A Brief Memoir

(NOTE: This post was supposed to be about my time down in New Orleans for Jazzfest. But after today, it's hard to even really think about it. Also, the following should be viewed in this context: (1)I have no personal life because I couldn't devote the energy for when it didn't work out.(2)I can't really ever relax. This past weekend should have been a good time, but I would get lost in thinking about different aspects of cases. My mom would ask, "Are you okay?" Truthfully, I would say, "Yeah, I'm just thinking." In the end, I'm a 25 year old parent to 20 people. What else should consume my thoughts?)

My day began sitting in court two-and-a-half hours waiting to be called for an interdiction hearing. Rather than listening and watching the other attorneys, I mostly just sat there thinking about all of the other work, I really needed to be doing. When the judge finally got around to my case, I barely said three words before he called opposing counsel and myself up and told us to do some more work and come back next week. He was being fair, but it's also a case into which I've put over a hundred hours or literally $10,000 worth of my time. So, it was a little frustrating to be told that I hadn't done enough yet and return when he deemed it sufficient.

I hadn't yet arrived to my office when I received a call from a client essentially telling me that his employer was getting ready to fire him, because he filed a discrimination complaint with the EEOC. I had warned him this might happen, but still it's a little tough to deal with when it is actually going. We worked out a plan of action which I think will diffuse that time bomb for a while.

When I got back, I checked my mail and calls. Everything seemed fairly calm, but I needed to get to lunch with my partners. I was hoping for some relaxation as we traded stories about our weekends. Instead, we got into a pretty solid discussion about which of our cases are the shittiest.

Returned from that only to have a deluge of phone calls from three clients wanting a whole bunch of crap done. While they babbled, I mostly thought about ways I could hang myself with my own phone cord. And then the real delight came at around 3:00.

A woman came into our offices to discuss a number of incidents. One involved her ex-husband molesting her, at the time, seven year old son. I read the police report which described how he used to sleep in the same bed with the child and touch his genitals. The kid was traumatized enough to fucking tell people that his father and him were going to have a baby together and drew stick-figure pictures of the three of them.

After I was done looking throught the horrific drawings, I went and visited with my new juvenile client. Since the last time I saw him, their house has had the electricity and phone turned off and the carpet is now covered with trash, giving the place a nice aroma of rotting food. The kid, who is 14, has no priors, but something is clearly now going on with him. A friend of his came in and grabbed the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers booksack that my client had been carrying. Something valuable was clearly in it, and my first thought was of the movie Fresh. And I wondered if he was a runner for some local.

I got back to the office, spent some time researching a hopeless argument, and then started typing this. I get to look forward to going home tonight to a cat that hates me right now, and then repeating all of this again tomorrow. It should be just as cheerful considering I'm doing a trial prep for a gun charge in Federal Court. My client is assuredly going to lose and get the maximum of 120 months. He's got 7 kids and a wife. But on the bright side, he's only 37, so at least he'll be out before 50.

My point in telling all of this is not to purely garner sympathy. But to let you know that for most of us young lawyers doing it ourselves, this is what every day is like. I work myself to the point of exhaustion, go to bed, get up, eat a pop-tart and go back to it. Every goddamned day.