I am now Imbarkd on a tempestuous Ocean from whence, perhaps, no friendly harbour is to be found.
-- George Washington to Burwell Bassett, June 19, 1775
Diary of My Disastrous Law Career: From Harvard to Heaven Help Me
Chapter 10
People sometimes ask me why I quit being a lawyer, or if I would ever try a different type of law/smaller firm/other variation on the theme of law. The short answers are: to save my life, and, if you don't like onions or flying you probably also don't like different onions or flying in a smaller plane. I worked at big firms, firms in different countries, in-house, and as a gig attorney, and found variations on misery and misogyny in every environment.
In this installment: my disastrous experiences as a gig attorney, after leaving Big Law and in-house (previous posts!).
When I was at Harvard Law School, I hoped that as a lawyer I could make a difference in the world, doing meaningful work with like-minded colleagues toward justice for people everywhere. Lofty dreams! I did not aspire to be a gig lawyer in a series of short, monotonous, dead-end assignments, with low pay, no insurance or benefits, and no respect. I did not even know that such non-job lawyer jobs existed. Yet, after leaving the misery, misogyny, and brutality of large law firms, and the misery, misogyny, and illegality of Arthur Andersen, there I was.
When I quit Andersen in late 2001 because my boss wanted me to break the law (see previous post), my law career was effectively over. Actually, looking back, it seems it was over before it even started, if you go back to my first post of these memoirs. But the Andersen job was the last full-time job I would have as a lawyer (or as anything but an entrepreneur, at least so far). I simply couldn't find another job after that. Recruiters said they didn't have any clients hiring after 9/11 and the resulting economic fallout. No firms I knew were hiring. Of course, I didn't even like being a lawyer; my law career had been mainly misery and misogyny, misogyny and misery. Maybe this low point was an opportunity for new developments? I turned 32 as the year was about to turn to 2002. What to do next?
I kept thinking about the idea I had had since age 19 to start a new kind of tour, beyond the architectural tours that existed: a chocolate tour. I also kept thinking about how to deepen my personal, romantic, and spiritual growth. I had a Mary Kay business, and I thought about growing that. And, I kept thinking about how to pay my bills and student loans; my bank account was empty, and I didn't have a clear picture of my future.
I decided to try the contract attorney world -- or, more accurately, fell into it when I didn't see other options. Being a contract attorney or gig or freelancing lawyer means being a lawyer who doesn't have a set job but who is brought in by law firms through a staffing agency for an hourly wage, with no benefits, when the firms need extra help. This usually happens for short-term low-level projects like document review, which means looking at a database of document after document on a computer screen, flagging those documents that are relevant to the project. Junior associates used to do this work, but contract attorneys are cheaper.
This is the law industry's version of the gig-ification or Uber-ization of work, where the gig worker works cheaply and on demand, and pays the cost of doing business, with no control over the wealth created, unlike in entrepreneurship. This is what some call the "servitude bubble," which I have come to think of as a trend of robotification, and I don't like it. I like liberty, empathy, opportunity, and development of rather than stifling of humanity. I've already told you I'm a radical! Ok, back to my disastrous law career:
I knew that there would be no benefits like insurance with such gigs. I discovered as well that as a contract lawyer, you weren't invited to the office parties, some of the "real" lawyers wouldn't talk to you or looked down on you as being a lesser lawyer, many of the other contract lawyers were bitter and hostile, the work was deadeningly monotonous, and there was no future or career path. The most I was paid during this time was $40 an hour, and the least was $20 an hour. (Before taxes.) That's not to say there wasn't any money in the contract lawyer world: large law firms saved lots of money because they didn't have to hire full-time lawyers. And, I know a former lawyer who founded a legal staffing/outsourcing firm and sold it to a larger firm for several million dollars. The contract lawyers themselves made very little money, however. I was the only contract attorney I knew who'd gone to Harvard; most I met had not gone to top tier schools, though this apparently changed somewhat later.
The years 2001 - 2005 were a disaster in terms of my dead law career. Some weeks and months I had a gig, some weeks and months I did not. Still, I tried to be grateful for the chance to find my next chance.
Those years were also difficult in terms of housing. After I left Andersen, I left my 51st-floor anti-stalker apartment, and moved in with my truly amazing mother. I slept on the sofabed in her perfectly petite condo in Chicago's Gold Coast neighborhood, cluttering her corridor and living room with my boxes. The first Chicago apartment I had by myself, during Lawyer Jobs 3 and 4 before moving to the secure anti-stalker building in River North, was also on the Gold Coast, so that I could be close to Mom, and close to work. I rarely saw my mother while working as a Big Law associate, and now I saw her more than either of us expected.
After a while, I found a super sweet roommate with a 2-bedroom condo in River East, near Navy Pier, where I had a miniscule bedroom for $800 per month. I had no extra money for storage, and had sold or given away most though not all of my furniture and other possessions, but still had art, books, clothes, and items from Europe and America, plus special pieces like a brass lamp from childhood, so my bedroom was basically a bedroom/storage space.
After another while, I moved to a small Gold Coast studio for $800 a month which had a beautiful view looking north over the southern end of Lincoln Park and part of Lake Michigan. The place also had a semi-working kitchen (the smoke detector went off if I turned on the oven, for example), concrete walls on which I couldn't hang pictures (the superintendent laughed at my plight and offered to drill holes at $50 each; I figured I could buy my own drill for less but never did), a nice daytime doorman but an evil nighttime doorman (evil to me, not to people like the two drunk men he once let up to my door), and a faulty elevator. One night the elevator shut down with me in it; I found myself trapped somewhere around the 13th floor, on my way to the 20th floor where I lived. I shouted for help, and pressed the alarm, but evidently no one heard me, including the superintendent who lived on the first floor. I was worried that the elevator would fall all the way down, as the cables jerked and dropped the elevator a floor and a half or so. It was around midnight, and my cellphone was almost dead, but the phone allowed me to call 911. Firemen came to my rescue, wonderful firemen, who pried the doors open, grabbed my arm, and pulled me up to the floor above. While they were berating the superintendent for not waking up when I pressed the alarm, I walked up the stairs to the 20th floor and collapsed into bed (really a futon mattress on the floor, as I had sold my bed).
Moreover, there just didn't seem to be enough room in my little apartment for my little collection of possessions and boxes of books and me. I had difficulty organizing the space, so this apartment -- like my bedroom in the shared apartment I had just left -- was also basically a bedroom/storeroom.
Happily, I was not injured in the stuck elevator incident. And, luckily, my default state is one of radiant health. I say luckily, because I had no health or dental insurance, which means being your own doctor, and practicing at-home dentistry.
On the positive side, I embarked on a program of personal growth, and through trial and error (and error and error) developed a successful dating program for myself (I needed it when trying to re-enter the dating world after my divorce and remembering I had never really known how to date before my marriage) which I turned into seminars and a book, called Romance Around the Corner: 8 Steps Toward Attracting the Man of Your Dreams and Having Fun in the Process, in early 2005, promoting this for around a year. And yes, I did attract the man of my dreams; we dated for over a decade, and today we are good friends. One of the many reasons I fell in love with him is that he always accepted me as I am, and believed in my dreams right along with me.
Another positive: this phase led up to late 2005, which is when I started Chicago Chocolate Tours, the business of my dreams. I expanded the business to 4 cities and 50 team members, and I closed the business in 2014 -- because Amazon and Groupon stole it by selling cheap tickets to a low-quality or fly-by-night impostor tour using my name, trademarks, and other intellectual property. I'm getting a bit ahead of my story, however.
The years 2001 - 2005 were painful in many ways, and filled with hard work that didn't stop after '05 when I was promoting multiple businesses to cobble together a living and to see what had the best chance of sticking. Yet, aside from my disastrous law career (or in part because it was so disastrous), the inner work that I did during that time to develop myself, and the outer work or what's now called "hustling" that I did to develop my business skills, led to positive future chapters, and I had what you might think was a surprisingly positive attitude during much of this time. Don't think everything was happily-ever-after after this time however; my wheel of fortune continued to spin, and my law background proved sometimes helpful, sometimes the source of ongoing dismay.
Here are some gig lawyer episodes for you:
Post-Lawyer Job 5, or, Contract Lawyer Gigs, Chicago
Island of misfit toys
After I quit Lawyer Job 5 in late 2001 because I wouldn't break the law, and firms weren't hiring but I needed income, I contacted an agency that placed lawyers into contract gigs. Soon, I was part of a team of three contract lawyers in a small windowless conference room at a large law firm in an office building located in one of the buildings between Laywer Job 3 and Lawyer Job 4; all were on the same downtown Chicago street. Our job was to review electronic documents in a computer database, to see which were relevant to the project. The other two contract lawyers were nice, and the partner and associate running the project were nice. The work was boring and relatively mindless, and the other two contract attorneys and I would chit chat a bit sometimes. Sometimes this alleviated my claustrophobia. Sometimes this made it worse. One of my contract co-workers commented that contract attorneys were like the misfit toys in the old Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer children's animation, the defective toys -- like the boat that didn't float, or the spotted elephant -- that couldn't be given to children on Christmas and had to go to the island of misfit toys. Being a misfit toy wasn't what I had in mind at Harvard Law School.
I decided to see if there was anything I could make of this job. (Spoiler alert: there wasn't.) I got to know the partner a little bit, and he suggested that since I used to do m&a and corporate finance at my old firm, I should help two of his partners with a corporate finance deal they were concluding, at night after I had finished my work each day on the project I was hired for. This sounded like an opportunity worth exploring, so I said yes. It was clear the moment I met his partners that they didn't want my help; perhaps they felt forced into saying yes because a powerful partner told them to. Perhaps they resented having a contract attorney or any outsider inserted onto their team. I took a look at the deal, asked a few questions to get up to speed, and was met with snarls and sneers. For instance, I asked if we needed to repeat basically the same information in two places as one of the documents did, and wouldn't it be cleaner and less susceptible to misunderstanding or future litigation if we deleted the repetition and kept things streamlined? This idea was met with angry no's, and that was that. I realized I was working under unusual conditions (and for free) for people who didn't want me, I didn't seem able to win them over, and so I stopped, stuck to the staring-at-a-screen project I was hired for, and that was that. So much for the old idea of "getting your foot in the door" and taking any job and moving up in an organization. That never happened for me.
As I seem to have given up on keeping secret the names of some of the firms where I've worked, perhaps I'll just add here that this firm, where again the (male) partner and (male) associate running the project I officially worked on were nice to me as a short-term contract attorney and to the other two (female) contract attorneys, the firm was later sued for discriminating against women; a woman partner initiated a $200 million federal class-action suit. The case settled, and she started her own firm, putting policies into place to make the environment friendly for women and men, as I did when I started businesses. I read about the case in Philadelphia after I opened Philadelphia Chocolate Tours, and hired her firm when I needed local legal work. She was an amazing lawyer.
If you've read previous posts, you know about the institutionalized gender bias I experienced as a law firm associate, and that many women in Big Law have faced and continue to face the same scenarios. What if all women lawyers joined class-action suits for justice? What if all people who work for a living but don't make a living wage or have insurance or control the fruits of their labor (most people in the US and on the planet) banded together so that the oligarchy/patriarchy cannot control and rig the game? This article on the state of contract lawyers and the state of what I think of as end-stage extractive corporate America contains interesting thoughts and links regarding the serious downsides of our current economy.
No exit
At my next gig, I again found myself in a windowless conference room at a large law firm, again on the same street, again with two women coworkers. One was sweet, one was a bully. The sweet one had had an almost unthinkably terrible experience at a prior in-house counsel job. As seems to be so often the case, she left the job, while her male tormentor kept his position. So there she was: an underpaid contract attorney in a windowless conference room.
I don't know the background of the bully, but I couldn't stand her bullying. She picked on me for being skinny. She was skinny too. The whole thing made no sense. I told her to stop, but she didn't. I didn't want the conference room to feel like the Sartre play No Exit, in which characters are locked in a room with each other and torture each other verbally, so I mentioned the bullying to the junior partner running the project. He decided to replace her with a new contract lawyer, so from one day to the next she was gone.
She was replaced by a male contract attorney, a very negative individual. I felt sorry for my coworkers, and tried not to feel sorry for myself.
Let there be light
An interesting meditative development occurred during this gig: I was terribly sad again one day in the drab and functional conference room at the "No exit" gig above, bored, claustrophobic, feeling this was a waste of my time and life, and trying not to cry. Suddenly I noticed that even though there was nothing beautiful about the conference room -- no art, no nice furniture, no windows -- the way the fluorescent light glinted off of the metal file cabinet, and the way my soul could perceive the sparkle through my eyes, was a lovely example of the spiritual and the physical in harmony, and of God being present in everything and everyone and everywhere if only we will look.
Maybe you think that's unusual, but I have always been spiritually-minded; for example, I conducted my own research and study of religions of the world at age 7 (seven), to find out if one was right, and decided they all pointed to the garden of God once you got past the dogma. I meditated as a child before I knew the word for it. You'll remember some of my child genius experiences if you read previous posts, and religion and spirituality were also on my mind as a kid because my father was a Jewish athiest and my mother is sort of Episcopalian, and we kids could make up our own minds. When I was a stressed-out overworked associate in Big Law, I was frustrated that I never found a way to make enough time for my spiritual life. At this sad gig as a contract lawyer in a windowless conference room, I meditated on light and reflections as God, noticed glints and sparkles everywhere, and thought positive thoughts of connection and unity while doing mindless work that today a computer does. Today still, whenever I see a reflection or sparkle, including in my eye or yours, I remember to see God.
Crabs in a bucket
Have you heard the saying that crabs in a bucket will try to pull an escaping crab back into the bucket, meaning that they will all stay captured and ultimately be killed together? The idea is that negative people will pull each other down, and will try to stop anyone from making a positive change, even a life-saving change. I don't know if crabs really do this, but I met some contract attorneys who tried.
At this gig, there were about a dozen of us, working at computer screens in an open atrium. This was a smaller firm that specialized in litigation (and it was on a different street). As a group, we didn't have team spirit, so much as crabs-in-bucket spirit. For example, when one of the other contract attorneys announced that he had an upcoming job interview for an associate attorney position at a big law firm, others didn't seem excited that he was excited, but were perhaps jealous. He asked me for pointers, as I had worked at big law firms, and I was happy to give him tips. (Even though I didn't want to go back to a big firm, he wanted to try it, and it was his goal, not mine, so why shouldn't I encourage him?) When he didn't get the job, some others seemed to have a "Schadenfreude" feeling; they gave the impression of being glad that he was sad, glad that he didn't get what he wanted.
Other contract attorneys also confided in me about their stories, as some had done at previous gigs. I became an unofficial and discreet counselor, listening ear, and friend to some, while there were a few in our group who seemed to hate me more every time someone befriended me. The crabs-in-bucket contingent turned their Schadenfreude to me when I self-published my book Romance Around the Corner; one left a negative review that read as if she hadn't read the book but just wanted to make a personal attack. Amazon took down the review.
The idea of creating a positive environment for everyone in an organization had already been in my mind, inspired by the numerous negative professional environments I had already experienced. This firm seemed to offer a generally positive environment to the "real" employees, some of whom were completely nice to us gig workers, while some perhaps just didn't really know how to treat us, expressing different degrees of surprise or dismay if they saw us in the kitchen, elevator, or walking through the hallway, or anywhere except at our screens. The idea lodged in my mind that maybe one day I could make sure not just a core group but every person my organization touched could come away feeling uplifted.
Double life
While I was at the above gig, I was invited to join then Illinois State Treasurer Judy Baar Topinka's women's board. The way this came about: I kept in touch with two of the women senior partners from the big prestigious firm where I was an associate at Lawyer Job 3 (you may remember from a previous post that of 100 senior partners, 6 were women), and they kindly tried to help me where they could; one helped me join her on this board, where I was one of the youngest members and met highly accomplished women who were well known in Chicago's business and legal communities. It was exciting to brainstorm with the Treasurer and other members about projects that could help people throughout the state of Illinois.
I felt disrespect at my day job, and then I would go to a board meeting where highly respected people treated me with high levels of respect too, and then I would go back to my day job and be treated as a lowly gig worker. It was a weird double-life feeling. I was the same person, treated differently in different roles. It reminded me of having friends in 4th grade, until my parents divorced (I'm glad they did) and I had to go to a new school (that was the part I didn't like) and kids at my new school bullied me. I was the same person. I knew the problem wasn't me, it was them.
Ghostwriter
When the economy was booming, recruiters called me. After 9/11, they didn't. I called one, and she said she had no jobs. I asked her if she had any work-from-home jobs, or any other strange little jobs that she couldn't fill. She said: Funny you should ask. She told me that she had a large law firm client who couldn't find any of their own associates to write case summaries for a new website they were creating, because it wasn't billable and there was no byline. I said it sounded perfect. She set up the interview, I met the partner, and he seemed nice if cranky. He kept reiterating that I would not get my name on the case blurbs or anywhere on the website. I kept replying that this was fine, because it wasn't my goal to broadcast that I was doing this, as I was known to be focusing on starting entrepreneurial endeavors at that time. Not that I wanted to hide anything, but I was happy to keep my business ideas at the forefront.
I worked hard to summarize the first cases I was assigned. They were due by 7:00 am on a specified day, and I emailed them to the partner just before that time. Just after that time, he called me to shout at me for not sending in my work. Pause. I said I had emailed him the work several minutes before. Oh, he said, and hung up. We actually quickly developed a good working relationship; he came to see that he could depend on me to do the job well and on time.
Writing the blurbs was somewhat interesting, more so than staring at a screen, because it involved reading and thinking. There was less work, and it paid less, and there were still no benefits or career path; this wasn't a job anyone in America could live on no matter where you lived, but a supplement. At the time, it was fine, for what it was: a segue out of the law.
Between my contract attorney years and today, many contract lawyer jobs have been replaced by outsourcing to India, and by Artificial Intelligence. (And I've been told that the case summaries at the ghostwriter gig are now written by interns who do it more slowly and not as well.) Whatever your thoughts are on outsourcing and AI (or interns), what would you have done in my shoes during this phase of my disastrous law career? Would you have tried to continue as a contract attorney in a dead-end situation, until a robot took the last gig? Then what? Would you have quit the law long before I did?
Still to come: how law helped and hurt in entrepreneurship, what Harvard Law School was really like, more!
To be continued....
Valerie Beck
-- George Washington to Burwell Bassett, June 19, 1775
Diary of My Disastrous Law Career: From Harvard to Heaven Help Me
Chapter 10
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| Graduation day: Harvard Law School, June 6, 1996 |
People sometimes ask me why I quit being a lawyer, or if I would ever try a different type of law/smaller firm/other variation on the theme of law. The short answers are: to save my life, and, if you don't like onions or flying you probably also don't like different onions or flying in a smaller plane. I worked at big firms, firms in different countries, in-house, and as a gig attorney, and found variations on misery and misogyny in every environment.
In this installment: my disastrous experiences as a gig attorney, after leaving Big Law and in-house (previous posts!).
When I was at Harvard Law School, I hoped that as a lawyer I could make a difference in the world, doing meaningful work with like-minded colleagues toward justice for people everywhere. Lofty dreams! I did not aspire to be a gig lawyer in a series of short, monotonous, dead-end assignments, with low pay, no insurance or benefits, and no respect. I did not even know that such non-job lawyer jobs existed. Yet, after leaving the misery, misogyny, and brutality of large law firms, and the misery, misogyny, and illegality of Arthur Andersen, there I was.
When I quit Andersen in late 2001 because my boss wanted me to break the law (see previous post), my law career was effectively over. Actually, looking back, it seems it was over before it even started, if you go back to my first post of these memoirs. But the Andersen job was the last full-time job I would have as a lawyer (or as anything but an entrepreneur, at least so far). I simply couldn't find another job after that. Recruiters said they didn't have any clients hiring after 9/11 and the resulting economic fallout. No firms I knew were hiring. Of course, I didn't even like being a lawyer; my law career had been mainly misery and misogyny, misogyny and misery. Maybe this low point was an opportunity for new developments? I turned 32 as the year was about to turn to 2002. What to do next?
I kept thinking about the idea I had had since age 19 to start a new kind of tour, beyond the architectural tours that existed: a chocolate tour. I also kept thinking about how to deepen my personal, romantic, and spiritual growth. I had a Mary Kay business, and I thought about growing that. And, I kept thinking about how to pay my bills and student loans; my bank account was empty, and I didn't have a clear picture of my future.
I decided to try the contract attorney world -- or, more accurately, fell into it when I didn't see other options. Being a contract attorney or gig or freelancing lawyer means being a lawyer who doesn't have a set job but who is brought in by law firms through a staffing agency for an hourly wage, with no benefits, when the firms need extra help. This usually happens for short-term low-level projects like document review, which means looking at a database of document after document on a computer screen, flagging those documents that are relevant to the project. Junior associates used to do this work, but contract attorneys are cheaper.
This is the law industry's version of the gig-ification or Uber-ization of work, where the gig worker works cheaply and on demand, and pays the cost of doing business, with no control over the wealth created, unlike in entrepreneurship. This is what some call the "servitude bubble," which I have come to think of as a trend of robotification, and I don't like it. I like liberty, empathy, opportunity, and development of rather than stifling of humanity. I've already told you I'm a radical! Ok, back to my disastrous law career:
I knew that there would be no benefits like insurance with such gigs. I discovered as well that as a contract lawyer, you weren't invited to the office parties, some of the "real" lawyers wouldn't talk to you or looked down on you as being a lesser lawyer, many of the other contract lawyers were bitter and hostile, the work was deadeningly monotonous, and there was no future or career path. The most I was paid during this time was $40 an hour, and the least was $20 an hour. (Before taxes.) That's not to say there wasn't any money in the contract lawyer world: large law firms saved lots of money because they didn't have to hire full-time lawyers. And, I know a former lawyer who founded a legal staffing/outsourcing firm and sold it to a larger firm for several million dollars. The contract lawyers themselves made very little money, however. I was the only contract attorney I knew who'd gone to Harvard; most I met had not gone to top tier schools, though this apparently changed somewhat later.
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| Planning to go onward and upward as I went outbound from Harvard Law School, I ended up facing misery and misogyny in Big Law, in-house, and as a gig lawyer. Instead of onward and upward: graveward and downward. But also, happily, inward. |
The years 2001 - 2005 were a disaster in terms of my dead law career. Some weeks and months I had a gig, some weeks and months I did not. Still, I tried to be grateful for the chance to find my next chance.
Those years were also difficult in terms of housing. After I left Andersen, I left my 51st-floor anti-stalker apartment, and moved in with my truly amazing mother. I slept on the sofabed in her perfectly petite condo in Chicago's Gold Coast neighborhood, cluttering her corridor and living room with my boxes. The first Chicago apartment I had by myself, during Lawyer Jobs 3 and 4 before moving to the secure anti-stalker building in River North, was also on the Gold Coast, so that I could be close to Mom, and close to work. I rarely saw my mother while working as a Big Law associate, and now I saw her more than either of us expected.
After a while, I found a super sweet roommate with a 2-bedroom condo in River East, near Navy Pier, where I had a miniscule bedroom for $800 per month. I had no extra money for storage, and had sold or given away most though not all of my furniture and other possessions, but still had art, books, clothes, and items from Europe and America, plus special pieces like a brass lamp from childhood, so my bedroom was basically a bedroom/storage space.
After another while, I moved to a small Gold Coast studio for $800 a month which had a beautiful view looking north over the southern end of Lincoln Park and part of Lake Michigan. The place also had a semi-working kitchen (the smoke detector went off if I turned on the oven, for example), concrete walls on which I couldn't hang pictures (the superintendent laughed at my plight and offered to drill holes at $50 each; I figured I could buy my own drill for less but never did), a nice daytime doorman but an evil nighttime doorman (evil to me, not to people like the two drunk men he once let up to my door), and a faulty elevator. One night the elevator shut down with me in it; I found myself trapped somewhere around the 13th floor, on my way to the 20th floor where I lived. I shouted for help, and pressed the alarm, but evidently no one heard me, including the superintendent who lived on the first floor. I was worried that the elevator would fall all the way down, as the cables jerked and dropped the elevator a floor and a half or so. It was around midnight, and my cellphone was almost dead, but the phone allowed me to call 911. Firemen came to my rescue, wonderful firemen, who pried the doors open, grabbed my arm, and pulled me up to the floor above. While they were berating the superintendent for not waking up when I pressed the alarm, I walked up the stairs to the 20th floor and collapsed into bed (really a futon mattress on the floor, as I had sold my bed).
Moreover, there just didn't seem to be enough room in my little apartment for my little collection of possessions and boxes of books and me. I had difficulty organizing the space, so this apartment -- like my bedroom in the shared apartment I had just left -- was also basically a bedroom/storeroom.
Happily, I was not injured in the stuck elevator incident. And, luckily, my default state is one of radiant health. I say luckily, because I had no health or dental insurance, which means being your own doctor, and practicing at-home dentistry.
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| The studio apartment where I lived for a short while in the 2000s was inside the white building on the right. This photo is not vintage; I took it last year. I hope the faulty elevator in the building is no longer vintage either. |
On the positive side, I embarked on a program of personal growth, and through trial and error (and error and error) developed a successful dating program for myself (I needed it when trying to re-enter the dating world after my divorce and remembering I had never really known how to date before my marriage) which I turned into seminars and a book, called Romance Around the Corner: 8 Steps Toward Attracting the Man of Your Dreams and Having Fun in the Process, in early 2005, promoting this for around a year. And yes, I did attract the man of my dreams; we dated for over a decade, and today we are good friends. One of the many reasons I fell in love with him is that he always accepted me as I am, and believed in my dreams right along with me.
Another positive: this phase led up to late 2005, which is when I started Chicago Chocolate Tours, the business of my dreams. I expanded the business to 4 cities and 50 team members, and I closed the business in 2014 -- because Amazon and Groupon stole it by selling cheap tickets to a low-quality or fly-by-night impostor tour using my name, trademarks, and other intellectual property. I'm getting a bit ahead of my story, however.
The years 2001 - 2005 were painful in many ways, and filled with hard work that didn't stop after '05 when I was promoting multiple businesses to cobble together a living and to see what had the best chance of sticking. Yet, aside from my disastrous law career (or in part because it was so disastrous), the inner work that I did during that time to develop myself, and the outer work or what's now called "hustling" that I did to develop my business skills, led to positive future chapters, and I had what you might think was a surprisingly positive attitude during much of this time. Don't think everything was happily-ever-after after this time however; my wheel of fortune continued to spin, and my law background proved sometimes helpful, sometimes the source of ongoing dismay.
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| Speaking of apartments: I lived in a cute little apartment in this Beacon Hill building during my 2nd and 3rd years at Harvard Law School. This is mainly where I wrote my third-year paper, on copyright in the age of the Internet, a cutting-edge topic in 1996! |
Here are some gig lawyer episodes for you:
Post-Lawyer Job 5, or, Contract Lawyer Gigs, Chicago
Island of misfit toys
After I quit Lawyer Job 5 in late 2001 because I wouldn't break the law, and firms weren't hiring but I needed income, I contacted an agency that placed lawyers into contract gigs. Soon, I was part of a team of three contract lawyers in a small windowless conference room at a large law firm in an office building located in one of the buildings between Laywer Job 3 and Lawyer Job 4; all were on the same downtown Chicago street. Our job was to review electronic documents in a computer database, to see which were relevant to the project. The other two contract lawyers were nice, and the partner and associate running the project were nice. The work was boring and relatively mindless, and the other two contract attorneys and I would chit chat a bit sometimes. Sometimes this alleviated my claustrophobia. Sometimes this made it worse. One of my contract co-workers commented that contract attorneys were like the misfit toys in the old Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer children's animation, the defective toys -- like the boat that didn't float, or the spotted elephant -- that couldn't be given to children on Christmas and had to go to the island of misfit toys. Being a misfit toy wasn't what I had in mind at Harvard Law School.
I decided to see if there was anything I could make of this job. (Spoiler alert: there wasn't.) I got to know the partner a little bit, and he suggested that since I used to do m&a and corporate finance at my old firm, I should help two of his partners with a corporate finance deal they were concluding, at night after I had finished my work each day on the project I was hired for. This sounded like an opportunity worth exploring, so I said yes. It was clear the moment I met his partners that they didn't want my help; perhaps they felt forced into saying yes because a powerful partner told them to. Perhaps they resented having a contract attorney or any outsider inserted onto their team. I took a look at the deal, asked a few questions to get up to speed, and was met with snarls and sneers. For instance, I asked if we needed to repeat basically the same information in two places as one of the documents did, and wouldn't it be cleaner and less susceptible to misunderstanding or future litigation if we deleted the repetition and kept things streamlined? This idea was met with angry no's, and that was that. I realized I was working under unusual conditions (and for free) for people who didn't want me, I didn't seem able to win them over, and so I stopped, stuck to the staring-at-a-screen project I was hired for, and that was that. So much for the old idea of "getting your foot in the door" and taking any job and moving up in an organization. That never happened for me.
As I seem to have given up on keeping secret the names of some of the firms where I've worked, perhaps I'll just add here that this firm, where again the (male) partner and (male) associate running the project I officially worked on were nice to me as a short-term contract attorney and to the other two (female) contract attorneys, the firm was later sued for discriminating against women; a woman partner initiated a $200 million federal class-action suit. The case settled, and she started her own firm, putting policies into place to make the environment friendly for women and men, as I did when I started businesses. I read about the case in Philadelphia after I opened Philadelphia Chocolate Tours, and hired her firm when I needed local legal work. She was an amazing lawyer.
If you've read previous posts, you know about the institutionalized gender bias I experienced as a law firm associate, and that many women in Big Law have faced and continue to face the same scenarios. What if all women lawyers joined class-action suits for justice? What if all people who work for a living but don't make a living wage or have insurance or control the fruits of their labor (most people in the US and on the planet) banded together so that the oligarchy/patriarchy cannot control and rig the game? This article on the state of contract lawyers and the state of what I think of as end-stage extractive corporate America contains interesting thoughts and links regarding the serious downsides of our current economy.
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| It's ridiculous even to explore whether being a contract lawyer was my ikigai. This sad phase of my disastrous law career did however give me a bit of time to think more about what my ikigai could be. |
No exit
At my next gig, I again found myself in a windowless conference room at a large law firm, again on the same street, again with two women coworkers. One was sweet, one was a bully. The sweet one had had an almost unthinkably terrible experience at a prior in-house counsel job. As seems to be so often the case, she left the job, while her male tormentor kept his position. So there she was: an underpaid contract attorney in a windowless conference room.
I don't know the background of the bully, but I couldn't stand her bullying. She picked on me for being skinny. She was skinny too. The whole thing made no sense. I told her to stop, but she didn't. I didn't want the conference room to feel like the Sartre play No Exit, in which characters are locked in a room with each other and torture each other verbally, so I mentioned the bullying to the junior partner running the project. He decided to replace her with a new contract lawyer, so from one day to the next she was gone.
She was replaced by a male contract attorney, a very negative individual. I felt sorry for my coworkers, and tried not to feel sorry for myself.
Let there be light
An interesting meditative development occurred during this gig: I was terribly sad again one day in the drab and functional conference room at the "No exit" gig above, bored, claustrophobic, feeling this was a waste of my time and life, and trying not to cry. Suddenly I noticed that even though there was nothing beautiful about the conference room -- no art, no nice furniture, no windows -- the way the fluorescent light glinted off of the metal file cabinet, and the way my soul could perceive the sparkle through my eyes, was a lovely example of the spiritual and the physical in harmony, and of God being present in everything and everyone and everywhere if only we will look.
Maybe you think that's unusual, but I have always been spiritually-minded; for example, I conducted my own research and study of religions of the world at age 7 (seven), to find out if one was right, and decided they all pointed to the garden of God once you got past the dogma. I meditated as a child before I knew the word for it. You'll remember some of my child genius experiences if you read previous posts, and religion and spirituality were also on my mind as a kid because my father was a Jewish athiest and my mother is sort of Episcopalian, and we kids could make up our own minds. When I was a stressed-out overworked associate in Big Law, I was frustrated that I never found a way to make enough time for my spiritual life. At this sad gig as a contract lawyer in a windowless conference room, I meditated on light and reflections as God, noticed glints and sparkles everywhere, and thought positive thoughts of connection and unity while doing mindless work that today a computer does. Today still, whenever I see a reflection or sparkle, including in my eye or yours, I remember to see God.
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| Autumn light at home sweet Harvard. |
Crabs in a bucket
Have you heard the saying that crabs in a bucket will try to pull an escaping crab back into the bucket, meaning that they will all stay captured and ultimately be killed together? The idea is that negative people will pull each other down, and will try to stop anyone from making a positive change, even a life-saving change. I don't know if crabs really do this, but I met some contract attorneys who tried.
At this gig, there were about a dozen of us, working at computer screens in an open atrium. This was a smaller firm that specialized in litigation (and it was on a different street). As a group, we didn't have team spirit, so much as crabs-in-bucket spirit. For example, when one of the other contract attorneys announced that he had an upcoming job interview for an associate attorney position at a big law firm, others didn't seem excited that he was excited, but were perhaps jealous. He asked me for pointers, as I had worked at big law firms, and I was happy to give him tips. (Even though I didn't want to go back to a big firm, he wanted to try it, and it was his goal, not mine, so why shouldn't I encourage him?) When he didn't get the job, some others seemed to have a "Schadenfreude" feeling; they gave the impression of being glad that he was sad, glad that he didn't get what he wanted.
Other contract attorneys also confided in me about their stories, as some had done at previous gigs. I became an unofficial and discreet counselor, listening ear, and friend to some, while there were a few in our group who seemed to hate me more every time someone befriended me. The crabs-in-bucket contingent turned their Schadenfreude to me when I self-published my book Romance Around the Corner; one left a negative review that read as if she hadn't read the book but just wanted to make a personal attack. Amazon took down the review.
The idea of creating a positive environment for everyone in an organization had already been in my mind, inspired by the numerous negative professional environments I had already experienced. This firm seemed to offer a generally positive environment to the "real" employees, some of whom were completely nice to us gig workers, while some perhaps just didn't really know how to treat us, expressing different degrees of surprise or dismay if they saw us in the kitchen, elevator, or walking through the hallway, or anywhere except at our screens. The idea lodged in my mind that maybe one day I could make sure not just a core group but every person my organization touched could come away feeling uplifted.
Double life
While I was at the above gig, I was invited to join then Illinois State Treasurer Judy Baar Topinka's women's board. The way this came about: I kept in touch with two of the women senior partners from the big prestigious firm where I was an associate at Lawyer Job 3 (you may remember from a previous post that of 100 senior partners, 6 were women), and they kindly tried to help me where they could; one helped me join her on this board, where I was one of the youngest members and met highly accomplished women who were well known in Chicago's business and legal communities. It was exciting to brainstorm with the Treasurer and other members about projects that could help people throughout the state of Illinois.
I felt disrespect at my day job, and then I would go to a board meeting where highly respected people treated me with high levels of respect too, and then I would go back to my day job and be treated as a lowly gig worker. It was a weird double-life feeling. I was the same person, treated differently in different roles. It reminded me of having friends in 4th grade, until my parents divorced (I'm glad they did) and I had to go to a new school (that was the part I didn't like) and kids at my new school bullied me. I was the same person. I knew the problem wasn't me, it was them.
Ghostwriter
When the economy was booming, recruiters called me. After 9/11, they didn't. I called one, and she said she had no jobs. I asked her if she had any work-from-home jobs, or any other strange little jobs that she couldn't fill. She said: Funny you should ask. She told me that she had a large law firm client who couldn't find any of their own associates to write case summaries for a new website they were creating, because it wasn't billable and there was no byline. I said it sounded perfect. She set up the interview, I met the partner, and he seemed nice if cranky. He kept reiterating that I would not get my name on the case blurbs or anywhere on the website. I kept replying that this was fine, because it wasn't my goal to broadcast that I was doing this, as I was known to be focusing on starting entrepreneurial endeavors at that time. Not that I wanted to hide anything, but I was happy to keep my business ideas at the forefront.
I worked hard to summarize the first cases I was assigned. They were due by 7:00 am on a specified day, and I emailed them to the partner just before that time. Just after that time, he called me to shout at me for not sending in my work. Pause. I said I had emailed him the work several minutes before. Oh, he said, and hung up. We actually quickly developed a good working relationship; he came to see that he could depend on me to do the job well and on time.
Writing the blurbs was somewhat interesting, more so than staring at a screen, because it involved reading and thinking. There was less work, and it paid less, and there were still no benefits or career path; this wasn't a job anyone in America could live on no matter where you lived, but a supplement. At the time, it was fine, for what it was: a segue out of the law.
Between my contract attorney years and today, many contract lawyer jobs have been replaced by outsourcing to India, and by Artificial Intelligence. (And I've been told that the case summaries at the ghostwriter gig are now written by interns who do it more slowly and not as well.) Whatever your thoughts are on outsourcing and AI (or interns), what would you have done in my shoes during this phase of my disastrous law career? Would you have tried to continue as a contract attorney in a dead-end situation, until a robot took the last gig? Then what? Would you have quit the law long before I did?
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| At a conference to speak on alternative careers for lawyers: Harvard Law School, April 6 -7, 2018, in front of a picture of the late Professor Detlev Vagts, a kind and brilliant soul for whom I was a research assistant when I was an HLS student. |
Still to come: how law helped and hurt in entrepreneurship, what Harvard Law School was really like, more!
To be continued....
Valerie Beck
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