In-House Counsel

The Road Not Taken: There Is Enough Pie

Is the legal profession a pie eating contest where the prize is more pie?

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(photo by Seattle Municipal Archives)

(photo by Seattle Municipal Archives)

Succeeding at law is often compared to a pie eating contest where the prize is more pie. You’d think with that image in our collective minds, we as a profession would have come to realize there is enough pie for each of us. That isn’t the case, however. Our industry is competitive, cutthroat, alpha. If you win, I lose. Under those circumstances, there is not enough pie. And it is so easy to live in a world where we see only those circumstance and only that kind of pie. Like anything with a finite, valuable resource, we learn to covet our colleagues’ pie.

It is so easy to fall into the trap of desiring another person’s pie and resenting others for having what you want. You can rationalize these feelings by telling yourself that the pie-getter didn’t work hard enough to deserve her pie, isn’t smart enough to keep her pie, or simply is unworthy of her pie. All that rationalization, though, will not transfer her pie to you. It’s an unproductive mental rut to fixate on whether others deserve their rewards, but it is something many of us do.

This profession demands so much of us as practitioners. It demands attention, care, dedication, and it can fill our vision until all we have is a myopic view of the universe where there is only one pie and a finite amount of that pie. Our colleagues’ success feels like our pieces of pie are being pulled from our plates. If they get pie, we get none. And to be fair, that is often the case. In adversarial relationships, if one side wins, the other loses; if a client chooses another firm, he doesn’t choose me; if she is named partner, I am not. However, in the bakery of life, there is more than just work-pie.

If you think about life’s rewards as different flavors of pie, you begin to see how much pie is in this world. There is family pie, work pie, love-life pie, friend pie, pet pie, travel pie, life experience pie, and all combinations and variations allowed by the imagination. That’s a lot of pie.

When we focus solely on work pie, we only know if we have work pie or don’t have work pie. That instinct isn’t incorrect; not everyone can have work pie all at the same time. We are adults, we know how the world works. Sometimes someone else gets what you want or walks into something you’ve been working hard for. If all you see is work pie, you won’t see the slices of life experience pie or family pie that are being offered to you or pie you may already have.

We all get pie. I may not get to choose the type of pie or when I get it, but I will get pie. You will get pie. There is enough pie for all of us, even in the legal industry. We only have to expand our palate to appreciate as many types of pie as we are lucky to have offered to us. We may think that only work pie can sustain us, but we won’t always have work pie. None of us will. If we have refined our senses to appreciate the attributes of other pies, we will always be nourished.

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Celeste Harrison Forst has practiced in small and mid-sized firms and is now in-house at a large manufacturing and technology company where she receives daily hugs from her colleagues. You can reach Celeste directly at [email protected].

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