Let me tell you about a lawyer named Josh. Josh was not very good. Everybody said so, especially the partner who was his practice group leader. Eventually the firm redirected Josh’s career path. He moved on and started his own practice. Josh did very well on his own. He developed a great reputation in the profession practicing the same type of law that he was not good enough to practice at his old firm.
It took me eight years after I first realized that my life in law was not working for me until I was fully retired. It went like this:
2012: Best financial year ever. Worked incredibly hard in the last quarter. My hours in November and December were insane. I was so proud of myself. Got a huge slice of the compensation pie.
January 2013: Went to the doctor worried that I was not well enough to go on a trip to Australia for a meeting of our international association. Diagnosed with a thyroid issue. The doctor said it had nothing to do with the stress of my career. I did not believe him.
When asked about my complaints about the legal profession, I am forced to admit that back before I escaped the profession and became happy, I did in fact have some good days. Three of them. (Okay, I am kidding about that last bit. There were more good days than that.)
As a recession may be looming and Banks may be enforcing their mortgages, I thought that I would share this story from the recession in the early 1990’s.
There was a law firm that did volume mortgage remedy work for a Canadian Bank. A somewhat junior real estate lawyer who I will call Barbara managed the files. The work was somewhat routine but required precision and organizational skills, and Barbara did it well and earned a reasonable salary.
Some years ago I went off on a cruise and took the opportunity to have some renovations done at my house while I was away. George did a great job on the drywall, but when he sent me the invoice, he made one tiny little mistake. Instead of giving me the invoice for the construction work, he sent me an invoice for his “other business” which, unbeknownst to me, was producing racy videos. He was quite embarrassed when I asked him what a “panty teaser” was and what it had to do with my ceiling. I never did find out whether my house was the setting for his cinematographic masterpiece.
“Lawyers make wonderful (psychiatric) patients: they have excellent health insurance and they never get better.” Niles Crane on Frasier
As a completely unqualified, amateur mental health consultant, I have diagnosed myself with post-professional stress syndrome which I believe results from my forty-year legal career. My symptoms are not sleeping well and worrying too much, even in retirement when on any rational basis I have very little to worry about.
In 2014, I was pretty fed up with life and I decided to do something different. Since my years practicing law had not prepared me to take any really big risks, I decided to take a small one. I rented a cottage on Cape Cod for the summer and set out to prove that I could work from anywhere.
My father used to ask, “If you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?”
There are probably a million things that are wrong with that question, but his basic point is worth considering. He was asking why it is that some people believe that they know better concerning just about everything, but they do not generate any results from their supposed brilliance.
I said and thought a lot of stuff while I was practicing law. I believed every single bit of it. Over time I figured out that some of it was kind of dumb. Here are some of those gems:
When I practised law in Mississauga, Ont., our fees were cheap compared to the Toronto firms, and kind of expensive compared to firms in places like Guelph, Belleville and Kingston. I occasionally wondered whether my clients might prefer to deal with firms in smaller cities at lower rates. Then I would reassure myself that doing so would be terribly inconvenient for them and that they would rather pay more to deal with me.
Now I am not so sure.