Time is Money

“I am much too alone in this world, yet not alone enough to truly consecrate the hour.”-Rainer Maria Rilke

They don’t teach you how to bill hours in law school. You learn in your first law firm job and billing and collecting is one of the most important measurements of success in a firm.

Over forty years ago I launched into private practice in a medium sized law firm outside my home state. I was told to bill in increments of .1 or six minutes and write it on a timesheet. If I worked on a case for 15 minutes I billed .25, and so forth. It sounded simple!

It seemed logical and in alignment with my  values to simply track the time of ACTUAL work for each client, down to the smallest .1.  Unfortunately I quickly found that to bill my expected 8 hour daily minimum, I had to work 12 hours or more to accommodate breaks, lunch, mind wandering and general tasks of living. Or, I could skip all those life necessities and just work like a machine every day.  

Sadly, I chose the latter.

If my personality of perfectionism and overachievement predisposed me to workaholism, the .1 measurement of my worthiness sealed my fate. I became obsessed with clocking every minute of my life. I was face to face with my convictions with every .1 of every day in determining exactly how much to bill.  I stuck notepads in my car and around the house to mark down billable work outside office hours.  I got up before sunrise, even logging on to email in the middle of the night when I couldn’t sleep. Freakishly, lawyers were answering me back at that hour!  I wondered how many of them were suffering like I was with the notion of billable time.

When I had my own firm, I no longer had quotas but I was supporting my family (as a single mom), my staff and my overhead.  I constantly calculated billable hour needs against budget.  I needed a new copy machine; how many billable hours would that cost me? I could work harder over the next several weekends to bank that money.

Obsession with the 6 minute increments made it difficult to be fully “present” during non-billable moments of life for much of the 40+ years I practiced law. The voice inside my head was constantly saying “You are getting further behind!”

I went to my then-10- year- old son’s baseball game and sat in my car reviewing documents.  I paused “off the clock” when he got up to bat and honked the horn when he got on base.  I couldn’t enjoy anything during the work day, couldn’t go to the dentist unless it was the earliest appointment, couldn’t breathe. I still loved yoga but I could only take the 5am class so I didn’t miss “work hours.”

Vacations?  To miss 40 billable hours and keep up with your daily quota upon return was impossible.  On trips I’d bill hours in a dark hotel room near a corner lamp before my family woke up and after they went to bed trying to stay present during the day, hearing the gremlin of billable time intermittently.

My calendar was chock full with appointments, court dates, and meetings. A coach I hired told me it was essential to put margin in my calendar.  I did as he instructed but if a potential client called, I immediately scheduled them into the margin, so I didn’t miss the opportunity to get a new client.

I went through a dark season of life when family problems were consuming me. I pulled into the office parking lot mid morning after dealing with things since dawn and cried thinking I would drown in sorrow before I walked into the office.  I looked up at the barren winter trees of the parking lot, through tears, and the bible verse from Matthew 6:26-27 popped into my head: “Look at the birds of the air; they do not sow or reap or store away in barns and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they? Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?”

My life during those frenzied years ran on what the Greeks call “chronos.”  Chronos forms the word chronological. It is time in sequential order driven by the clock and the calendar. Most of our society is driven in chronos time. 

Over time, I became exposed to the term “kairos.”   Kairos is what I like to call “divine right timing.” For Christians, this is the difference between living “in the world” and living instead by “the nudging of the Holy Spirit.”  For mindfulness practitioners it’s “living fully immersed in the present moment.” 

I’d had moments of kairos earlier in my life, but I rarely was able to recognize them back then for what they were.  Twenty four years ago I was one of two finalists for a job heading the mediation clinic at  ASU Law School. I believed then, and now, I was the most qualified candidate yet the other person was selected.  A few weeks later my father came to visit us in Phoenix and got off the plane with a cold that turned out to be a terminal lung disease. He became a  hospice patient in our house for several months before he died and I was unemployed for the months he was there so I was able to care for him. Kairos timing.

I think of kairos when clients bemoan, “I should have gotten this divorce years ago.” We discuss the circumstances which usually reveal they were not ready until the day they came into my office and said, “Let’s file.” 

Kairos may also be rooted in an inner knowing. I feel the need to write today instead of doing my chores and the writing flows. My friend out of state keeps coming to mind, and I call and find she has been struggling. I feel a nudge to take a different route home from church and come across the perfect place to live as my lease is ready to expire.

Myopic obsession with chronos closes us off from the rich kairos moments. Jon Kabat- Zinn inspired me to look deeper into embracing kairos in his book Wherever You Go There You Are:  If you did die, all your responsibilities and obligations would immediately evaporate. Their residue would somehow get worked out without you. No one else can take over your unique agenda. It would die or peter out with you, just as it has for everyone else who has ever died, so you don’t need to worry about it in any absolute way.  If this is true maybe you don’t need to make one more phone call right now even if you think you do. Maybe you don’t need to read something just now or run one more errand. By taking a few moments to die on purpose, to the rush of time while you are still living, you free yourself to have time for the present. Dying now in this way, you actually become more alive now.

All of this brought forth the question: How much of my life has been spent in search of meaning, and how much has been focused solely on survival?  Being a single mother responsible for 100% of my own support for over 20 years of my life made this frenzy understandable.  But in the last season of my life how can I tip the balance in the other direction? 

I’ve let go of attaching to the outcome when I’m the mediator on a case that I feel should settle but doesn’t.  I realize the parties may have to “go around the mountain again” in order to learn lessons, have insight, or prolong their hurt now for their ultimate healing later.  Their settlement will be in kairos time, not within the chronos hours scheduled for our mediation that day because of a court deadline.  

Walking my dog in the morning, instead of drifting into the million things pulling on my attention, I focus myself on the present. The trees, the breeze, the mountains near my home and the sunrise all seem crisp and clear. I remember feeling this way years ago when I took refuge for a few days in a woman’s monastery in the mountains.

I had to go around the mountain again myself, even after the awakening  at the monastery. I returned to the stress and burnout of chronos until I was flattened by the reboot offered by the pandemic.  I finally listened and knew that kairos time was of the essence. And now I’m practicing living mindfully in the present, in “supernatural natural.”

Last night I went to dinner with the little boy whose mom sat in the car churning billable hours while he played baseball.  My son is now a 30 year old man.  I smiled as I listened intently to him light up about his life, his hopes for the future and the wonderful woman he has met.  For a moment just over his shoulder in the air I saw his mom looking at me, reminding me she chose what she thought she had to, to survive and take care of herself and so many others. With profound empathy and love, I blessed her silently then stepped forward as the woman she is now, sitting across from her handsome son in kairos time, prioritizing a life of meaning with the years that remain.

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A Lawyer’s Grief

It happened again today.  I closed the zoom mediation, covered my eyes and  sobbed.  This time my tears weren’t from watching parents trying to hurt each other. These were tears of relief for level headed parents and compassionate lawyers, structuring a healing trajectory for a divorcing family.

Tears come more often these days. A steady stream, a flood or an unpredictable onset welling in my eyes at inopportune moments.  It can’t be hormones, I’m past that age. It can’t be depression, my life has never been better.   My body senses a familiar feeling, originating in my heart.

It finally comes to me.  Yes, I’m sure of it.  What I am feeling is grief. 

Grief is something we all experience and it comes in many different forms. It’s easiest to identify when it accompanies death. But there are many small deaths that happen in life such that grief often lives just below the surface of our bodies, flowing like a river, sometimes coalescing into a deep reservoir. In The Wild Edge of Sorrow, author Francis Weller invites us to see grief not just as an event that happens at times of great loss, but as an “ongoing conversation that accompanies us through life,” so that we became “an apprentice of sorrow.”

I’ve accepted the invitation for apprenticeship and the allure of Weller’s pledge that approaching grief with reverence and close examination will bring me to right relationship with sorrow. I decided to try this approach on the complicated emotion I feel about transitioning from full time lawyer busyness, to a life season that has a gentler “just right” tempo.  It’s now relationships with the important people in my life and taking care of my aging body to enhance longevity that get most of my attention.  My professional identity and work as a lawyer are further down the list.  Could there be grief underlying this change in priority when my choice to downshift is deliberate and reaping new levels of happiness?  

There have been a few times in my life I’ve asked myself, “Was I really meant to be a lawyer?”  I find that question popping up with more frequency.  At this age, I’m guessing most people ask whether they made the right choice for their life’s work.  I remember asking my dad this question as I was caring for him as a hospice patient in my home. He’d gleefully smiled from his bed and said, “I’ve LOVED being a lawyer.”  I was comforted by my father’s fulfillment from his life’s work as I traversed the dimensions of holding gratitude simultaneously with grief that overcame me as he died.

I can’t say that I’ve loved being a lawyer, but I’ve felt very honored to be one. Frankly, it’s been a stressful and challenging profession for someone who’s wired like God wired me.   I realize that for over 40 years I’ve actually been an ambassador of sorrow.  In my work, I’ve sat in the shadows of life with people suffering great loss. I’ve helped them accept that they must cram their sorrow, loss, fear, overwhelm, mental health, and scarcity worries into a legal box of “rights” and get permission from the state to rubber stamp their plan to move their lives forward. Their grief has been overwhelming and my empathy and compassion reserves have been tested.

My years of courtroom work particularly challenged all my strength. As an empath, I was tasked with holding my deep feelings for all the losses suffered by my clients, while navigating a competitive and fast-paced playing field of rules of evidence and ever-evolving case law and statutes. All the while, I was making sure to translate the seemingly disconnected paradigm of court in a practical way that made my clients feel they were being heard and understood.

My ambassadorship didn’t get easier when I transitioned primarily to work as a mediator.  How many millions of tears did I observe from the mediator’s chair all those years?  How much sorrow swirled around me in rooms where I had to continually say, “It’s not about what’s right in either of your eyes. It’s about what rights each party has under the law.”  Even in Zoom mediation a camera might click off for a few moments, but I can still feel the brokenness of that person struggling to stay afloat in their immense grief.

Lately, my drama bandwidth has changed. I have zero margin for drama or chaos in my personal life since I sit in front of a Zoom screen watching hours of drama in mediation.  Yet there’s a new delight in my work as a mediator. I’m finding it’s not my legal skill that is at the forefront in my cases. It’s now wisdom, abundant patience, and the opportunity to conclude the Zoom and quietly pray for all the players in the life story I’ve just heard that drives my work.  Bittersweet aging has opened up a chance to see life differently, and better, and even painful circumstances take on a new dimension in my heart and mind.  Every moment of NOW is too precious to waste and I try to convey that in my work without lecturing but instead modeling it with my own life. 

When I transition out of the practice altogether a long chapter of my life will close. I know a few lawyers who put a firm stop date on their practice of law and others who continue to work or dabble until the very end.  I admire the choices of each but  I’m in the camp that wants to retire at a certain date and move into a new life that does not include the law.  I’m not sure when that will be but I can see it on the horizon in my mind’s eye. I’m not sure what I will do next but I’m excited about the possibilities which are also starting to appear in the shadows of my imagination.  So what’s with the sorrow?

Knowing there is a time I will never practice law again, is the same feeling I have knowing there is a time coming when I will never be able to pull up into a headstand in the middle of the yoga floor. Somehow clinging to my world as a lawyer, like the headstand, is a symbol that I’m not getting old. That I still “have it.”  It’s the last breaths of my ego trying to stifle my true self.  That true self has been coming out more and more for the past many years but the deepest part of her is still scared to fully break free. If I keep practicing law and standing on my head I can still fool myself into thinking I have control of my life.

I’m sure I’m not the only person who likes to be in control. As a lawyer, you try to control the evidence, your client, the narrative, and the drafting of the documents.  In this reflective stage of life, I’m working harder on letting go, sometimes blaming my chosen profession for my propensity to want to fix, manage, and control most of everything.

“Control is an illusion,” writes Rami Shapiro in Recovery-the Sacred Art.  “Spending all my time and energy pursuing an illusion is a waste of all my time and energy.”  Shapiro reminds us that we cannot control what happens to us, we can only navigate what happens moment to moment. 

There is nothing like getting older that brings this point home.  Suddenly I realize that at any moment, life could change in a myriad of ways, and that as age marches on I am closer each day to my own death.  I can take steps to manage my life in ways that make some of these outcomes less likely but nothing is foolproof.  And death will surely come. This thought is daunting and perhaps the ultimate grief. And yet, as I work to fully embrace it, I find more freedom.

In my ongoing transformation, I’m deepening my apprenticeship with sorrow.  I’m leaning into listening, feeling, examining, and calling on my ancestors and my God to guide me in this marvelous adventure of grief. I’m not dropping out, I’m continuing to drop more deeply in.

I’m also looking for ways of expanding my ambassadorship with sorrow to new acquaintances and communities who are suffering and need a calm and steady soul to walk alongside them.  I’m working to mindfully practice courageous presence in these situations as a true elder who realizes she has no control over life and finds radical freedom in that acceptance.  I’m opening up my clenched fists so that God has room to bring new wisdom and insight into my open palms.

It’s grief that has awakened profound gratitude and joy for my abundantly rich and fulfilling life.  I was thinking about this at yoga last Saturday when I resisted the urge to pop into a headstand and instead lay in Shavasana on my yoga mat in rest and surrender.

Namaste.

FEED MY SHEEP: A Pandemic Tale

Being in quarantine is difficult for everyone, but it’s particularly difficult when you are a family lawyer doing it alone. You have nobody to decompress with or hug after long hours of working on stressful cases on a computer. If you decide to go off of social media because of the tone of the rhetoric there, and you don’t have cable tv, there is even more isolation.  Days are spent triaging highly anxious family law clients and nights are spent asking yourself weighty questions.

You read an article that says you will discover who your friends really are by the ones who reach out to say “are you ok?” and realize that while you think you have many friendships, if that is the criteria, only maybe one or two of those friendships are very deep. You rarely or don’t ever hear from “friends” and maybe only one asks if you are ok.  It seems like you are the one checking in on people but other than your children nobody is checking in on you.

Most of the people that are calling you want something. Your legal expertise, your help in filing for unemployment, your take on how they can survive the pandemic, your interpretation of a custody order in light of social distancing. All the people you’ve helped, guided, loved on and taken care of over the years are preoccupied.  They assume you are strong and must be ok.  Some who you reach out to texting “I hope you are safe and doing well” don’t even take time to respond.  You remember what you’ve done to help those people over the years and wonder what it is that made them so detached they couldn’t even take a quick moment to send back a thumbs-up emoticon.

At night with a dog sleeping at your feet and the “pink moon” glaring through the window you start asking yourself big questions.

What has my life been about up until now?

  If I catch the virus and die, what is my legacy? (After all, at age 62 I am in the “endangered species” category.)

 Who and what did I let drive my life in ways that were not, in retrospect, beneficial and may have even de-railed me?

 What did I miss along the way?

 IF I live through this how will I show up differently post-pandemic?

I started seeing a terrific new therapist before the virus hit, because I was so miserable in the practice of law. He helped me see that I’d been suffering for many, many years and for the first time (because he was a former attorney himself) someone “got” the suffering I’d been feeling for years.  We began to dissect it with the intention of figuring out what I would do with my “last act” of life and how, and if, the law would a part of it.

But then the pandemic hit.

Suddenly I am faced with having this weighty reflection front and center as I navigate 10 hour days of client matters every day while trying to pay attention to what is going on with the virus, whether I have to Clorox my groceries, and whether my 84 year old mother and 60 year old brother with advanced MS are safe in their homes. What was previously a stressful job now has become even more mentally taxing.  But what I know from previous life devastation is I have to somehow navigate staying present and awake for all there is to learn.

As I ponder the “suffering in the law” question amidst all of this, I’ve come to a clear realization. It isn’t the clients, even the most demanding ones, who cause the suffering.  They are actually the bright spot.  It’s the other lawyers. It’s the value system of the practice of law. It’s the idea that more money is made by lawyers the more parties are fighting and litigating.  It’s that it’s all about winning, including thinking it’s a big victory to take a child away from a parent or to get a vocational expert to say a lifetime stay at home parent should all of a sudden be making $50,000 and therefore minimizing the amount the other parent has to pay to support their children.  It’s mentally stressful hearing sad stories in a system of deadlines and rules of engagement that make people’s life traumas the source of ego gratifying wins and competitive gamesmanship. The idea of family justice seems so bizarre and illogical.

I’ve loved my clients and loved on them for over 35 years. I’ve sat with them for hours hearing their hearts, encouraging them to find their highest selves, helping them find new footing in the new normal of their lives during and after legal interventions. I’ve had many profound experiences sitting side by side with people who were bleeding emotionally and watching their lives fall apart. As I was helping them, my clients were my own spiritual guides as I found new pieces of myself in them, and new understanding of suffering and transformation.  I’ve sometimes floated home from the office whispering to myself about what a privilege and honor it is to do such important work for my clients.

But back to the suffering as a lawyer. After confiding  to mentors and confidantes I was encouraged by one mentor about 7 years ago to write about it, and to start sharing the message of change in my profession. This is where my path might have gotten off course (but as is always the case, that diversion brought me back home).  I proceeded to spend years writing and imploring lawyers to reclaim the beauty of our profession as a healing profession. I wrote “The Compassionate Lawyer” in 2014. I’ve been on the speaking circuit explaining to lawyers that they needed to do things differently. I’ve spoken with passion and a sense of urgency.

Most who have heard me figuratively patted me on the head and said, “Good little Kimmy.”  They’ve dismissed my message and just keep doing things the same way. Why would they change? It’s a good gig, even if studies show a large number of lawyers feel their line of work has adversely impacted their mental health. Plus, any sense of changing to be more collaborative, loving, compassionate and kind is largely viewed as a sense of weakness, frailty, not being a “real” lawyer. And it’s no secret you end up billing fewer hours for cooperation than for combat.

I’ve given speeches at the law schools imploring faculty to offer coursework on topics like collaboration and emotional intelligence  and to place emphasis on being a “whole person” above emphasis on things like class rank. That message has gone over with a thud. Those subjects aren’t on the bar exam after all and bar passage rate is one of the components of measurement by US News and World Reports.  Yes, legal education hasn’t changed in decades and now it is held hostage by a magazine that nobody reads.  So lawyers are continually turned out in the same competitive paradigm that is part of the dysfunction of the profession.  Some studies show that incoming law students change their whole world view. When they enter law school most do so to “help people.” During the three years, law students change their goals to wanting to be the exemplar student,  to complete law school with a high class ranking to ensure a shoe-in at a lucrative job in “Big Law” and to make a name for themselves.

At night with shutters open in the light of the beautiful pink moon, laying in my bed during the quarantine, I put my hands over my heart and comfort my wounded self. What in the world were you thinking when you took on this crusade?  What in the world made you think that you could be the champion of change?  And what now?

Trying to mentor young lawyers to practice in a new way, by approaching and recruiting those who I thought could share the vision, only added more suffering.  I realize that while I thought they shared my dream and mission, for most of them, that wasn’t it at all.  It was instead that my dream and passion for the cause was contagious to them. I got them excited because I was so excited. They weren’t really excited on their own.  When the money starts coming the vision gets lost because the old way is a good gig.  Frustration, heartache, kicking myself for the time invested, the giving, giving, giving of myself to those I thought would help multiply the change. Suffering from those fractured relationships in the law that hurt worse than other personal and family heartaches.

Also, in that pink moon a ray of light through the clouds illuminated another pandemic induced realization. In my crusade I’d lost something.  The connection with my clients. Yes, it’s always there to a degree but the “mission” became paramount to the delicacy of the client’s hearts. My own mind and heart have been split in two these past years.  I’m still “feeling with” the clients but doing so while a big part of my heart has been dedicated to my agenda of legal reform. The “movement”  has permeated a big part of my body, mind and spirit that only have finite resources.  The personal satisfaction of the  legal reform mission is much less gratifying than the profound joy the work with the clients  in the trenches has given me.  If anything, “the mission” has fed my ego and made me more driven to be “seen and heard” and stolen a big chunk of my humility, stillness and center.  And then last night, a bold ray of moonlight pierced through the clouds with such brightness it was startling, and a bible verse came to the forefront.  “Feed my sheep.”

“Feed my sheep” is what Jesus said to the disciples when they were trying to convince him how much they loved him, and he was telling them how to prove it.  (John 21:15-17) That verse, at that moment, answered one of my big questions.

How will I show up in the world post pandemic?

Before the onset, I had been focused on a legacy of being an instrument of change in the legal profession.  While I know I have been making a difference in the lives of my clients, I’ve thought that individual impact was “too small” of a mission. I remember a friend who had a business with an important message, and she shared that she’d been convinced she would “reach millions.” Somehow that went into my subconscious and I thought of all the good that could be done in the world by lawyers, sitting with the most vulnerable in our society, if my message of compassion in the law would reach millions.  A few sheep surely weren’t the same caliber of importance.

Laying alone in the middle of a pandemic brings clarity about how inconsequential you are in the scheme of things at the end of the day.  And yet there it was; “Feed my sheep.”

I go to the dog park this morning shortly after sunrise like I do every pandemic day. As usual, nobody is there that early but my dog and me, and this morning I’m thinking about “feed my sheep” and asking for more clarity of what it means.

As I pull into the parking lot, NPR is interviewing Andrea Bocelli who will sing day after tomorrow at a cathedral in Milan, where there will be no audience. He says that having no audience is beautiful because to him it is not a concert, it is a prayer.  The interviewer asks his wife if it will seem odd that he won’t be in front of a packed house and she says no. She tells of how at times, on Sundays, he does church with a few people who are very sick or dying. There may be only five people bedridden and Andrea Bocelli sings just for them. She tells that it is beautiful because they all view his singing as a prayer offering for the healing of the few people that are there.

I start to sob as he proceeds to sing Ave Maria, alone in my car in full pandemic loneliness as his music feeds me, and my dog licks the tears as they come down my cheeks.

I’ve realized that each intervention with each client I meet makes a monumental impact. It’s not just me impacting them, but them impacting me. Meeting someone on the path of suffering and helping them navigate that part of their journey, is the highest calling I have on my life.

There are politicians and special interest groups clamoring for healthcare reform, change in our government, big systemic changes like I was preaching. And those things are worthy, and necessary.   Yet there is also a nurse sitting with  one person dying of the virus who can’t be near family and would be alone without that one nurse.  That moment is a crucial transformative moment for both of them.  Calling someone in quarantine to check on them when they are suffering is a huge transformative moment for both people.  Sending a thumbs up emoticon during a pandemic to someone who is reaching out to ask how you are, can trigger a transformative reconciliation.

Meanwhile, the pandemic has dropped bombs on the law. Big Law is disintegrating before our eyes, with associates and staff being downsized all across the country. Lawyers who are client centric are surviving (and dare I say, thriving) during the transition and other firms of  billing machines are panicking.  Law schools have had to scramble to move to online instruction and now discussion of pass/fail grading, doing away with bar exams and equipping lawyers to be more client centric are part of the zoom discussion.

What will be left standing?

Of course, there is a part of me that wants to roll out my publications and say, “I told you so” and reinvigorate the crusade. This time in my mind’s eye I’m carrying a flag out front of the pack leading through the rubble of singed yellow legal pads on the ground to higher ground.  But what I know now, is if I do that, I will be lost again.  And my current round of suffering will be for naught.  You see, the practice of law has been dysfunctional for years and apparently, I wasn’t the only one who noticed it.  The change is taking care of itself through the path of COVID 19, which lawyers would call force majeure or “act of God.”  It’s not just the law that will change dramatically after this extraordinary phase of life.  It’s most every business, system, government.

But what about us as individuals? Will we change? And how will we show up post-pandemic?

For me, never again will I minimize a small word of encouragement, a hug with a suffering person, sharing the heart stories and sitting beside (or across the screen from) a client while we navigate their life through change. It may be a change caused by a legal intervention or, as happened this week,  a pandemic that makes them realize they want to learn skills to better communicate with their co-parent. Either way, I’ll be paying rapt attention to what is happening with the people I will serve.

I will go forward and embrace my new role, which is the role that I’ve had all along but took for granted.  But first, I’ll be watching the Andrea Bocelli Easter concert live streamed. And I’ll cry tears that contain many profound emotions while he sings as I sit alone in quarantine on Easter Sunday. Through his concert that’s really a prayer, I’ll proclaim once and for all that I am enough, if I simply choose to be the change I want to see in the law.

Photo by Kat Jayne on Pexels.com

 

 

 

 

Finishing Well

I was asked to contribute a lesson for the book “50 Lessons for Women Lawyers-From Women Lawyers,” by Nora Riva Bergman, which is available soon on Amazon.  Here is my contribution:

In a few  months I’ll be 62 years old. Actress Jane Fonda recently announced she is in her “last act” and although I hopefully have many more years of life, the finish line in my life as a lawyer is more clearly in view.

I want to chart an intentional path for my last act, living mindfully and finishing strong. As I begin the process, I’m struck with paralysis. Where do I want to go? A good starting point might be to reflect on where I’ve been.

I was the youngest in my law school class of 1981, graduating at age 23 and entering full time law practice at age 24.  I’ve had many legal jobs: in-house counsel, associate at firms of varying sizes, solo practitioner and even senior partner at small law firms I’ve formed.  I’d gone to law school to “help people.”  I was a kind and compassionate problem solver, a good listener, and a lover of people from the time I was a little girl.

I launched from law school in one of the early waves of females deployed into the profession. Our role was clear; act like a man.  After all we’d been told that we were taking a spot rightfully belonging to a man with a family to support.

“Mr. Durant died right here at his desk,” I was told by an associate at my first law firm job as he pointed to an office with an empty desk. It was as though Mr. Durant was a warrior who died in battle saving the world.  I got the message.

I dove in as the only female in the firm’s litigation section, charting my course as a workaholic, billing hours like a trooper. I silenced my inner voice and went full speed ahead, learning to be tough. Law school and the lawyers mentoring me convinced me that compassion was a weakness and aggression was a strength.

In my private life I paired with a man also constrained by his job, traveling for business  five days a week. We married and had three children. What was wrong with me? I loved my babies but I was obsessed with being a lawyer.  I heard a new term called “work-life balance” so  I joined the part time work committee of the local bar association. The all -female committee soon disbanded with the summary finding that for women lawyers,”part time” meant shoving all your full -time work into fewer hours and getting paid less.

I navigated as best I could with no women mentors to guide me.  I’d race to little league baseball games, editing documents in the stands while waiting for my son to bat so I could wave and give a thumb’s up, and then race back to the office. I tried to be nurturing but I never took off my lawyer hat, often telling my children to “toughen up” instead of acquiescing to the sorrow of childhood bumps and bruises.   Nannies were enlisted to help assuage working mother guilt. I’d try to mother my children when I came home exhausted from the office.

My marriage began to deteriorate so I stopped practicing law and tried staying home. I was an outcast among the other mothers.  Their conversations were boring and their obsession with their children seemed unhealthy to me. I prepared spreadsheets for class cupcake volunteers and felt incompetent in my new role. I became depressed and like an addict who needed a fix, I yearned for the office.

At the same time, my lawyer father became ill at age 65 and came into my home for hospice care as he was dying. Towards the end he would hallucinate often saying he saw dead lawyer colleagues in the room.  I wondered why the lawyers would show up to him instead of cosmic visits from loving relatives or his golfing buddies.

My father died and I was divorced. Even though I wasn’t working I was “imputed” with the income of a lawyer in the divorce. After all wasn’t that who I was? I had to recreate myself and start making money quickly and the most logical step was to reclaim my lawyer-self.  When I went back to inhabit her skin, I noticed she was different. She was weary, having sustained a whirlwind of life, tragedy, and brokenness.

I set up a law practice focusing on family law and mediation. I’d experienced devastation similar to what my clients were facing. I encouraged clients to find healing, forgiveness and compassion and decided to claim those things for myself.  I still fought for client’s rights and equity, but I did it with dignity, calmness and compassion for all.

I felt more authentic as a person and a lawyer. I began to write. I transported my brother diagnosed at that time with cancer to his chemotherapy appointments. I watched the IV drip, drip, drip of the drug infusing him with life. The writing did the same for me. Each moment in the chair typing was life-giving, healing, rebuilding, and renewing myself.

I wrote and self-published “The Compassionate Lawyer” in 2014 and started speaking to lawyers about compassion in the practice. I mentored several lawyers and helped three women lawyers start their own firms.  I encouraged lawyers to be compassionate problem solvers and for women lawyers to realize we should celebrate our unique gifts and skills as women.

I continue to practice, write and teach about what I’ve discovered.  Earlier this week I saw a woman lawyer in her first few months of practice aggressively tell off a male lawyer on the phone and then hang up only to burst into tears. ”I’m such a wimp for crying!” she declared.

I told her that being tough and aggressive is uncomfortable for many women. We can do it, probably even more biting than men, but is it really who we are? The crying was undoubtedly from the adrenaline but it was also a warning sign of living outside her authenticity. It hurt to watch her minimize her body’s warning and I tried to tell her so, encouraging her to use compassion and dignity instead.   I’m guessing it fell on deaf ears as it would have to me at her age when I ‘d set out to “make my mark” as a lawyer. But at least she is getting a message I was never told.

In my last act, I see a woman enjoying life, available to her three children for long talks instead of saying “I’ll call you after this meeting.”  She is a compassionate, kind person to all she encounters. She practices law in an authentic way that is uniquely hers, until she decides it’s time to stop. That woman will die as far away from her desk as she can get.

From the moment she walked into the doors of law school her identity as “woman” and “lawyer” were permanently fused together. She’s learned many lessons as a woman lawyer. She will claim her journey without regret but with gratitude for the wisdom she’s gained.  And most importantly, she’ll  live out her last act with compassion for herself.

 

 

 

Our Lawyer Legacy, What Gets In The Way?

“ All external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure-these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”- Steve Jobs

It’s a long day as I take my brother to cancer treatment. I sit with him as he surrenders to chemotherapy dripping into his veins, hoping that he’ll be cured.

Across town in hospice, a fellow lawyer is saying goodbye. He’s practiced law for over 40 years.

Not surprisingly, I begin to reflect on my own mortality and significance. Does my life really matter? Am I doing what I was meant to do? What will I be remembered for?

In Living Forward  the authors define legacy as “the spiritual, intellectual, relational, vocational and social capital we pass on.” As a lawyer, what gets in the way of leaving a lasting legacy ?

1. Ego. Much of our identity is tied up in our label as “lawyer.” We joke about the reputation of lawyers but deep down we feel our title brings prestige and worthiness. My dad used to say, “People say they hate lawyers but they usually love their own lawyer.”

When we tie up our entire identity in the work we do, it limits our impact and influence in other areas of our lives. Can we let down from the public lawyer persona to be authentic? Do we keep aspects of ourselves “on the down low” because we worry if people really knew us it could be bad for business?

Question: Are you doing things that look good on paper, on the bottom line or at the firm, but that are draining you emotionally? Is there something that your heart yearns to do, but your are too afraid to undertake?

2. Scarcity Mentality. Lawyers live in the constant shadow of the billable hour. From the moment you hit the door in the morning every minute literally counts. Time spent outside your billable events leaves more time to make up in the office. When we plan vacation we frontload hours so we aren’t so far behind when we get back, and field emails on vacation before our family awakens to go to the beach. A part of us is never far away from a timesheet.

We may believe if we don’t take every client that comes our way now, cases might not come tomorrow. We take cases without discernment and end up doing unpaid work as a result of retainers running out or a judge who won’t let us withdraw. Then we become self deprecating and frustrated for having taken the case in the first place.

Question: Do you leave your dreams at the doorstep because you feel it’s about survival instead of destiny?

3. Constant immersion in toxicity. Every day we deal with clients with grave wounds, both physical and emotional. We handle the circumstances around life’s most devastating events. We are expected to “rescue” our clients from disasters they have often created themselves, so we think about these negative fact patterns over and over even on our supposed “off” time.

This constant immersion into the darkness of life leaves us little time to dream, reflect or connect with our interior life. A life’s desire can be lost in the fog, recast in our mind as nothing more than a whim, or tucked away as “too risky.” The failure to unplug for even short periods from the office, returning email or calls and churning cases in our heads means we are never fully present for our loved ones and the beauty of life.

Question: When is the last time you unplugged, and spent time totally away from work, for even a short period time? Are you exercising self care?

4. Personal and financial insecurity. When we have been successful lawyers we risk prestige and prosperity by branching out. What will everyone think? How can we give up the golden handcuffs? A lawyer friend chucked his law practice and opened a gourmet spice store in a trendy part of my hometown. Lawyers flocked to his store because it was extraordinary, but also to study him as an example of uncommon courage and authenticity. Sadly, the lawyer died unexpectedly at age 46, only a short time after the store had opened.

Lawyers are often the caretakers of less productive friends or family members, sometimes even supporting others who have not made good choices with their lives or finances. They look to us as “having it all” and don’t hesitate to ask for handouts or help.

Question: What would it take to set boundaries with your money? Are the things that you acquire from wealth blocking you from taking risks to fulfill your heart’s desire? Are there people you are enabling by “helping” financially?

5. Lack of transition planning. In my first law firm job over thirty years ago the partners took me by the macabre office of the named senior partner pointing to a dusty wooden desk telling me that is where he had dropped dead. Was that supposed to inspire me?

New lawyers claim the older lawyers aren’t moving over to make room. I recently suggested that a young lawyer ask an older lawyer to coffee, to get hints on how that lawyer had built the type of practice the young lawyer aspired to create. The older lawyer did not offer any advice and the impression was that the older lawyer was “hoarding” the work for himself.

It can be a blow to our ego when clients we introduce to younger lawyers decide to transition their work to that younger lawyer excluding us. Thoughtful transition and passing the baton can play in to insecurities and make us question our relevance.

Question: Are you sharing your wisdom and experience with younger lawyers? Are you encouraging a younger lawyer who is struggling?

As lawyers we owe it to ourselves to ask these questions at all stages of the practice, not just as we move into the final chapters of our professional careers.

Are you on target for your legacy?

I love to coach lawyers! If you are interested in hiring me as a coach contact me: kim@attorneymediate.com