I learn plenty of new words on Jeopardy nowadays, and while most of them are words related to specific fields like name of hand tools or types of gardens, sometimes a more commonly used term pops up that I am ashamed I didn't know before but excited to get to know (like making a new friend): wanderlust, which means a strong desire to travel. I guess I have that, as I often diverge off the beaten path when going for a run, delving into new areas just to see what's there, or drag MJ on long road trips to places she's hesitant about going to even when I myself don't really know what lays in store.
My working life, unfortunately, has somewhat mirrored my travel life: I've worked for various law firms now as a contract attorney in various cities (and now I work remotely due to the pandemic so I can be in any city or suburb or remote location that I want as long as I have WiFi). It's not ideal not to settle down with a law firm and be on the natural associate path, but that was the hand I dealt in 2008 when I first entered law school during a global financial crisis that hit the legal industry hard as well because many clients were big businesses that had to cut their costs, thus cutting their legal budget that went to law firms, who in turn had to reduce their hiring of new legal associates, and as I'm too familiar now I was at the bottom of the food chain and was part of the collateral damage. Probably not unlike the current state of the legal industry, where law firms have had to cut some hiring and reduce their summer associate classes.
Working for various law firms, though, does have some advantages: I get to work on different cases, most of which are pretty interesting and make headlines, maybe not on the front page of the New York Times but could be like a section in the "legal" section of the Wall Street Journal. When I get depressed about how certain industries are shrinking, businesses are being consolidated into mega corporations and technology firms like Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, etc. are taking over the world (Nividia is acquiring Arm Holdings from Softbank which goes to show the strength behind FAANG MAN, the new acronym on Wall Street adding Microsoft, Adobe, and Nivida to the traditional FAANG acronym stocks), I remind myself how many companies I've worked for that are NOT those companies and there are still big players in banks, real estate, telecommunications, automobile, pharmaceutical companies, may of whom I'd never heard of before working for them but have enough money to pay big-time law firms a lot of money to represent them in litigation or maybe a merger. I'm reminded how different a lawyer's job is, than say, a doctor or nurse or teacher, all very significant and reputable professions but professions that work on a personal level of addressing the patient's problem right then and there. Lawyers do work with personal clients like an individual employee who was wrongfully terminated or injured in an auto accident, but that's not where the big money is and not where most of my law school classmates and friends in the legal industry went on to represent: it's often the big companies that can afford multiple big law attorneys to represent them. Lawyers therefore represent the big companies and often have to be on meetings with leaders at those companies, or at least meetings with law firm partners and associates who are relaying the wishes of the clients. The patient who's suffering is not a patient with a beating heart, it's a company with a class action lawsuit on its hands, or needs to get approval of a merger to another company to survive. I have to admit it's somewhat exciting sometimes to know I'm part of something, and I'm getting paid for it; it is what I thought I would be doing as a child being asked "what do you want to be when you grow up?" I am a professional that is hired for a specific purpose, and I do my best to accomplish that purpose that I have been trained to do (in law school and in self-studying various languages) and submit my work to the client, and hope it's sufficient, or adjust my work based on the client's feedback. I hope to be able to continue working and that demand for my services will continue, as I have, in my opinion, one of the better jobs in the world. Not the best job, like being a $20 million per film actor/actress, or professional athlete paid to play a sport, but for a mediocre talent like myself who's OK at most things but not exceptional at anything and representative of the most common type of demographic on planet Earth (an Asian man), I'll take it.
I wrote this article after getting an update about a case that I had worked on this summer in light of Covid-19; the client's legal problems arose specifically because of the pandemic and because the demand for its services collapsed due to Covid-19; it really is a tough situation, and I feel bad for both sides of the litigation for trying to salvage something from a terrible situation, but it goes to show that I maybe in the right industry: litigation continues despite a global pandemic, and some cases business is even enhanced because of it. One of the quirks of being a lawyer.
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
No comments:
Post a Comment