Benefit

Dear Diary:

I’m helping a close family friend purchase a residential home. Naturally, as his “lawyer” friend, I have to read all of the offers, counter offers, addendum, title commitment letter, etc. and I’m also helping him through a property tax appraisal protest.

When his real estate agent forwarded me all of the paper work to look over, he wrote “here it is. You have alot of reading this weekend!” I remember thinking “goddammit, I want to drink this weekend.”

But when I opened up the attachments, all of the documents were under 20 pages. I remember thinking “that’s all??!”

Perhaps 20 pages is alot to a lay person (I would hope a real estate agent who handles all these contracts on a daily basis as part of his profession and counsels his clients to sign them would at least be familiar though I have found that hoping real estate agents would be competent is like hoping my dog could get a damn job and help pay rent), but to lawyers, reading 20 pages of form contracts takes as much effort as wiping our asses.

The one good thing about Biglaw is that it does somewhat prepare you (at least transactional attorneys, not so much litigation attorneys) for doing deals in the real world because you’ve done your time not only mulling over 150 page contracts, but fifty of those 150 page contracts (due diligence) or mulling over title commitment policies with a senior associate or partner when you were a little one. You are familiar with most legal terms in the contract and if you aren’t, you sure as hell can bluff your way through, especially when talking to the seller’s agent by saying, “well, when I was closing multi-million dollar deals, this is what I normally saw…” And it’s not just in this situation–it’s in many situations when I speak with business people and entrepreneurs while I network for my next opportunity.

Throughout my letters to you, mi caro diario, I have confessed to you that I did not enjoy BigLaw, I did not see it as my career goal, I found most BigLaw attorneys insufferable, and that I see being laid off (with a severance) as one of the best things that could have happened to me, but I will admit that I was able to benefit from my time in the slammer doing hard legal labor, which consisted of 60-70 hours of busy boring and unchallenging work, and that I am much more competent than most people I meet. I won’t claim that I’m more competent than my peers who worked in TinyLaw because they may have an expertise that I do not have because they worked in TinyLaw (e.g. a trial lawyer at a plaintiff’s firm has much more trial experience than most BigLaw trial lawyer) but I do believe that I at least sound pretty damn sophisticated and it comes from 1) being able to talk out of my ass flawlessly, and 2) working on sophisticated deals in BigLaw.

Now let’s not get mixed up and take a leap into arguing that I should have stayed in BigLaw or that my lay off was anything but a blessing. Let’s get one thing straight–BigLaw sucked balls and so did working with most other BigLaw lawyers. But, just because it sucked the life out of me through every facial orifice doesn’t mean I didn’t benefit from it.

So, besides a nice comfy paycheck, I at least got something else from doing time in the Big Slammer.

–milked BigLaw every way I could

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