From the outside looking in, one might think that lawyers eat luxury meals for lunch and dinner; martinis and bleu cheese salads for lunch, and rich French red wines with steaks and lobsters for dinner every day. It’s not true. Real lawyers eat fast food because there isn’t time to eat anything else.
This accounts, in no small part, for the wealth of soft bodies and plump profiles of so many in the legal profession.
Take yesterday for me, for instance. I had a reasonably healthy breakfast of coffee and oatmeal. Then I worked through a client meeting and preparation for a mediation. I waited until the last minute to leave for the mediation so I could get as much work done as possible. The mediation was in Valencia, about forty-five minutes away from my office. So on the way in, I got some drive-thru salty fat burger and an unintentionally ironic diet cola.
The mediation began at 2:00 and lasted until 10:00. At about 6:00, I had a slice of pizza which was ordered in by the mediator. The mediation concluded at close to 10:00 at night, by which time I was running out of gas and wanted to come home to The Wife and the critters. That meant no time for a real dinner anywhere with anything like vegetables in it; instead, there was more drive-thru.
I’m still really burnt out from the stress and duration of the mediation. Mediations give me a small taste of the emotional roller coaster of someone in combat — they require that when it’s our turn to work with the mediator, we be as “on” as a trial requires, and at the same time significantly more open and honest to work towards a collaborative solution to the case. After that, it’s a lot of waiting. For the attorney, that means doing a lot of hand-holding for the anxious clients, who sit around with no further input for long periods of time.
Fortunately, my clients yesterday were very cool people with whom I would probably enjoy socializing outside of the work context. That made it a little bit easier, and when they realized just how much time they were going to have on their hands, they were grateful that I told them to bring some other things to do (they’re schoolteachers, so they brought in papers to grade; we learned that Adolf Hitler and his wife Eva Braun committed suicide the day before they got married — must have been a grim reception — and that “Gorge” Washington had a very simple house made of cherry trees).
I also can take my time getting in the office this morning; I had blocked off the morning to return to Valencia to depose of the parties in this case but now that it’s settled I don’t need to go back. I can log in to the office remotely and work from home if I need to, but I will go in later this morning. If I don’t make it in by 8:30, though, I won’t feel too bad, after last night’s marathon.
A consistent diet of not getting home until eleven o’clock is not a recipe for the kind of home life I would like. This sort of thing is fortunately rare and The Wife is really very nice about it. A consistent diet of fast food is not a recipe for the Adonis-like body I’m sure The Wife would prefer I have. That sort of thing, however, is more likely to be repeated in the future.
