Work
I get up at about 6:15 to be at work by 8:30 -- I'm a bit of a slow starter, and I don't exactly live near where I work. I work, maybe take a short lunch break, and lately have left between 8 and 9pm to get home between 9 and 10. Maybe I eat a halfway decent dinner, maybe not. I take care of chores, see my girlfriend for a few minutes, probably fall asleep around midnight. Outside of work I'm constantly thinking about the problems I deal with at work. And worst of all, I cannot see when this pattern will ease.
When I was leaving the office at around 6:30 p.m. (getting home around 7:40), it was tolerable. Now it is not.
This will not do. It is not the life I want. If these are the terms on which I must accept this career, then this is not the career I want. I value a lot of things outside the office-- and I require time for them. So what do I do?
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Start looking for a new job! When I was about to graduate from lawschool, I had lots of choices about where to work. I purposely avoided working at large firms in big cities for exactly the reasons you mention you are unsatisfied. I'm at a small firm where I'm pretty autonomous. My earnings directly depend on how much I work. If I work less, I earn less. If I want to work more, I can. If I want to take off early, no problem. You are going to burn out fast if you don't make some changes.
I'm not even at a large firm. It's a small firm, but litigation pressure is pretty high right now. I stepped in at a bad time, though maybe there wouldn't ever really have been a good time.
I alternate between sympathy and loathing for my predecessor. Some of the files were frightfully disorganized, and she didn't bother to write transfer memos to tell me what was going on in each, meaning that I've been crammed up against deadlines I didn't know were coming trying to iron out issues that I'm discovering on my own because she didn't tell me they were there. She faked it well; the supervising attorneys didn't know what a wreck things were, and now that it's time for disclosures, she's gone and I'm here dealing with the mess.
So, that's the main source of my frustration today.