Work Ethic

It's a Sunday, and I have work to do. Not household chores, and not errands (although I have to attend to those as well), but honest to goodness, do-it-or-your-job-is-on-the-line employment-related work.

I'm pretty lucky, I suppose. My job is an office job -- a desk job, if you will -- more often than not. I don't have to do any heavy lifting or manual labor; I rarely have to travel for work. And my work is portable. I don't even have to haul my sorry ass into the office to get it done. I'm sitting at home in my PJs, in front of my computer. Give me a computer with MS Word and an Internet connection, and I'm good to go.

What's more, my work is intellectually challenging. I feel engaged by the assignments I'm given; they make me think. Some people go into a specialized practice when they become lawyers. While I respect that choice, I fear that to do so means learning more and more about less and less. I don't want my professional expertise to be a mile deep and an inch wide. I worry I would spend time writing memoranda on the same topics, just plugging in new names to the same tired analyses. Doing something different, and something fresh, requires me to keep my mind sharp. I need to tackle a new body of law, or nuance of a familiar legal principle, grapple with it, master it, and produce a brief explaining why, as applied to the facts of the case on which I'm working, it should result in an outcome favorable to my client.

The down side to all of this is that it's not easy -- not usually easy, anyway. There is the requisite rolling up of the sleeves -- online legal research. Before I can write a compelling argument, I have to learn what the law says. When it doesn't favor the position we're taking, I have to find a way to make it cut in my favor. This takes some serious strategizing. And it can take a lot of my time.

I really cherish weekends. I opted to be a public sector litigator to get good training, but after forsaking the public sector for the private, I decided to make a trade-off. I wanted to go to a firm with a sophisticated practice, where my legal writing wouldn't consist of using the "Find and Replace" function to mark up an earlier memo and appropriate it for a new, virtually-identical case. But I also wanted to go somewhere where I wouldn't be tethered to a Blackberry. The downside of going to a small firm is that I have a salary that, while more than adequate to cover my expenses at present, is now less than half of what first-year associates are making at large "white shoe" law firms.

The upside of working at a litigation boutique, rather than at a larger shop, has always been that I have ample down time. I suppose that's a relative term. At my brother-in-law's wedding just one week ago, people were shocked and aghast to hear that I'm frequently at work until 7:15 p.m., and that even when I get home at 8 p.m. or thereabouts, I have yet to work out, cook, or eat dinner, to say nothing about relaxing. Still, I manage to cook dinner for the Mister (or he for me) about 50% of the time -- not bad for someone keeping my hours -- and I regularly make it to the gym at least two-to-three times per week. At a big firm, these options would likely not be available to me.

But, on weekends like this one, where to procrastinate means risking not only the wrath of my bosses, but also blowing a court deadline, I can't bring myself to ignore looming assignments. It's the right thing to do to buckle down and get the work done.

My sister has always had the "stick-to-it-ivness" to get her work done when it's called for. So does the Mister. Growing up, my motto was "why do today what you can do at 2 a.m. before the project is due?" Rarely suffering any consequences from this approach -- I got As throughout high school, and was accepted into two Ivy League institutions -- I'm surprised that I ever learned to start projects before the eleventh hour.

Maybe it's called growing up. Maybe I've developed a conscience. Whatever the reason, I can't justify to myself any longer the sense in putting off until tomorrow (or at least until later on tonight) what must be done today. I'm thirty-one, so I suppose it's about time. It's just something that surprises me, since it snuck up on me. I don't remember waking up one morning and feeling any different, it's just the case that now, if there is work to do, I know I'll work until after dark, after the gym is closed, over the weekend, whatever it takes, to get a job done.

I'm proud of myself for making this change. I know that to do otherwise would leave my colleagues in the lurch. And I owe them more than that. But it's more than that. They haven't bought my loyalty (even though I'm earning more than I ever have in my life), and it's not the fear of getting let go that motivates me either. I just know that, when my name gets signed to a court document, I want to be proud of what I've written, certain that I gave it my best shot. Truth be told, I don't just work hard these days because most of the work I produce becomes a matter of public record when filed with the Courts. I just want to know that I didn't half-ass it.

So when I go to bed tonight, I may not be up to date on Ugly Betty, and I may not have finished watching The Illusionist on DVD yet, but at least I'll know that I can walk into the office tomorrow confident that I've
done what I was supposed to do.