Job Searches, Layoffs, Midsize Firms / Regional Firms, Notes from the Breadline

Notes from the Breadline: Fear of Falling

onJuly 8, 2009 at 11:57 AM

Ed. note: Welcome to the latest installment of “Notes from the Breadline,” a column by a laid-off lawyer in New York. Prior columns are collected here. You can reach Roxana St. Thomas by email (at roxanastthomas@gmail.com), follow her on Twitter, or find her on Facebook.
At the Big Law Firm where we used to work, my friend Giovanna was the kind of associate that every partner dreams of. She spent nights and weekends at the office. She took on the most tedious tasks without complaining. She did the work of three people. She was conscientious. Sometimes, the partner for whom she worked would call her late at night, at home, with a frantic last-minute request for something that probably could have been done earlier in the day; Giovanna would turn around and go back to work to get it done.
Giovanna survived working for this partner for four years, but she did not survive the round of layoffs that eventually trimmed the herd at the Big Law Firm. In the months before she was “let go,” she had been certain that the figurative guillotine was poised above her waiting head. So, when she was summoned to the managing partner’s office to hear her fate, she said later, she was shocked, but not particularly surprised. She cried when she got the news, but then she gave them a piece of her mind and cleaned out her desk. A few days later, she left without looking back.
For the first few weeks, Giovanna and commiserated about life in the breadline. “I’ll never find a job!” she wailed, and threatened to cash in her 401(k). “Don’t do it,” I told her repeatedly, picturing her out on a ledge, cell phone in hand, ready to take a financially unwise leap.
“This is infuriating,” she said at one point. “No matter how many times I explain that more than 6000 people were laid off from firms, I swear people still look at me and think, ‘You suck, and that’s why you were let go.’ But AT&T lays off 50 people and it makes the CNN scroll and everyone empathizes.” I complained that Cliff didn’t understand that lawyers had emerged as the lepers of the new job market. She complained that her boyfriend, Tony, kept telling her to get a job at the local diner.
But Giovanna is one of the lucky ones. After a few weeks of unemployment, which we spend planning our eventual relocation to the shantytown which, she insists, is bound to spring up in Central Park, a former colleague passes her resume along to a friend of a friend and … before we know it, she has a new job.
Read about Giovanna’s new gig, after the jump.

Giovanna’s new position is at a mid-sized regional firm, and although she has taken a significant pay cut, she is immensely relieved. And, at least initially, she seems excited about the chance to work on something other than huge class action cases, in which she has been immersed for the past few years. In fact, I think, reading the first email she sends me, she sounds practically exuberant. “All in all,” she writes, “the place seems okay and they actually have a lot of real litigation. In the first day alone, I already feel like an actual litigator again. I have some memos to write and some random stuff to prepare for local counsel in one case but I get to go to court tomorrow! Yeah!”
The new firm feels different in other ways, too. “I was here until 7:30 last night,” she tells me, “and the place was a ghost town, which I’m pretty psyched about. From what I’ve been told, it has a decent culture, and people concentrate on their personal lives. Whatever — works for me! So, I don’t want to jinx it just yet, but this may have been a good move.”
Giovanna’s elation is short-lived: the transition from life at the Big Law Firm, it seems, is not as easy as it appeared. A few days later, she calls me in the middle of the day. “This girl I work with just came in and gave me a bowl of potpourri for my office,” she tells me in a guarded whisper. She sounds miserable.
“Why are you whispering?” I ask. “Is there someone in your office, or are you being held hostage?”
“Because,” Giovanna tells me, “it was really fucking weird. She told me that she wanted to give me an office-warming present, and I thanked her and said ‘that was so thoughtful, but you really shouldn’t have.’ So she said, ‘well, it’s not like I went out of my way to purchase it for you. It’s just that I have too much potpourri in my apartment and thought I could get rid of some.’ What the fuck? Who offers you a gift and then goes on to tell you that they just wanted to get rid of some clutter from their apartment and you looked like someone they could give their garbage to?”
I try not to laugh at the image of the (decidedly no-nonsense) Giovanna graciously accepting the gift of cast-off potpourri. “Well,” I tell her, “you know that lawyers can be socially awkward. At least you got a bowl of potpourri out of it.” She doesn’t answer. “Is something else bothering you?” I ask carefully.
“I don’t belong here,” she says, sounding despondent. “I don’t know how to do anything, and as soon as they figure that out, I’m going to get fired. Again.”
“You’re new,” I reassure her. “No one expects you to know how to do everything.”
“But I’m not new!” she insists. “I’m supposed to have these skills, and I don’t. I spent the last four years preparing binders for whoever was taking a deposition. Now I’m supposed to take the depositions. I’ve been writing briefs with arguments that the partner told me to make.” I hear panic rising in her voice. “I got assigned to a case today, and they told me to run with it. I’m supposed to move for summary judgment, and I have no idea what the basis of my motion is supposed to be.” She pauses for a moment. “I don’t even know where to get a fucking salad around here.”
“Look,” I tell her, “the first three months of a new job suck. It’s natural to have a learning curve. You’re a good lawyer, and you’ll do a great job. You’re being much harder on yourself than anyone else is.”
“I’m a mediocre lawyer,” she says bleakly. “I gave up my life for the Big Law Firm, and now I don’t know how to do anything except prepare other lawyers to do things that I don’t know how to do.” I hear a knock at her office door in the background, and listen as she has a brief, polite conversation with whoever has come in. A moment later, she returns. “There’s probably an e-mail going around right now, asking who hired the senior associate who has no clue about anything.”
“You’re going to learn how to do it,” I say. “And you’re going to find a salad. I know it’s easy for me to say, but trust me. You’ll look back at this in three months and laugh at how worried you were over things that will be second nature to you by then.”
Giovanna does not sound convinced. When I meet her for dinner, a few weeks later, she looks tired. “There are lawyers at this firm who could litigate circles around me, even though I’m way senior to them,” she says. “It’s because they started out here, or at firms like this one, and they always had to do everything themselves.” She is worried about a brief she wrote, which a partner returned to her covered in red ink. “He thinks I suck,” she says dejectedly. “I’m waiting for them to see through me, and then I’ll be out on my ass.”
“No you won’t,” I reassure her. “The only thing partners love more than editing is editing their own edits. It’s not you.”
She pauses thoughtfully. “You know,” she says, “I think it’s a matter of confidence. At the Big Law Firm, everyone tells you that the cases are too huge and the clients are too important for you to take the lead on. They basically convince you that you’re not competent. I feel like I understand how everything works, but I don’t actually know how to do it. I feel like they’re going to figure that out.”
Well, I tell her, working at a Big Law Firm is, in some ways, like being an abused child. If you’re told for long enough that you can’t do anything right, you’re bound to believe it eventually. “But,” I add, “I’m pretty sure that most lawyers don’t know what they’re doing half the time. They just fake it really well.”
“It’s more than that,” she says. She tells me that recently she was in a partner’s office with another associate. In a fit of pique, the partner threw a sheaf of papers at both of them. The other associate, who, unlike Giovanna, was not a refugee from a big firm, said, “I don’t work this way,” and walked out. “Coming from a Big Law Firm,” Giovanna says, “my first impulse was to pick up the papers. It didn’t occur to me that you could stand your ground. I feel like that’s beaten out of you at a Big Law Firm.”
Listening to her talk, I feel a surge of anger. Giovanna, who is smart, beautiful, and talented, gave the Big Law Firm everything she had for four years. What does she have to show for it? Her reward – her parting gift – is the inability to stop second-guessing herself. It’s not right.
“You’re just more sensitive to criticism because you’re new, and you want to do a good job,” I say lamely. “They’re giving you a lot of responsibility, so they must think you can handle it.” Giovanna looks dubious. “I suck,” she tells me resolutely.
Giovanna continues to worry aloud that she doesn’t know enough, that she will forget her objections during a deposition, that she is missing something important in a brief. But, as the weeks go by, I begin to hear something else in her stories about work – a newly acquired fluency, a sense that she is more comfortable navigating her way through unfamiliar territory, and a discernible note of confidence. I have the urge to point out how much she is learning, despite everything she insists she doesn’t know. Still, there are times when I have the feeling that I have watched her tottering along on a bike with training wheels, and am now standing at the foot of the driveway while she pedals up the block, unaware that she is actually doing it.
A few months into her new job, Giovanna is assigned to take the deposition of a major witness in a case. The partners at her firm are convinced that they cannot win on the question of liability, but are hopeful that they will be able to limit damages in the case. When I catch her in the middle of preparing for the deposition, she sounds panicked. “This is so nerve-wracking!” she wails. The underlying law is totally unfamiliar to her, and she is certain that everyone will know she is a novice. To make matters worse, she and Tony have broken up, and she is not sleeping well. One day she calls me from work, in tears. “I feel awful,” she says. “I don’t think I’ll be able to do this. I’m going to screw it up.” I can hear her muffling sobs on the other end of the phone. “You’ll do a great job!” I tell her, feeling helpless.
I do not hear from her after the deposition, and I begin to worry that something has gone wrong. When she finally calls, it is nearly 11:00pm. “I was sleeping, but then I woke up and I couldn’t get back to sleep,” she says. I wait, apprehensively, for her to tell me how it went.
“Well,” she begins, “you’ll never believe what happened.” She was so nervous when the deposition started, she tells me, that she was – literally — shaking. Her adversary was a much older, seasoned attorney, who had clearly sized her up and determined that she was an amateur. In fact, she says, he stopped the deposition a number of times to interject with condescending pointers about how she should ask questions.
Giovanna was so afraid that she would miss something important that she decided to take the witness through a huge stack of documents, slowly and methodically. She spent hours asking questions, establishing that the witness had complete control over a certain bank account. After a while, she tells me, both the witness and the adversary appeared convinced that she was fixated on a point that was largely irrelevant. The adversary started rolling his eyes; the witness, determined to point out the redundancy of Giovanna’s questions, began to assert, with increasing conviction, that he was responsible for everything related to the administration of the bank account. When, several hours into the deposition, she confronted him with a document that showed an unauthorized payment from the account, the witness and his lawyer exchanged the “Oh, shit,” look that every lawyer dreams of. Giovanna, a clumsy beginner with the looks of a pin-up girl, had beaten them with a royal flush, and neither had seen it coming.
As she tells me the story, I feel myself smiling, overwhelmed with pride. I fight the urge to yell, “See! I knew you could do it!” Although I had nothing to do with the deposition or her success, I feel oddly elated.
“So,” I say instead, “do you think things are starting to turn for you? Is it getting easier?”
She thinks for a moment before she answers. “I think I’ve learned a lot in the past few months,” she says slowly. “For a long time, I thought that, any minute, they were going to figure out that I didn’t know what I was doing.” There is a long pause. “But you know,” she continues, “I do know what I’m doing. I’m still working on it, but I think I’m a good lawyer, and I think I have good instincts. It’s taken me a while to realize it.”
Giovanna sounds tired, but calmer than I’ve heard her in a while. Was it the deposition, I ask her? What made her feel so much more confident?
“I’m not afraid anymore,” she says simply. “I already got fired, and I survived. I kept worrying about what would happen if I fucked up, but what’s the point? I can survive anything.”
Her voice trails off. “You know,” she says, “the sad thing about being laid off is that it’s like having a bad breakup. I’ll probably never give my heart and soul to another firm. I’ll do the best job I can, but I’ll never let it consume me again. Maybe I’ve given up on the dream, but I think I’m a better lawyer because of it … I’m more focused on learning to trust my instincts and less on the idea that giving my life to a firm will amount to something at the end of the day.”
Giovanna laughs. “Did I ever tell you the story about when I left my BlackBerry in church?” she asks. “The priest called me to say I left my little phone on the pew. I seriously doubted that he had the wherewithal to figure out who it belonged to, so I asked him how he knew it was mine. He said I was the only person he had ever seen working during mass.”
She is quiet for a moment. “I guess what it comes down to is that I killed myself for the Big Law Firm, and it wasn’t worth it. I looked around one day and I was thirty-something years old and I hadn’t had a relationship in three years. I was on my fucking BlackBerry in church. I should have gone straight to confession, and confessed to working on the Sabbath, but even that would have been ridiculous. How fucking lame is that? I could picture the priest saying, ‘That’s it? That’s your sin? Come back when you have something better.'”
I am lying on the floor, and I roll over, propping myself up on my elbows. It is late, and we are both giddy, laughing at the image of a confession that even a priest would find extraordinarily dull. I feel like I should be talking on a pink Princess phone, gossiping about boys and Project Runway. I feel as though we have both survived, and this moment of levity is our reward. I feel as though, for Giovanna, everything will be okay.
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Roxana St. Thomas is a laid-off lawyer living in New York. You can reach her by email (at roxanastthomas@gmail.com), follow her on Twitter, or find her on Facebook.
Earlier: Prior installments of Notes from the Breadline