what I need to do, and being poor and unemployed is not it. I will stop working when BarBri stops in early February and take 2 weeks or so to do nothing but study. But in the meantime I think it will lower my general anxiety level in general if I know I can pay my rent.

There are a still few other pedestrian concerns, however. General life maintenance, for instance. Like, when will I manage to do the laundry? Also, I'd like to be able to get something resembling exercise. I've been very, very good, since I've moved here, about taking better care of myself. I have vastly slashed the amount of soda I drink, for one thing. I've put an outright ban on bringing any into the house, and I only occasionally drink it when I'm out. I didn't like the effect that drinking all those empty calories was having on my girth, and I was really unhappy when I thought about how much of my student loan debt had gone to the enrichment of PepsiCo. So I've since discovered the wonders of tap water. After all, we're not in China - we can actually drink it here.

While I suspect no exercise may happen during the frenzy of the next two weeks, after that my schedule will get more flexible and I think I'll be able to get some in. Which is good, because I'll also need that time to execute on my major goal of the new year: acquiring gainful employment as an actual lawyer. I burned up most of my job-hunting cycles in 2006 looking for temporary work, to the detriment of finding a longer term position. But now that I have the temporary front more or less covered, it's time to look towards getting my career started. This time next year today should be long behind me.

I keep having this nagging feeling that I'm wasting money by doing BarBri - surely at this point I could just self-study. But BarBri gives me structure, and last night I remembered that I learned best by listening to the lectures.

Last night I did torts, which was taught by the exact same professor, in pretty much the exact same way. But in a way that was comforting. Most of the BarBri lecturers are very good, although I realized that the second time through there was a lot more fluff in the lectures than I'd realized the first time around. It's handy fluff, particularly if you've never taken the subject or long forgotten it, but since neither of those applies to me I found it sort of slow and superfluous and tuned some of it out. I'm also afraid of introducing confusion where as of last summer there was none.

My biggest observation so far is that California BarBri is different than New York. I liked New York BarBri. They were very helpful, very accessible. California has been helpful, including in some over-and-above ways, but I feel like the organization is more distant. Right now, for instance, I don't know if for the MBE subjects I need to learn California distinctions. I'm thinking the answer might be no, since otherwise they probably would have told us, but I think it's weird that they've not raised the issue one way or another, and that there's no one at the lectures (I'm doing the taped version to start) who knows. This kind of thing would not have happened this summer.

I also think it would be worth talking about what the Cal Bar might be like for other state bar veterans like me. Looking around my classroom, I get the sense that I'm not the only one doing the "collect the licenses" thing. I met one guy for whom California is his fifth... They do talk about attorney applicants, since they don't need to take the MBE part, but then again if I were one of them I might still be wondering how I should best tune in for those lectures. (Interestingly the guy with the 4 other admissions has opted to take the MBE. He's confident on it because he's done well in the past, so he's taking the full test in order to have it help pull up his score.)

In the meantime, having survived one night of this I think I can survive some more. But only if I can remember to go to sleep as soon as I get home. The candle is just nowhere near long enough to burn by staying up.

I spent all day Saturday at BarBri, having Professor Chemerinsky tell me everything I needed to know about constitutional law for the bar. It was pretty much exactly the same lecture as last summer, down to each corny joke, down to each minute, practically. But that's kind of impressive.

I asked him how many of these lectures he does, and the answer was astronomically high. Particularly last summer, when I think he did 17! And he rattled off a whole bunch of cities all over the country. But he says he's cutting back, and next year may only do NY and CA. Which is too bad for people elsewhere because the lectures are really quite good. Or at least relatively painless (relatively - they still take hours to get through).

Yet that still means he'll be doing 6 lectures: one in NY, and five in California. Why so many in CA? Tradition, he said. In my mind this is very inefficient, and greedy of California BarBri, since now it deprives other states' of his lectures. But he thought it was too bad that NY didn't have more live lectures. Me, I'm not so sure. I've done a lot of taped lectures, and now a live one. And while live is better, it's not so much better as to be particularly deteminative. More important is the quality of the lecture. And yes, it is important to humanize this very arduous experience, but that can be satisfied, as it was by NY BarBri last summer, by sending in staff attorneys to help reach out a helping hand, nearly literally. I don't think CA BarBri has been quite as good on this, quite frankly, but I doubt the solution is to hog more of the good lecturers like Chemerinsky.

Written 1/9, posted 1/12.

I'm writing this (to be posted later) on the plane home from Las Vegas, where I just spent a few fascinating days. I attended the 40th annual Consumer Electronics Show. It's a tradeshow like no other in the US. Over 140,000 people were predicted to attend. In fact it seemed to stretch the Las Vegas infrastructure to the breaking point. Getting anywhere took forever, at least four times as long as normal. And that's even with 200-plus extra taxis on the streets. At the same time, Vegas was also kind of quiet, as the crowds that were invading it were not its usual denizens. Just lots and lots of geeks. And their lawyers.

Which is how I came to be there, in a semi-professional capacity. A good friend from law school is an attorney in a firm that represents the Home Recording Rights Coalition, an association of technology companies committed to ensuring a safe legal environment for such companies to be able to innovate and sell products without fear of excessive copyright liability. The HRRC has also teamed up with other IP-advocacy organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation to form the Digital Freedom Campaign in order to raise public awareness on the state of copyright law more generally, and to harness that awareness into the political leverage necessary to counter the legislative efforts of the content cartels on this front.

Where I came in was having been asked to help staff the Digital Freedom booth at the convention. This I was glad to do, as these are some of the issues I'm committed to advocating. And I did, comfortably, during the time I was at the booth. I thoroughly enjoyed the experience, and was glad for this first opportunity to finally get to stand up for these issues in a professional context.

But it turned out that I didn't really need to sing for my supper, so to speak, all that much and still had plenty of time to enjoy the convention generally, including various panels and of course the city itself.

It was a unique and fascinating experience in many ways, not the least of which is that it's not often I get to roam The Strip while wearing a suit...

Written 1/10, posted 1/12.

Way, way back before I went to law school I got involved with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. I essentially volunteered as a legal intern for a couple of months, which turned out to be a good deal for me in several ways: I got my first, intense exposure to the technology civil liberties issues they advocate, I got my first experience being in a legal environment, and I got to meet and work with a whole bunch of fabulous people. Oh, and when the webmaster went on vacation, I got to be the EFF webmaster for a month. What they got out of the arrangement I can't imagine, as it was before law school and I doubt I was of much legal use. But I was welcomed to participate in meetings and discussions, and from time to time I probably mustered something resembling a constructive contribution. Or at the very least I didn't break anything...

Over the years I've kept in touch, and they've kept being fabulous people doing lots and lots of important work. So when the intake coordinator went on vacation, they asked if I'd mind covering for her. Mind??!!

So today was my last day there. I was there two weeks, minus the days for CES. It was a surprisingly hard job. Because the EFF, to its credit and as a result of extensive outreach campaigns, is considered such a "go to" source for help on technology civil liberties issues that lots more people ask for its help than can possibly all be served. So I was in the position of needing to figure out which cases it could consider taking, and then trying to point people in other directions for the ones it couldn't. It's two competing interests to juggle: the protection of scarce resources and the need to exude enough openness so that the people it could help in some way could get it.

And that was just one source of tension. There also was the tension between needing to provide people with information, and needing to not provide them with legal advice. It's a tension that lawyers in general are always confronting, as people are always asking them for help, and it's really hard to navigate this tension under the best of circumstances as the line between the two is pretty blurry. Given though that the EFF is also such a repository of information on these topics of law and technology it's particularly hard to unwind all the questions and provide answers in general ways, especially because for so many people the answer they really want is the one that applies to their situation alone.

Of course, the real challenge was more from needing to step into a completely new job and be productive from the get-go than from anything else. Not because anyone there necessarily demanded it of me, but because I so appreciated the opportunity to be able to help provide such important support to the public, and I wanted to make sure I really did.

I've decided not to go to the third day of the contracts lecture. The professor has already had two days of my time and I'm not impressed by what he's done with it. I find his class outlines confusing, his demeanor condescending, and I find myself deliberately tuning him out in order not to have him make a jumble of what I do already know.

It's also Saturday, and I haven't had a minute of downtime since New Years. Oh, sure, Vegas was fun and I loved my job, but it's been "go go go" for quite some time now, and I need to "stop stop stop" now and take a breath and get caught up on all the many things I've neglected.

Including regular blogging, which is why I'm boring you all with this rather unimportant post.

My BarBri course is being held at St. Mary's Cathedral in San Francisco. It's not a bad location - perched high on a hill it's a very pretty one - except that it's not close to BART. Fortunately (for me) it generally has free parking, so I've been driving to it. Particularly after the evening lectures it's much nicer to be able to hop in my car than have to wait for a bus back to somewhere still short of home. Unfortunately it still costs me at least $5 to go to the city each time (the bridge toll is $5, commuting by mass transit actually costs more), which wasn't so bad when I was commuting to work but becomes rather uncompensatedly expensive when I just head in for lectures. So I try to make the most of my time in the city when I find myself there.

Saturday was one of those occasions. I had a lecture in the morning - a horrible crash course in Remedies (it's not that remedies are so hard, but I found the lecture and handouts disorganized and needlessly arduous to follow) - and that evening there was to be a Tower of Power concert at the Fillmore, a mere 4 blocks away downhill. How could I pass that up? So I was very good, taking the afternoon and holing up in a Starbucks listening to another 4 hours of an evidence lecture. I was also going to do some multiple choice questions, but after all the lectures my brain was pretty fried. Then the rest of the evening fried the rest of me, seeing how it included another 4+ hours of standing around.

But it was fun, and I got quite lucky. I hadn't bought a ticket in advance, and when I showed up to buy one at the box office it turned out they were sold out. A very nice guy then sold me his extra, and at a substantial discount. He had originally asked for $35, which was already $10 off, but seeing how I only had $25 in my wallet he settled for that and invited me to join him on his good spot online. But I feel bad, because as we went in, I accidentally lost him. I hope he doesn't take it personally, and just want to say for the record a big thank you to Pete the East Bay tiler. I had a very nice time at the show, thanks to you.

He'd actually seen Tower of Power for the first time at the Fillmore as a 15 year old - in 1969! This year is TOP's 39th, and they're still a great show to catch. So much so that they keep pulling in new audiences. Many people brought their kids, and I stood up front by the stage surrounded by a group of high school students who were thrilled to finally get to see the people whose music they'd discovered and been playing in school.

Being up front wasn't the best plan, though, because I'm still learning their material and couldn't make out all the words. And seeing a concert after 8 hours of BarBri lectures also wasn't really the best plan either. After the show the band did a meet and greet, and I met and greeted, but was more of a blithering idiot than usual. It wasn't really a "being in the company of famous musicians" thing as much as it was having generally forgotten how to speak English. I did, however, grunt appreciatively and then called it a night.

Happily it won't be until Wednesday before I have to go back for another 8 hours of BarBri...

In follow-up to my comments about the constitutional and contracts law lecturers, I relate an interesting conversation I had with someone at BarBri about the lecturers. Apparently the contracts lecturer whom I hated is extremely popular all over the country - except New York where his ratings were such that NY BarBri dropped him and got someone else (a guy whom I preferred, as at least I was willing to attend all his lectures...). Meanwhile, some of the New York profs are quite popular in New York, but untenable outside it.

I suppose to some degree there's something comforting about being taught law by someone with the accent corresponding to the area of law you're studying. Particularly for New York, where New York legal distinctions are important to know. That would at least explain why, say, Paula Franzese, a property law prof who practically oozes Brooklyn, is so popular there. We're wired to believe her. But it seems she's not popular outside of New York. Yet the contracts prof I didn't like had a thick Texas accent, and he apparently does not ruffle Californian feathers to nearly the same extent. Maybe it isn't an accent thing as much as it is general style. Perhaps Californians find the Texas guy kind of homey. (I found him condescending.) I guess they find the Brooklyn prof... mmm... a little much, although for me she reminds me of lots of people I knew growing up...

"How's bar review going?" a woman I work with asked the other day.

"Look at me. See these pants I'm wearing? These really green pants? And see these socks? These really red socks? And this sweatshirt, which has neither red nor green in it, but rather blue and yellow, and when I tell you that I actually put thought into what to wear today and yet still ended up with this fashion disaster, that should tell you how bar review's going."

Yes, my inability to dress myself can mean only one thing: bar review is in full swing. Meanwhile my mom has jumped the gun and is referring people to me to answer their legal questions, before I'm even licensed in a single jurisdiction. I hope I wasn't too hard on her when I told her to knock it off... It strikes me that proud parents might turn out to be really excellent business development managers. When the time comes for that, of course, which is not yet.

I just took the 200 question BarBri pre-test, the same pre-test I did last summer. I got a 117, which is pretty darn close to what I got last summer after having already done the same amount of practice questions previously (I've done 212 so far this time around). In fact, it's one point better. Which I suppose means I'm in good shape, although does seem a little weird given that (a) I've seen these questions before, and (b) I think got wrong ones that I had once gotten right, and vice versa. But it's all fixable, at this point, and brushing up on a few key areas should do the trick. Also, this year I mean to do more practice PMBR questions so I can get used to other question styles. But I am still fast (I did 200 questions in under 4 hours, not including a 30 min break halfway through), which is good. The hardest part is just managing to concentrate for the whole time. Unlike last summer, I have a lot more on my mind now and it's making it much harder to focus.

Especially since I keep finding the whole thing increasingly infuriating. It is insane that they construct a test based upon the illusory notion of legal certainty. Are the test makers really so unfamiliar with the American legal system? Ours is an adversarial one, where lawyers for each side always find a way to press an argument that advances their client's interests. Rarely is any legal situation such a slam dunk one way or the other. Barring something like Rule 11 sanctions that penalize a lawyer for truly frivolous claims made in bad faith, no statute, case, or indeed Constitution will ever be so clear on its face as to foreclose a good lawyer from finding a way to have the client's case viewed in a legally favorable light. That's what we're trained in law school to do.

Obviously in certain situations it may be a tougher row for the lawyer to hoe. But rarely will the law be as insurmountably absolute as the MBE imagines it to be. Perhaps it would be in a civil law system, where the law extends only as far as the language of the statute specifically articulates, but not in our common law system where statutes, cases, and indeed constitutions are always subject to some sort of interpretation. Therefore any test that boils down the American legal system into nuggets objective truth is going to be wrong, not the test-taker who rightfully fights that urge to oversimplify.

I don't just mean the test will be wrong in some metaphysical sense - it can be wrong specifically as well. Last summer, for instance, the MBE insisted that a search warrant could only be validly served when preceded by a knock on the door. The US Supreme Court, however, disagreed. Now, granted the Supreme Court weighed in subsequent to the composition of the test. And so it's possible that the MBE didn't ultimately count any question involving this "rule" since it had since been "changed."

But that's just it - the law does change, or at minimum gets constantly finessed. So to treat the law as a fixed set of discrete rules can never be right. Nor can we, as future lawyers, ever be either if our passing responses inherently ignore this reality.

Just a quick post to note the occasion - but I took my oath today. I'm officially a lawyer now.