There’s nothing like a little Latin to get a party started.
That’s a lie. Latin basically turns everybody off unless you’re a lawyer or a classics major, though it does make for a sometimes-welcome party trick. Matt, God love him, used to tell people that his girlfriend “spoke Latin” when we started going out. But you can’t really have a conversation with someone in an ancient language when all you know how to say are things like “produce the body” or “buyer beware.”
Law school was harder than I had conceived but also very rewarding. I would love to be a professional student. I love to read and write and research. I like the tidiness of producing things for a grade. I like the digestibility of projects with start and end dates. Book manuscripts are like this, but during the period in which you are supposed to be writing it is very easy to be distracted by everything else going on around you. Not in the beginning, though. In the beginning, the deadline always seems so far in the future, and you are not threatened by the potential of the outside world hosing your plans until you start to close in on a date on the calendar. Then things like your son being home sick from school and interrupting you every nine minutes for a snack can make you want to throw your laptop across the room.
Before the books I was writing came the books I was reading.
Practicing law was nowhere near as fun as studying law. Though most nights I had to squeeze my eyelids open in attempts to stay awake during such adventures as an examination of whether deadly force was permissible in defending an uninhabited property, my sizeable collection of legal texts was a source of (misplaced) pride. Buying the same $126 textbook as all your classmates is not a thing distinguishable. I liked the heaviness of the books, their apparent importance. I loved setting them up in my apartment during graduate school, and later in my new office with a view of downtown. I loved their look, spread open on my desk. The books were part of what I finally thought I’d developed: a sense of worth based on my vocation. The denser they were, the thicker they were, the better. I displayed my books in the same way people sometimes carry around unopened versions of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest to prove they know it’s a thing. A thing smart people know. A thing not a lot of people actually read.
For me, the brain was the thing. Even after high school, where I hadn’t been prom queen or cheerleading captain but had taken calculus for “fun.” Where I had been voted “most likely to become president,” which wasn’t so much a function of intellect but maybe more a consequence of being too opinionated.
I wanted smarts so bad that I thought stuffing my head full of information could make up for any intellectual deficiency. Law school sounds boring to a lot of people, because for a lot of people it is. But I cared so much about the imbued pride I got from saying I was a lawyer that I’d supplanted the concept of an actual “calling.” What did God actually desire for me to do? I knew I wanted to help people. That was a given. But every service performed or good provided is an attempt to “help” people. You “help” people clear their lawns by selling leaf blowers at Home Depot. You “help” people smell better by stocking deodorant at CVS.
I’m able to look back now and realize in how many contexts I’ve used my degree. It’s come in handy, for certain. But comparatively, among all its other uses, I’ve used my law degree the least in a “traditional context”—as in the actual practice of law. I didn’t understand it then, but when the designation started to lose its luster I likewise started to lose interest in what I was doing.
Things started out great. In fact, if I’d stuck with the first part of my legal work, I might still be in it. Our Baltimore-based firm was one of a few in the city with a specialty in admiralty and maritime law. This practice area involves the representation of everyone who might in any way be connected to work performed on or near a ship. It can involve shipowners, the owners of the containers on the ship, the workers on the ship, or the workers on the dock who unload the ship. If a product is moved from one place to another by waterway, at some point our firm had probably been involved. I had a hand in international commerce. (Fine. A pinky.) That was something, wasn’t it?
My grandfather was a naval captain. John Paul Jones, father of the American Navy, is an ancestor. I spent my teenage summers at a lake and spend my adult summers at the ocean. My innards are more water than blood. Here, I thought, was something that fit. Maritime law was smart and cool, and I was interested in it—and people were interested in me because I did it. When I hung out with my other lawyer friends, the suckers stuck doing tax law and corporate mergers, I would coolly tell them I had arrested a ship that day.
So, yeah, basically I was Catwoman.
Our offices were a few blocks from the federal courthouse, where we would file maritime liens and the associated requests for arrest. Arresting ships is super fun. Once you get over your sheer terror at marching up the gangplank behind a federal marshal while a bunch of crew members glower at you and curse at you in Croatian, it’s a real trip. Under the Federal Maritime Lien Act, if a shipowner fails to pay its crew or provide necessary accommodations, and attempts at resolution have failed, you can literally duct tape an arrest warrant to the steering wheel and the ship has to stay in port until things are resolved. Which is why the Croatian crew is glowering at you. Because now they’re stuck in a city where no one knows how to take an order for a cheeseburger in Croatian.
My legal work was a combination of smart and tough. And my mental fantasies abounded. They included (1) me, marching up the stairs of the federal courthouse and pushing reporters out of the way as I fought my way in to file super important paperwork; (2) me, slamming my fist on counsel’s table in front of the old-guard judge who wasn’t going to listen to the plaintiff’s case, certainly not one argued by a woman; and (3) me, hugging my client as the verdict was read in our favor and later buying everyone drinks as we toasted our victory under the stars.
Half of my legal career was fantasy, come to think of it. I realize now that law was an unconscious way to create an exterior shell to protect my jellyfish insides, a part of me that I felt was weak and ignorant and easily injured. I thought saying I was a lawyer would somehow both impress others and protect me at the same time.
The Falinski sisters cracked that shell right open.
Maritime work was only a portion of our firm’s focus. Much of it centered on the day-to-day commercial litigation that powers most small firms: things like contract disputes, landlord grievances, employment discrimination claims, and real estate cases. The higher-profile, higher-dollar cases went, as they ought, to the partners whose billable rates were twice mine. That meant that I got the remainders, the smaller cases. I learned there was an inverse relationship between the monetary value of a case and how often the clients will call you to ask about said case. In other words, a five-thousand-dollar dispute means you will get approximately ten thousand calls in the course of a week. A million-dollar case means you will get exactly one.
In a small, residential portion of eastern Baltimore, the Falinski sisters had held to a decades-old zoning variance that allowed them to operate a bar called Tony’s Place. It bore nothing more than a small neon sign the size of a bread box and a parking lot big enough for only three cars.
The parking lot was the crux of the Falinskis’ lawsuit: they were staking a claim to approximately twelve lost feet of parking space. The neighbor had a troublesome habit of parking his small boat on the left side of his house, which shared a common boundary with the parking lot at Tony’s Place. The Falinski sisters wanted to sue on the basis of that disputed boundary line, stating that the loss of this space was sending at least one paying customer away because there was nowhere for said potential customer to park. The Falinski sisters were good of heart but bloody of tooth, and they were out to drive their neighbor from his home, taking his boat and his sense of entitlement with him.
Each day calls from the Falinski sisters rolled in. The younger sister, eager to please her older and more cantankerous sibling, called me every day. Sometimes twice a day. I grew to dread the buzz of my desk phone. “These things take time,” I would tell her. “Opposing counsel still has ten days to answer our motion,” I would explain. But every day she called hoping that the neighbor had given up, decided to sell his house, and given the sisters the entirety of his proceeds as damages for lost business at Tony’s Place. To make it worse, the neighbor and defendant in our case was dying of cancer. His wife was overwhelmed with his treatments and her attempts to protect their own flagging business, and now she had to deal with two sisters who were out to claim twelve feet of pavement. It was hard for me to even face the defendant’s wife in the hallway during our hearings. I just wanted to put my arms around her and tell her I was sorry about the whole thing. (By the way, you cannot do this when you’re a lawyer. I guess it’s considered bad form.)
The judge denied our motion for summary judgment—a way to determine the case and issue a ruling before the parties get to trial. I told the Falinskis that there was a good chance we would lose at trial and that prior settlement would give them enough money to repave the parking lot and provide additional space. I told them how expensive continued litigation would be—all to no avail.
Walking the younger sister to her car after a client meeting one day, I explained what my next steps would be based on our discussions. She interrupted me.
“Wait—are you a lawyer? I thought you were a paralegal, hon.”
I blinked at her so many times I’m sure it looked like I’d been maced.
“No,” I replied cautiously. “Only a lawyer can file motions, appear in court, depose witnesses. You know. The things I’ve been doing for you for six months?”
I thought suddenly of the first motion I’d ever been called to defend, at the ripe old age of twenty-five. I thought of what the judge had said when I appeared at the counsel table and the way he looked down the bridge of his aquiline nose from a desk that seemed forty feet in the air. “Young lady, is there anyone else coming that’s going to be defending the motion today? Or is it just you?”
From the start, it was as if the world didn’t believe I was a lawyer. Notwithstanding the fact that I am cooler than any lawyer living or dead, I began having trouble believing I was a lawyer, too. Outside the SunTrust Insurance building, I waved Ms. Falinski off as she headed to her car, and thought to myself, What am I doing here? I had wanted two things: to help people solve problems and to totally impress people with my super fly career. I was failing at both.
The time for navel gazing and plan making became available when I contracted mononucleosis a month later and had to take an extended leave of absence from the firm. When I returned, I quit my job cold turkey without another prospect in sight. This was highly uncharacteristic of me. It was also highly risky, because I was paying enough in student debt each month to buy my own very nice boat and park it on someone else’s parking lot.
I flipped through papers on the couch as I recovered, stabbing at any job that caught my attention and thinking foolishly that a law degree made me qualified to do anything.
It didn’t.
I halfheartedly applied to other law firms, but no one was hiring. I made it to second and third interview rounds and received every assurance that an offer would come, only to be told later that the firm had decided to increase their lawyer’s required hours to cover the work rather than make an outside hire. I suppose there was some small part of me that was glad, because if these schlubs were already billing fifty hours a week and now had to bill sixty, I guessed they were going to be pretty miserable. Matt asked me what I thought I might want to do. I found myself at a crossroads. A weird one. I had these degrees, but I had shifted course and was not even sure how I would use them.
My parents must have sensed my growing discontent, because that Christmas they bought me two books: one titled The Lawyer’s Calling and the other called Running from the Law. Like they were hoping I might continue to practice but had a sneaking suspicion I was one foot out the door.
A few weeks later, I found a local paper with a list of the city’s best advertising agencies.
Huh. Advertising, I thought. That sounds interesting.
And just like that, my career path and my work took another abrupt turn.