Sweet Hot Justice

The Deadliest Sin?

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[Ed. Note: The following piece was authored by “The Legal Tease” of Sweet Hot Justice fame. You can check out all of Legal Tease’s other musings from Sweet Hot Justice here.]

A few things are bound to happen when you spend 76 straight hours closing a bond offering in a windowless office the size of a handicap toilet stall, eating nothing but stale candy corn from a nearby vending machine and fantasizing about unconsciousness. First, you make peace with the fact that showers are for people far luckier than you. Second, you start obsessively calculating what your hourly salary might be compared to, say, a teenage babysitter or a shoe-shine guy. Maybe you start to hallucinate a bit. Or wonder if it’s possible to slit your wrists with a stack of post-its. And then, finally, you catch sight of your pale, desperate reflection in the desktop monitor and you realize the pathetic, obvious, predictable truth: You’re wildly jealous of the people your firm recently laid off.

Don’t get me wrong, when it became obvious that my firm was conducting another round of layoffs, I wasn’t hoping to be axed. My day-to-day may indeed be a perverse merry-go-round of corporate inanity, bruising ego slams, romantic nonstarters, and bleak yearnings for my pre-BigLaw life, but when the time comes to end this cycle of misery, I want to do it on my own terms. Preferably with health insurance. So, when I found out that I wasn’t one of the Laid Off, I wasn’t disappointed–but I wasn’t exactly pleased, either. More than anything, I was just relieved that the waiting was over.

But now, in the aftermath of the layoffs, I can’t help but wonder if that relief was misplaced. If morale at my firm was low before the latest slaughter, the atmosphere now is pretty much unbearable. Within a matter of days, most of us went from billing a few hours a day, tops, to not being at the office for a few hours a day, tops. And yes, I get it, it’s BigLaw–it’s not supposed to be a day-spa experience, in any economy–but now, now, we’re supposed to be extra-super grateful for the sadistic pace. We’re supposed to bend over cheerily and smile while the firm’s powers-that-be alternately punish us, and then expect gratitude for, the very fact that we still have jobs. In the past few weeks, even the most docile partners I work with have had a taunting, lupine shine in their eyes every time they’ve doled out work on a Friday at 6 p.m., or announced an absurdly artificial deadline, or passed me in the hall at 5 p.m. as they were heading home and I was rounding midday. Just yesterday, one asked me if I was free to help on a new matter–and when I responded that 100% of my time was already committed, I could hear his smirk through the phone as he asked me to “define 100%.” (Note: you’re screwed no matter how you answer this one.) Now, regardless of how ridiculous, how unreasonable, how idiotic the demands of some prick partner may be, the subtext is the same: “Don’t like it? What are you gonna do–leave?”

More taunting, after the jump.


And that’s just it. I’m not going to leave. Not now, anyway. Call me stiflingly risk-averse, call me masochistic, call me addicted to the ability to pay my rent, but I’ll admit that I just don’t have the balls (well, literally and figuratively) to ups and quit in a depression. I know, I know–I understand the whole “leave-now-because-before-you-know-it-you’ll-be-37-and-still-toiling-away-at-a-job-you-hate” argument. And hell, I’m ready to take a pay cut and move out of BigLaw right now to a job that might let me have a life and a shot at not being miserable–if that job existed anymore. Back in the day, I’d have been able to slide into pretty much any low-key legal job I wanted at this point. But now? Now, ex-BigLaw players are dialing down their resumes and duking it out for night-shift doc review temp jobs. And still getting dinged. My problem isn’t the golden handcuffs themselves; it’s that I just can’t find the goddamn keys to take them off.

And this is where the recent casualties of BigLaw layoffs may actually have one up on those of us who haven’t (yet) been shown the door.

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Really, they do, check out the rest over at Sweet Hot Justice.

The Deadliest Sin? [Sweet Hot Justice]

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