Biglaw, Partner Issues, Women's Issues

Women And The Panopticon Of The Law (Part 2): A Letter To My Pre-Lawyer Self

Biglaw partner Jayne Backett reminds herself of the journey she has taken so far through the legal profession.

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letter writingInspired by Victoria Beckham, I wrote a letter to my pre-lawyer self, to remind myself of the journey so far and to remind my readers of how far we have all come in such a short span of time in this life and through this career.

Dear Jayne,

I know arriving at University to study law after nine years of emotional upheaval scares you and that once again you are the new person, but this time you’re on a level footing because everyone is new and you’ve left home, which is extremely liberating for you. I know that when looking at yourself in the mirror, you feel ashamed of being at least two stone overweight and that you get dressed every day feeling that your clothes don’t look good on you. You will walk around the University campus and wonder what the next three years have in store for you.

You will walk past the law building, which is grand and takes centre stage in the middle of the campus, and you will have butterflies, a sense of pride even that you’ve clawed your way out of comprehensive school and left behind the backwater beach town where you’ve lived since you were eleven. You will hope beyond all things that the sense of loneliness that’s haunted you since you were nine years old will now subside as you assimilate into this vibrant, young, and stimulating environment. It never will, but that doesn’t matter because later you will learn to harness immeasurable strength from being alone. To the outside world, you will always be an extrovert; only you and less than a handful of people will ever know that you’re an introvert, who has to be alone regularly to recharge.

You will spend the first term missing the person who you will later marry, you will visit home regularly to see him, but it’s time badly invested and eventually you will realise, despairingly, that you need to move on. Following Christmas of Year 1, you won’t return home for almost a year. It will be a powerful decision, one you will take against all emotional callings, however, surprisingly quickly that head over heart decision will start to reap benefits for you. Later in your life, you will wonder if you’re a sociopath, because your emotions have become so deeply buried. Again, this emotional control will actually become a plus for you, but you don’t know this yet. In weathering a lot of rejection you’ve just become resilient to ordinary levels of stress and your broken home, without siblings to support you, has meant you’ve just become an independent decision maker.

You will think back to times when compartmentalising feelings had caused you to adopt a form of OCD where you would obsessively hold your breath between road signs when in the passenger seat of a car. You will recall how it made traffic jams a life-threatening occurrence for a few years and, to this day, you are still an extremely travel sick person as the result of that odd and dysfunctional behaviour. However, you can rest now knowing that you have overcame your OCD and later it will make you realise how well you’ve learnt to work through issues in your own head, rationalise everything everyone says and commit to your decisions. When you do get married, your husband will have to remind you to talk about things, since working through your problems alone is a habit you find hard to shake off. It’s a trait that actually goes on to make you a star employee, as you never bother your superiors or HR with trivial complaints.

In Year 2 at University, you will head off on a Summer Scheme at a City law firm and it will be a shambles, the head of Graduate Recruitment will have been caught in some indiscretion with a Summer Scheme student from a previous intake and been marched unceremoniously out of the building the day before your scheme begins. Your supervisor in Corporate will be an uptight, gym-obsessed stick insect woman, who will make you feel like something she dragged in on her shoe. She will give you nothing to do all week and will subsequently trawl through your emails and find an email on your system where you have told another Summer Schemer that you are bored to tears. She will print and highlight the email and leave it on your chair for you to discover the following morning. You will feel like a tonne of bricks has collapsed on your dreams, but it will get worse. You will be confronted by an arrogant male trainee on your last day of the placement, who will tell you in no uncertain terms that you are a badly dressed, ill-educated mess who has no hope whatsoever of becoming a City lawyer. He will then try to persuade you to sleep with him. The whole experience will completely put you off the legal profession. The firm will ring you the following week to invite you to interview for a training contract. You will decline and tell them that you will be re-focussing your career on becoming a holiday rep. Comparing the week you’ve spent in their offices with the prior week in Faliraki, you will be convinced that pouring shots into open mouths in the sunshine for a living would be more fulfilling than paginating and proofreading alongside a circle of self-obsessed monsters. That will remain your position on life for the rest of your time at University.

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In Year 3 of being an Undergraduate you will finally discover the gym after hitting a severely low point whilst facing the mirror one day. Combined with eating a diet of jacket potatoes topped by tuna and very little else for weeks on end, you will begin to enjoy being in your skin for the first time in your life. It will be a pivotal time, since you will have learnt so much from the diverse spectrum of people at University, and you will start to get that third-year confidence that will make you believe you could change the world. It will occur to you that changing the world probably won’t happen on the bucking bronco on a Greek island, so you will enroll in a Masters in law at King’s College London. It will be a good decision, although it won’t remove the nagging desire to travel more.

During your Masters, you will attend an open day at the firm where you will go on to train and stay for over a decade of your life and you will realise that being in private practice, having a fast-paced life, and doing work that gets your clients on the front pages of the financial news is exactly what you want for yourself. From that day on, you won’t look back; you will never question whether you’re in the right career. Not a Sunday night will pass where you won’t leap out of bed on Monday to go to work and see what new and exhilarating things will happen that week, you will discover every day is different to the next, and each challenge will mould you into a better lawyer and a more dynamic person. From time to time (although thankfully not often), you will be faced with characters like the arrogant male trainee, but you will have already proved him wrong and so you’ll prove them wrong too.

Keep going; don’t give up.

Lots of love,
Yourself (15 years later)

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Jayne BackettJayne Backett is a partner at Fieldfisher LLP in London specializing in banking transactions, with a particular focus on real estate financing. Fieldfisher is a 600-lawyer European law firm, with a first-class reputation in a vast number of sectors, specifically, financial institutions, funds, technology and fintech, retail, hotels and leisure, and health care. Jayne has a depth of experience in mentoring and training junior lawyers and has a passion for bringing discussions on diversity in law to the forefront. She can be reached by email at jbackett@hotmail.com, and you can follow her on Twitter: @JayneBackett.

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