reading

Naturally, it’s not one hundred percent correct to say nothing has changed. Some things have changed. It’s the gestalt that hasn’t changed, what might be referred to as the “legal-industrial complex,” that endlessly revolving, self-perpetuating, interconnected dynamo of law schools, law firms and lawyers which continues to churn merrily away, like a vast sausage grinder. The input is young lives and billions of dollars in tuition - the output vast mountains of documents, uncountable billable hours, staggering (and seemingly perpetual) loans, equally staggering partner profits, and a bottomless lake of human misery. I don’t want to seem like I’m laying it on too thick (I get accused of that from time to time.) So let’s enumerate the facts:

The good news, such as it is, all comes at the input end of the sausage grinder, and it’s marginally good, at best, but hey, we’re clutching at straws here. Depending on your choice of metaphor, either slightly fewer lemmings are lining up to jump off the cliff or slightly fewer cattle are mindlessly lining up for the bolt gun to the forehead. The numbers aren’t huge, but obviously any life spared a career in law represents (we’ll all agree) a step towards a healthier world and brighter future for humankind. It might not seem critically important that a low double-digit percentage fewer kids are heading to a testing center to take the LSAT this year, but – to paraphrase the Buddhist tale (or New Age koan or whatever) it makes a difference to that one starfish! (You know, the story about the guy who tosses a starfish back into the water despite there being zillions of starfish on the beach because it made a difference to that one starfish? Oh, whatevers.)

I don’t want to wander too far off on a tangent (but what the heck, why not?) I only wish to point out that, in the on-going struggle between the-lemmings-marching-off-the-cliff metaphor and the cattle-tramping-up-the-ramp-to-receive-the-bolt-gun-in-the-forehead metaphor, the latter is clearly winning out. And some interesting variations have cropped up along the way. One client (who reappears in anonymized form as a character in a piece within these pages) refers to her biglaw firm on principle simply as “the veal pen.” Another explained her decision to quit biglaw with a rhetorical flourish: “Sorry, Temple Grandin, your magic don’t work on me.” (You sort of have to know who Temple Grandin is to get that joke, but trust me, it’s worth looking up if you don’t.)

So…we have a slight decline in cattle lining up for the bolt gun in the forehead, in the sense that LSAT test-taking numbers are down. (Yay!) Enrollment at the very lamest and most obscure fourth-tier law schools is down, too, at least a smidgeon. (Whoopie!) But I’m afraid you’ll have to season your admiration for awhile as, per the norm in law, there is some fine print: First of all, many of these schools started life as auto body shops and still offer alternative academic tracks in cosmetology; and second, when I say enrollment is down, that means down from the absurd heights of a few years back, when the numbers of students enrolled in these Ponzi-schemes-disguised-as-academic-institutions doubled and tripled with an alacrity nearly matching the soaring tuition costs, which rose in near-miraculous parallel with the government’s willingness to loan immense quantities of money to broke, clueless twenty-three year olds. So things are better, but still pretty damned bad.

The good news is that the law schools, at least some of them, are ever-so-slightly hurting. The truly larcenous bottom-rung outfits are hurting the most, to the point where they’ve had to (oh, the horror!) trim the jobs of minimum wage adjuncts in order to maintain the million dollar salaries of administrators and presidents whose lavish lifestyles are the true raison d’etre of these esteemed institutions. Sacrifices must be made to keep “legal education” alive.

That pretty much sums up the good news in a nutshell: Hooray! There are slightly fewer kids becoming lawyers.

Now for the bad news (you can always count on me to be there with the bad news.) Man oh man oh man are there still too many lawyers. America remains up to its browline in lawyers. Lawyers lawyers lawyers everywhere you look, as far as the eye can see.

What is the fallout of a nation swollen like an over-stuffed haggis with lawyers, lawyers and more lawyers? A variety of mass extinction. To put it mildly, several features of the legal landscape whose abundance we once took for granted have proven evanescent, only to deliquesce, thaw and resolve into a dew, peace-ing out, quoth the raven, nevermore. After many a summer…This is the end, beautiful friend.

Something along those lines.

What am I blathering about? The discontinuation of a lot of stuff we used to take for granted.

For starters, there is no longer such a thing as “becoming a law professor.” In the misty recesses of memory there existed a time when, if you got good grades at one of the better law schools, but didn’t really like law, you could take it up as a purely theoretical enterprise, pen long, puzzling academic monographs concerning pseudo-philosophical vagaries like “international human rights law” or “queer theory” and actually obtain a tidily remunerated gig teaching torts at a third-tier backwater.

At this point, you could pull straight-A’s at Yale and clerk for (and personally physically pleasure) each and every Justice on the Supreme Court – hell, you could be on the Supreme Court – but you ain’t gettin’ no job teachin’ at no law school. There are law school presidents who earn $1 million or more per year for their fund-raising skills. There are tenured old fuddy-duddies who have been “teaching” since the dawn of time and will expire at their lecterns (then remain on an additional semester for the money.) And there are adjuncts, who are paid minimum wage, do all the actual teaching, and are currently being laid off in droves. But that’s it, the sum of legal education for the foreseeable future. There are no jobs – no decent jobs – available teaching law.

Ça n’existe plus.

I’ll point out that lawyers earning minimum wage will be developing into an additional trope or leitmotiv here, one that’s linked via phenomenology (i.e., concerning shit that’s actually happened to people) to my other, mass extinction theme. That’s because most of what’s going extinct in a massive way are jobs for lawyers—at least, jobs that support a middle class lifestyle. I recently heard from an unemployed lawyer client that he’d been offered an “internship” (I kid you not, an internship) at a law firm. “It was basically doing doc review,” he told me, “except you didn’t get paid.” Much to his credit, he declined said offer, and it is my fond hope that for at least a short while longer, unpaid internships spent doing doc review for nothing will continue to be staved off by starving out-of-work lawyers (not that I would be shocked if things trended in the other direction.) At this point in time, simply to announce, with a straight face, that you possess employment, any employment, constitutes a status symbol for a lawyer. If your particular job happens not to be at Walmart, restocking shelves or working the checkout line, that’s a big plus…as it should be.

What other formerly extant jobs for lawyers have dried up and blown away like so many autumn leaves…or raisins in the sun…or cats on hot tin roofs? For starters (since it’s where things used to start) summer associate gigs are dying out faster than trilobites in the Late Permian. Nearly that long ago, biglaw firms were still competing to hire the best and brightest, which meant cultivating law students while they were yet in school, regaling the little louts (and loutesses) with posh meals, outings to country clubs, and the whole nine yards. It was an established fact, back in those days, that you weren’t expected to do any actual work as a summer associate; such tawdry labors lay beneath your exalted status as a potential recruit. The firm’s task was to mollycoddle summers - to get you livin’ like a pimp (as it were), so you wouldn’t peace out.

Nowadays firms needn’t convince anyone not to peace out, and they sure as hell needn’t waste their time cultivating law students. A few big-shot firms maintain the pretense of an old-fashioned summer associate program, but nowadays they expect you to work. In these great times, it’s your job to cultivate them, all the while hoping and praying to land among the blessed few who receive an offer. We’ll see how long even those programs remain. I’ve had partners inform me outright that summer programs no longer make sense. Why lavish time and lucre on training a bunch of law students and juniors if you can hire hungry mid-level associates as laterals from other firms? No one needs juniors – clients refuse to pay for them, and an experienced paralegal can do the same work faster and better anyway. Then there’s the stark fact that a slew of juniors crash and burn each year – weeping alone in their offices for a few months, then sinking without a trace, like an untethered bathysphere in the Mariana Trench. Who needs the drama? There are so many lawyers out of work at this point, you can hire fifth years from top firms for a third year’s salary. Let someone else train juniors. If you must hire at all, lasso ‘em when they’re good ‘n broken in and uncomplaining, ready to pull the plow. Clerkships, too, have gone the way of the dodo. You can apply three years in advance, but the judge had better be your uncle, and then you’ll still have to bribe him. Ditto with Assistant United States Attorney gigs. Even non-profit positions. In fact, all those gigs that seemed like they were not a big deal, virtually an entitlement, if you went to a good school and made decent grades, are now suddenly a very big deal indeed. Mere attendance at Yale Law coupled with good grades doesn’t ensure you’ll walk into a prime clerkship, and acquiring an AUSA position is akin to winning Powerball. Moreover, the process for applying to either can drag on for years. Should you opt to rise above such pettiness, and devote yourself selflessly at a low-paying non-profit job…well, nice try. Get in line. Everyone dreams of hooking a plum non-profit legal position, even if it pays less than a barista gig at Starbucks and the “Founder and Executive Director” is an insufferable, silver-spoon-born tyrant.

In-house jobs? Long gone. Or at least, you probably don’t want the ones you could get. Here’s the skinny on that imbroglio: Be wary of unscrupulous headhunters pushing over-hyped jobs. If it’s a good in-house job, then it’s like a rent-controlled apartment in Greenwich Village - someone already has it, and is planning to die there. Decent-paying in-house legal jobs are the last hold-out of “lifestyle” in the profession, and I assure you, if there’s one available, it’s because there’s a catch - typically, that the boss is an utter dick. And, in the context of the legal profession, when you say the boss is an utter dick, you’re saying something, indeed. Which is not to imply that a feeding frenzy won’t ensue the minute such a job opens up, with every lawyer in town battling to claim the kill (Oh my God, an in-house job – lifestyle!) But some weeks later (assuming you surmount the competition and manage to acquire said job) when you actually begin performing your duties and meet the staggering douche you have to work for…despite your best efforts to go along and get along, to be agreeable and competent and on top of things in every respect, and despite an ineffable longing in the deepest recesses of your soul for this job to just work out – you shall not out-endure the epic asshat across the hall. He shall torment you, and humiliate you, and do his utmost to ruin your life, and thereby derive sadistic pleasure. As a result, one day, not long after you begin, you shall say to yourself, nothing is worth putting up with this, and you shall quit. And then another eager troop of desperate lawyers shall rush in to take your place, once again hoping against hope, dear God in heaven, let this be it. To which God in heaven will tersely reply: Sorry. It isn’t.

Naturally, even theoretical access to any of these now-extinct former opportunities assumes, as a starting condition, that you attended a top law school - as in Yale, Harvard or the other one. If you didn’t, well, then I hardly need bother reminding you that merely getting a job, any job (at least for the past decade or so, since new crops of law schools, and law students, pullulated like fungi after a soaking rain) resembles that scene in the Beverly Hillbillies’ opening credits, where Jed levels his firearm and takes a pot shot at a possum, only to stare in astonishment as crude oil gushes from the hole. In other words, getting a job in law when you didn’t attend Yale, Harvard or the other one, resembles something that doesn’t happen very often. I work with oodles of bright young things two years out of decent (not top, but decent) law schools, who have come to accept the conclusion that law jobs don’t exist, at least for them, anywhere, anyhow, any anything. Under the circumstances, that seems a fair conclusion to draw.

One constant amid all this evolutionary change and mass extinction are school loans. Those aren’t going extinct any time soon. Those remain eternal. The schools display immense creativity in concocting ways to disguise simultaneously highly contingent and totally inadequate financial aid as something more than the sheer puffery it is, all the while trumpeting “loan repayment assistance” which is meticulously designed never to materialize. But the loans themselves? The loans remain. The loans abide. It is standard operating procedure to emerge from law school with $240k in bankruptcy-proof debt, at the age of twenty-five, with no prospects for a job. Nothing to look at here, people. This is hardly news.

If anything has changed on that front, it’s the attitude surrounding this calamity. Instead of shock and disbelief, I’m confronting something more along the lines of resigned acceptance. Because let’s face it – it’s not like I didn’t warn you. This book that you’re clutching in your palms at this very moment is the sequel to a book about law and lawyers called “Way Worse Than Being a Dentist.” You might not have believed me the first time around, but I wasn’t kidding then, and I’m not kidding now, and you know that I know that you know what I know so yeah, we’re on the same base nowadays and yeah, it sucks.

Will kids still line up to take the LSAT and eagerly volunteer for that bolt gun in the forehead? Yeah, they will. Biglaw partners are still raking in the bucks, everyone wants money, and going to law school still somehow looks (at least, to an eager twenty-three year old) like it will transmute decent academic performance into filthy lucre with a dash of prestige. Everyone wants to be a partner at the top of the heap, pocketing millions. In fact, duh. Of course they do. Don’t be naïve.

So, if that’s you…well, go ahead, knock yourself out. But keep a few things in mind, starting with the fact that law is a lousy way to get rich. Even the biglaw partners banking millions earn only a tiny portion of what their clients pull in (they work for billionaires.) And these über-partners represent an infinitesimal proportion of lawyers. And they make that much money working around the clock, days, night and weekends, and by understaffing their law firms so that everyone else at the firm (who isn’t earning big money) also works days, nights and weekends - and most of those folks only last a few years before they burn out. Partners are also, by definition, very very good at an arcane, detail-oriented, frankly (to most people, not all people, but most people) tedious endeavor that most people (not all people, but most people) have no interest in and never will have any interest in - namely, law. To put it starkly, biglaw partners are born, not made, and they’re a rare commodity, which is another reason they’re paid so much.

I subtitled this introduction “a request for injunctive relief” because I believe an extraordinary remedy is called for. It doesn’t seem like this situation can go on forever, does it? I mean, the “entire generation fooled by their own greed and naiveté into winding up unemployed and up to its ears in debt” thing?

The question is, who can intervene, deus ex machina, sliding down a zip line from the catwalks above our heads, and save the day, halting this juggernaut before the inevitable armageddon arrives? I haven’t the foggiest. For the record, these books are my stab at the problem. The central obstacle to progress is that the interested parties are too interested in their own interests to call an end to the party. The law schools love recruiting students – the more they rustle up, the more wealth they accumulate. At this point, the only prerequisite for acceptance to a fourth tier law school is a credit card and the ability to fog a mirror (and you could talk your way in with just the credit card.) The firms don’t care how they treat their associates – they’d work them to actual death if they could get away with it and it increased PPP (“profits per partner.”) The kids themselves line up eagerly for slaughter, eyes glazed over, tongues lolling limply, mesmerized at the prospect of fat cat salaries. And the government keeps loaning the money to perpetuate the ceaselessly rising tuitions, which pour into the pockets of the law school “administrators.” And so on. And so on. And so on.

If reading this book saves just one starfish then, okay, I did something. So here’s the second volume of “Way Worse Than Being a Dentist” and yeah, it’s still way worse, and if anything’s changed since the first volume, it’s that I’ve listened to a lot of lawyers over the past five years, and this book is tilted less toward my musty old stories of the good old days and more towards the current yet-more-alarming-thanever-before state of affairs. Naturally, my writing style has matured with time. Where the first book embodied a frothy spirit of sans souci, a merry merengue of enchortled gigglement…the later style draws more from a well of post-quantum neo-poetics, a sombre, nattering, pretentious, petulant, brittle, whiny palette of inky darkness. Call it the difference between a jaunty baroque quodlibet and the measured nuance of a power saw. Enjoy.

To sum up, then: here’s a sobering look at a total shit storm, and it’s meant to be sobering, because I’d love it if someone or something could intervene from above and stop this nightmare and the damage it does. If I held such wondrous powers, I would snap my fingers to make half the law schools in the USA close their doors. Then I’d require the remainder (under threat of legal action…) to populate themselves with people who enjoy law (for whatever reason) as their métier (i.e., not just for the money). Everyone else I’d direct to follow their bliss (i.e., please, for your own sake, just do something, anything, else.)

Might I suggest dentistry?

I participated on a panel last year with an expert on “happiness studies” and naturally, as someone who works with lawyers, I found myself inverting the customary nomenclature. While the relevance of “happiness studies” to the legal profession might fairly be questioned, it would be foolhardy to minimize the implications of “unhappiness studies” with regard to lawyers’ lives. I would venture a step further, to aver that law, as a profession, holds immense promise for future “unhappiness studies” research.

Until that time, we’ll have to make do with insights provided by the “happiness studies” folks, and simply invert it all so things makes sense in legal terms. It might sound like some kind of “Mister Mxyztplk” version of happiness studies…but for our purposes, it’ll do the trick.

Here, then, Mr. or Ms. Lawyer, is the official explanation (at least, according to some of the happiness experts I’ve read or listened to) for why you’re so unhappy: There are three things missing from your life – three elements critical to happiness (think of them as vitamins, and yourself as having a deficiency.) Studies show that you need these three elements, or your life will suck. Well, that’s not exactly what studies show, but in all honesty, I haven’t bothered to read any of those studies because it seems like that would be a difficult and boring thing to do and in any case this stuff is pretty intuitive (intuitive being the polite word for obvious) and who knows with these psychology studies - half the time they aren’t reproducible and most were likely done by a psych professor milking his tenure track gig while he moonlights supervising waterboardings.

But I regress. Or digress. Or whatever.

Here then, is an explanation of the vitamins, in entirely random order:

Vitamin number one (again, the order is random) is autonomy, as in, control over your own life - i.e., the ability to do what you want to do, when you want to do it, the way you want to do it.

Needless to say, these concepts are foreign to a lawyer’s experience. In fact, lawyers are the only people I’ve ever met who casually refer to “taking most of the weekend off” as though that were a perfectly normal thing for someone who works all week to say. Some of my lawyer clients have so little of vitamin number one that they interrupt psychotherapy sessions to repeatedly reply to email or even answer their cellphones (I sit, patiently observing, as they listen, go suddenly pale, and then, with a very small voice, begin to sound like obsequious lickspittles placating angry war lords – which is, essentially what they are.) The entire absence of personal autonomy in biglaw seems so blindingly “intuitive” that it’s almost embarrassing to point out as a fact worthy of statement - but here it is, summed up once more for ease of comprehension: In biglaw, you sell your life (i.e., all semblance of personal autonomy) for money.

I lost track, at Sullivan & Cromwell, of how many times I was told, “What did you expect? Why do you think we pay you so much?” There was often no detectable prompt to trigger this statement; it was just something people said to me for the heck of it, as in:

Me: “Nice weather we’re having.”

Them: “What did you expect? Why do you think we pay you so much?”

Me: “How was your weekend?”

Them: “What did you expect? Why do you think we pay you so much?”

(Of course, in this case you might argue there was some logical linkage, since their weekend might conceivably have been spent doing something not involving spending said weekend at the office, whereas, regarding my weekend, that outcome was not seriously at issue since I inevitably spent it, in its entirety or near-entirety, at the office…)

Them: “What did you expect? Why do you think we pay you so much?”

In psychotherapy terms, it was an “ego defense” - in other words, I think they were a bit self-conscious about keeping human slaves and this was a way for them to assuage said self-consciousness.

Next obvious question: Why does a total absence of personal autonomy create unhappiness? I guess for the same reason a circle is round, or a gestation crate on a factory farm is a bad place to live. It just is. I’m not sure if, even in my wackiest mood, I could manage to explain something so goddamned intuitive, even if (writing, as I am, for lawyers) it might actually require explaining. Something there is that doesn’t like being a slave, locked in a cage, doing what you’re told, unable to do what you want. And that’s how it is. I wish money were enough to make that go away, but disliking being a slave (well, okay, perhaps peon or indentured servant captures your status more precisely) remains a stubborn feature of human nature. Moving right along…

Vitamin number two is competence. It makes us happy when we feel like we’re good at something. If we feel good at something, we like doing it more, and yes, it feels good when we hear that we’re good at it. That makes us feel appreciated and a little bit celebrated. And in biglaw, I’m sorry, but that’s never gonna happen - at least 99% of the time. As a general rule, it is safe to say, lawyers don’t praise one another, they compete with one another. If you know more than someone else about anything in the legal sphere, the standard industry practice is to silently hold it over them, communicate disdain – radiate it, in fact – and let them know each and every waking moment that you are better and you could do whatever it is we’re talking about in half the time it’s taking them and, furthermore, that they are broken, wrong, incompetent, flawed, defective – take your pick – human beings. The rules are simple: A lawyer must never, ever, under any circumstances take the time to explain anything or show that miserable, useless little junior clown how to do anything. That would spoil the sport of grinding his ego to dust. Never explain. Never praise. Never thank. Constantly criticize. Rinse. Repeat. That’s biglaw. That’s how we roll. And guess what? It’s making you unhappy – at least, if you’re on the receiving end. And since there’s always someone above your head treating you the way you’re treating the person beneath you, all the way on up to the partners and the department heads and the name partner and the management committee and the client….voilà! We’re all unhappy.

Vitamin number three is sociability. Or sociality. Or maybe they mean the same thing. Whatever. Anyway, you need your peeps, your crew, your boyz, your crowd. You need other people. You need to feel surrounded by the people you feel at home with, who accept you, and maybe appreciate you a little, too. Once again, this isn’t what you’re liable to find at the average biglaw firm. In no small measure, that state of affairs is due to the resounding reality that, as one of my clients exuberantly shouted at me (via Skype) just the other day, at the top of her lungs, with a strangely blissful sense of emotional release more appropriate, perhaps, within the confines of a revival tent: “Lawyers are SUCH DICKS!”

Alas, there was no small measure of truth in her words, and as a result of this situation, you might find that you frankly aren’t so much into hanging out with other lawyers. Perhaps you’ve endured a lunch spent with a colleague bragging about how many hours he billed last month, or sat shoveling take-out lo mein into your mouth at 11 pm in a half-darkened skyscraper with a junior associate expressing her eagerness to work on some dodgy and unnecessarily convoluted derivatives contract because it’s “so much fun to wrap my head around!” I recall, at some weary juncture in my legal career, realizing with startling clarity that there weren’t any lawyers remaining in my acquaintance whom I would wish to invite to a party. I wasn’t even sure I would invite myself to a party at that point in my development as a human being. Happily, that wasn’t a period of my life when I was in any position either to throw parties or get invited to them.

But it matters, at least in terms of producing happiness, that you feel a part of a group you wish to be in. When I sign up for a weekend retreat with a group therapy institute, to spend hour after hour emoting and gibbering in psychobabble and kibitzing over bagels with a couple hundred other therapists, we might not all get along, but I’ve no doubt I’m down with my peeps. It’s New York City, I’m talking to therapists, we’re “putting our feelings into words,” there are many Jews and guys in tweed jackets and older chicks sporting chunky jewelry, lots of talking with hands and big, understanding eyes that gaze into your soul. I’m home.

With lawyers, not so much. In fact, if you are feeling among your people in a room filled with lawyers, congrats! You’re probably one of those odd ducks who really belongs in the field of law and isn’t even unhappy there. In fact, you’re probably not even reading this column right now. And you’re probably also receiving at least a small dose of vitamin number two, since someone’s praising you and grooming you to stick around (you could be one of the infinitesimal percentage of your class who won’t be gone in a few years time) and you might even start receiving your first tiny trickle of vitamin number one – the ability to decide when you want to do something, as opposed to doing whatever everyone else tells you to do, on their schedule (which somehow always means at 5 pm on Friday.)

It turns out dogs can produce their own Vitamin C. That comes in handy for them on long sea voyages. But we humans have to make sure we get our vitamins or we develop scurvy and bad things happen.

Some lawyers, apparently, are born with the ability to produce their own vitamins one, two and three – autonomy, competence and sociability. They flourish where the rest of us begin to notice anemia, coarse, brittle hair and bleeding gums.

You need to feel in control of your life, feel good at what you do, and feel surrounded by friendly faces. Otherwise, you’re going to be unhappy. And if, within the confines of biglaw, you lack the ability to extract the necessary nutrients from your surroundings, you might find yourself forced to leave before you wither up and die. You might even consider heading back to school to pursue another professional degree. Might I suggest the new-fangled yet red-hot field of Unhappiness Studies?

Originally published on November 4, 2015. This piece was a quickie – it pretty much wrote itself. I don’t actually remember where the “3 vitamins” concept came from. I spoke on a panel at Harvard University on the subject of happiness a couple years back, along with a prominent researcher who presented a summary of some of her findings, and that got me thinking about the subject and reading odds and ends and somehow all that cogitation produced this synthesis. I can’t vouch for its originality, but it seems to have struck a nerve with lawyers, as this piece quickly went viral and received a great many reads and comments.

The verb “to gaslight” comes from a 1938 stage play (which was then made into two movies, one starring Ingrid Bergman.) The plot is super-creepy, especially for 1938. In it, an evil husband tricks his young wife into believing she’s losing her mind by staging bizarre occurrences in their house, then pretending only she’s seeing and hearing them (yes, he’s after her money.) His favorite trick is dimming the gas lights in her room before clomping around upstairs or making strange sounds emanate from the walls. Soon she’s freaking out whenever the lights dim, expecting another bad trip. After each freak-out, once she’s good and melted down, he rushes to her aid, feigning concern.

It seems like a lifetime before she catches on - but she does. Things click as she (more or less) walks in on him rattling chains in the attic.

Law firms gaslight young lawyers - they create a world where nothing makes sense, then studiously pretend it does. You should catch on, too. You’re probably not the one who’s crazy.

Here’s how it works:

When you first get to the firm, it feels like summering all over again. Work is slow, and when assignments come, they’re low-priority research for marketing or pro bono. Here and there, you get a week of mindless doc review, which actually comes as a relief, since it’s easy and counts as billable hours. Mostly, you’re sitting at your desk, reading blogs. Your officemate is present half the time, not present half the time, but he doesn’t seem eager to explain what he’s up to any of the time, so you follow his lead and attempt to look serious and busy and involved in something, whatever that might be. You begin to wonder if there’s something wrong, but since you haven’t had a chance to do anything yet, it seems unlikely it’s something you’ve done. You build up the resolve to ask around and check if everyone else is dead, too – but they look busy enough, sitting at their desks, determinedly staring at their computers, so you chicken out. Just calm down, do what they’re doing – pretend there’s work. A week later, you pass the bar. You still haven’t really done anything, but it’s a step forward, right?

Assignments start coming in, which is a relief. You tell yourself it’s typical first-year stuff – no problem. Draft a reply to a document request: It’s confusing, and boring, and you’ve never done it before, but this is a milestone. In a few weeks you’ll probably whip one off in three hours. Right now, it’s taking sixteen. Then things die again – no work for a few weeks, and it’s back to reading blogs and wondering if there was something about that last assignment they’re not telling you – because they didn’t actually tell you anything.

Then one day you get another reply to a document request, a longer, more confusing, more boring one. You’re not really “getting it” yet, but whatever. No biggie. You consider asking for help from the senior associate on that case, but there’s something about the way he drops the work on you that seems to foreclose that possibility. He doesn’t look like the type to offer help – it’s more like he never wants to see you again, and you just about never do see him again.

More assignments - there’s a privilege log in connection with a massive document production. You aren’t sure what that would look like, so you ask for a precedent, and it’s 75 pages long. Ominous, but you’ll use common sense and assemble something serviceable.

Everything goes on hold while another vast sea of doc review eats up two weeks, night and day and weekends. And then it’s over. During it, and then after, you’re not sure how you’re supposed to act. Bothered by this work that’s beneath you? Intensely involved in it, as if it were intensely involving? Everyone else seems to be deeply involved, or pretending to be, or something.

You’re pulled into another case, a behemoth securities litigation in its early stages. The senior associate wants a first draft of a memorandum in support of a motion to dismiss. This is smarter stuff, and you’re determined to impress. But you start the research and it’s potentially endless. There are a dozen issues. You spend the weekend on it, but complications breed new complications - issues of scienter and issues around standing. You try to remember your civil procedure class, but there’s a lot coming at you. You tuck away that nagging thought – that you don’t really like this work, that you don’t really like law, that you didn’t really like law school, that you never really wanted to do this in the first place. But after you finished first year, and did okay, the consensus was that you should finish since you’ve come this far. So here you are again, and you might as well finish this, too, since you owe a bank two hundred thousand dollars.

On Monday the other stuff needs doing. You put the complicated securities assignment aside and focus on the request for discovery reply thing, which is a time-hole.

There’s an email from the senior litigation associate on the securities litigation – the partner needs the first draft of the memorandum by the end of next week. You put down the phone and realize you have an hour before a conference call the privilege log partner asked you to join. Can you work on the securities stuff for an hour? That would be pointless. You get back to work on the reply to the request thing, then glance at your email and remember a two-day intensive training on taking depositions starting in another week or so. Should you cancel the training? It’s only a training, and who knows if you’ll ever take a deposition. But the privilege log partner asked you to go, so maybe the firm makes a big deal out of trainings. On the other hand, if you do go, you’ll never get the securities stuff done.

You notice you’re tapping your foot against your chair.

You dial into the conference call. For the next ninety minutes you try to listen closely - but you’re not sure what you’re listening to. There are acronyms and references to people’s names you’ve never heard before and meetings you didn’t attend. It’s disorienting, listening to nearly a dozen disembodied, unfamiliar voices. They all seem to know one another and be continuing a conversation begun ages ago. After twenty minutes, your mind wanders to a vague recollection of an episode from the original Star Trek, in which glowing brains float in glass tanks in an underground chamber and communicate to one another telepathically. That’s what this feels like – strange voices, emanating from nowhere.

The conference call abruptly ends. You’re left in a daze, suddenly snapped back to reality.

That call couldn’t have been important – the partner never got on – or did he? It dawns on you he probably expected you to take notes. You start jotting down a few token words – but it’s hopeless. He never told you what the call was about. You never asked. When he requested that you be on it, he was super casual about it, like an afterthought. It seemed like you were there to absorb atmosphere, “background” yourself, that sort of thing - like when they brought you to a meeting but it was clear you didn’t really have to do anything because you were decorative, another lawyer in the room. But maybe this wasn’t like that. Maybe you were actually the only one on this conference call from your entire firm. Maybe you were supposed to be on top of it, somehow. Maybe it was all on you.

Your throat is constricting – you realize you’re panting for breath. Abruptly, you decide to let the whole “what was that conference call about” issue go. Worry about it later.

Right now, you’ll email the securities litigation partner and ask if there’s flexibility with the due date on the motion to dismiss draft, since you’re busy with another case.

His reply comes almost immediately. It’s one line: “There is some front-end flexibility, but be aware that lessens our flexibility on the back-end.”

That’s a scary email. Not exactly reassuring. In fact, it’s not clear what that means, except mostly, no, he’d really like it at the end of next week, or at least, if he doesn’t get it by the end of next week, whatever comes next might be worse than it otherwise would be…but okay. Think. You can do this.

You start on the endless response to the document request thing, working late nights, coming in all weekend. At some point, a senior associate comes by asking how it’s going with the securities research outline thing. You explain you asked for more time, since you’re swamped. It looks good to be swamped, right? They like that.

The senior associate frowns.

“Gosh, swamped, huh?”

You change gears. She doesn’t seem impressed, more like concerned. You sense a sympathetic soul, and hint you’re feeling pressured. She sits down next to your desk and listens attentively for a few minutes, with a gentle expression on her face.

You always thought she was kind of a joke – overweight, with weird bangs, ugly suits and those blouses with the ribbon things that look like she bought them at JC Penney. But maybe she isn’t so bad after all. When did you turn fat phobic? She seems rather nice, and you need nice right now. You realize your voice is breaking and tears are starting to come. Someone seems to care – the senior associate - and it’s dredging up unexpected emotions.

The senior associate abruptly stands up and advises you to speak right away with your partner mentor.

A moment later you are sitting alone in your office, wishing you hadn’t looked like you were about to cry in front of an overweight, badly dressed senior associate you hardly know. You have to pull it together. Now you look like an idiot. Swamped! You’re not supposed to admit you’re swamped! They’ll think you can’t handle pressure.

You start back in on the reply to the request for discovery, and realize you’re having an anxiety attack. You’ll take a few deep breaths, then get back to work and it will be okay.

But there’s that nagging fact: your “partner mentor” is the same guy who sent you the scary email. He’s also the guy at the end of the hall who leaves his office dark in the evening, with just his desk light on…which is super-weird. You remember the time, a few months ago, when you came by his door hinting you could use some work. He regarded you like you were an annoying object cluttering his office, and you realized it was a mistake to “drop by” at all. “I’ll keep you posted,” was all he muttered, and it seemed clear you’d committed a faux pas. You made a mental note: If it can possibly be avoided, don’t bother this guy.

You’re not going to lose it.

You recall the rumor about the junior associate who committed suicide at this firm - how someone leaked a dozen emails from the partners accusing one another of over-working him. Where did you hear that story? A legal blog? Someone at law school?

A week later, the phone rings. You glance at the display – it’s your partner mentor.

Shit. The fat senior associate with the ribbons talked to him. Now you’ll be labeled a freak and a suicide risk for breaking down in front of her. How could you be so stupid!

But the partner mentor doesn’t seem to know anything, and he’s in a hurry. He called to make sure you signed up for the deposition workshop. So that must be important. You don’t mention you were thinking about canceling.

Back to the privilege log. But you can’t concentrate. The securities thing – there’s no way you can get it done by next week with all this other stuff.

Then you slow down and process another thought that’s been haunting you for a couple weeks. Are they seriously counting on you, a first year, to write up a draft for this motion? It can’t be all on you, can it? It’s a hazing - they’re putting a scare into you.

Maybe you’re supposed to play along – you know, “take a stab at it.” Don’t give anything away. Keep your cool, hand something in, and act like you know what you’re doing. It’ll be like that other research assignment, a month or two back. When you handed it in (after sweating over it for two weeks), the senior associate only grunted, and you never heard about it again. It seemed awkward to ask, later on, if he’d liked it. So it simply went away - you never heard another thing about it. Maybe this will be like that. But maybe that wasn’t a good thing. Maybe that was a bad thing, but they didn’t say anything because that’s how they do things here.

A grunt, and not much more, seems to be the standard reception your work receives. Sometimes you get an eye roll, or simply a weary sigh and it’s stuck on a heap of paper. It appears, mostly, like they’re merely receiving something they have little choice about and so they take it from you and make a mental note to look at it later and that’s that.

To be on the safe side, you decide to talk to another senior associate who’s working on the case and ask for guidance.

That associate seems friendly, although she’s weirdly thin, always wears a worn-out cardigan with holes in the elbows and tennis shoes and gives off a high-strung vibe that’s kind of off the charts. She cheerily offers to take on one of the issues, to lighten your load. But then she picks the easiest one – a statute of limitations non-issue that will occupy half a paragraph. She fails to suggest in any way that this is a set-up. As far as you can determine, you actually are assigned to a multi-million dollar case and you’re doing most of the work, at least for the time being, and that partner really is expecting a draft of a motion on the most complicated thing you’ve ever done in your life, probably next week.

You return to flipping through the 75-page privilege log and try to figure out how you’re going to recreate something like it, but you can’t concentrate and give up.

You’re biting your nails again, a nervous tick you haven’t succumbed to in ages. At home that night, you stare into space for a long time, then burst into tears. You turn to your cat for comfort, but he only scowls at you, clearly pissed off you’re never home. You can’t do it. You can’t return to the firm in the morning. But there’s no way out; your loans are massive.

Why are you thinking this way? You have to pull yourself together. It’s been five months since you arrived at this firm. You’re losing it.

You call your therapist. It’s been three months since you cancelled on him and never rescheduled. You explain you got caught up in work, your schedule’s been unpredictable.

I tell you to come in and we’ll talk.

The bright, confident young attorney from a few months ago is a frazzled wreck sobbing in my office. You tell me you can’t do anything right. You can’t sleep. You’re afraid to go to back to the firm. You’re doing a lousy job and they know it. Why can’t you handle it, when everyone else is doing fine? You can’t tell if they really expect you to do all this work, if this is normal. Maybe it’s some kind of mistake. No one tells you anything. You can’t trust anyone in the office. You haven’t had a weekend off in six weeks.

All you wanted was to do your best, make them happy, give them whatever they asked for – and earn money to pay loans. Now you think you’re starting to lose your mind.

Law firms gaslight associates. They might as well flicker the lights and rattle chains in the attic.

I suggest the obvious - talk to your partner mentor and review your work assignments. There needs to be a check-in.

You immediately object, and I don’t refute your concerns. Yes, the firm might think you’re over-reacting or a slacker or simply no good at law. They might stop giving you work. They might push you out the door with a bad review and a please-be-gone-in-three-months speech. They might simply not care. Or they might realize you’re overwhelmed and reduce your workload or slow down and explain what they expect from you (although I wouldn’t count on it.) Heck, the entire firm could implode tomorrow and lay everyone off – that’s happened to people, and you’d never see it coming. Biglaw is an opaque world, and anything is possible at a law firm. One thing I’m adamant about: I seriously doubt this is all in your head, or that the other juniors are doing fine and you’re the only one freaking out.