What Did I Get Myself Into?
Capital Thinking · Issue #1025 · View online
Twenty years ago, I stood as a freshly shaven 25-year-old, raised my right hand, and got sworn in to the California State Bar with absolutely no clue what I was getting myself into.
I thought on this anniversary, I’d share a bit how I got here, some of the wisdom I’ve learned along the way, and my own reflections on my profession.
20 YEARS A LAWYER
A LITTLE HISTORYIn 1986 I was an aerospace engineering student and doing great.
A professor told me that as an engineer, I would be well served to get better at presenting ideas. He explained there are plenty of engineers but not so many articulate ones.
I thought about it and joined the debate team. In no time at all, I was cleaning up on the collegiate debate circuit all over the southwest on every weekend. I had lots of fun and was good at it. I was so good that it began to make me wonder if maybe I needed to lean my ladder against a different wall.
Eventually, I started thinking about law school. Looking back, I really had no idea what it was like being a lawyer, what kind of law I wanted to practice, or even what types of skills I’d need to be successful at it. I just knew that I loved the debate tournaments more than engineering.
I think part of the reason for this big move was my own delusion about what it would be like being a lawyer. Coming from a working class family, the thought of becoming a lawyer felt like something special. In hindsight, none of those delusions were correct.
My dad knew something was up, so we went to Denny’s together and I told him of my intention to drastically alter the course of my life over scrambled eggs and pancakes. Dad wasn’t all that impressed.
Instead he said he was worried. He wasn’t worried about the cost or the idea of me leaving engineering or even about my ability to succeed. His concern was that becoming an attorney was going to wreck me as a human. (As I’ve written before, my dad was pretty special.)
So with a sincere promise to my father, I switched majors and eventually headed off to law school.
My first day of law school is worth explaining. One of my professors was in the process of publishing her own textbook but for the meantime, her students had to trudge off to the law library and make photocopies of important cases for reading.
So there I was on my first day with a brand-spanking-new mechanical pencil surrounded by people that only wrote with Mont Blanc.
I was waiting in line behind another first year that was making copies at full resolution. I explained politely (really. politely.) that hitting the “reduce” button would let her copy two pages at once at nearly the same size.
She gave me her snarky baby-lawyer face and said, “I knew that.” Then she resumed copying one page at a time.
As I waited I realized there was another room with copiers (it was, after all, my first day) so I left for greener pastures. After finishing my copy project–using the “reduce” button–I passed the snarky 1L and, of course, she was now indeed using the reduce button.
I remember this experience vividly. My head started spinning and I had to sit down. My father’s words were ringing in my ears and I wondered exactly what I was getting myself into.
That silly moment was another crossroad in my life. I realized at that moment that I’d be dealing with people like that the rest of my life. I was a scholarship kid in a fancy private school.
I could have walked out the door at that moment and actually considered it for awhile. In the end I decided I was making too much out of a person having a bad day at a copy machine and started reading my cases for the next day.
So I spent three years in law school and was pretty good at it. I still had no idea what it meant to be a lawyer.
My third year of law school my dad got sick so I moved back home and took and externship with a federal judge in Los Angeles. I spent six months riding the bus from San Bernardino to Los Angeles and back every day. I spent my time in a working courtroom and I finally started to understand what it meant to be a lawyer.
Then I buried my father, finished law school, passed the bar, and on December 15, 1993 got sworn in. Having worked in the federal court and graduated with good grades, I had some pretty good opportunities.
At the end of every interview, I’d ask my prospective employer what they expected of me. Every single answer I received was some integer follows by the word “hours”.
Some wanted 1500 billable hours. Some wanted 2200 hours. Everybody wanted a slave.
There was one little firm that I’d done some work for while in law school. They offered me a job but the pay was less. They did promise to let me try cases.
The clincher though was my “what do you expect of me” question. Their answer: “We expect you to win.” I took the job and have now worked with the same people for 20 years.
As promised, I had my first trial in February 1994, less than two months after swearing in. Opposing counsel called me to tell me how he looked for my bar number and I didn’t have one yet.
I prepared for that four day trial like I was going to be in front of the U.S. Supreme Court. I crushed it.
It was a bench trial (meaning there was no jury) and when the judge asked me if I wanted to waive closing statements, I declined explaining it was my first trial and I was going to give a closing statement even if it meant doing so in the empty courtroom during the lunch hour.
The judge let me give my closing to actual people and then I won the case. I was hooked.