The Nadir

Going forward this blog will alternate between 1) life in law, and 2) the law. Hopefully 1 will be interesting to people, and 2 will be useful lawyers. Lawyers may find both interesting and useful but they hardly count as people do they 😉

So the “life questions” one thinks of at 2am on a Friday night when they are still in the office and doing filing and they now that they will have to be back on Sunday:
• Am I doing this inefficiently, could I do it faster without compromising on accuracy?
• After working a 19hour day yesterday and being back in the office at 8:30am today is it possible possible to do anything without errors?
• Is it possible to do highly iterative, unstimulating work perfectly or will there always by a typo somewhere?
• Am I wasting my life or is this an investment that everyone has to make?
• Is staring at screens, doing this repetitive menial work making me dimmer? Really, is the fact that I am doing this, for free and eagerly an indication that I am not intelligent enough to ever be successful?
• If this is an investment of time/life, why is this the investment?
• Is this really making me more able to manage my clients’ legal risk or enhance their comercial opportunities?
• Has this training contract taught me process but made me dimmer and a less capable thinker?
• So my friends work as insurance brokers and underwriters, they work less hours, their work is more enjoyable and they get paid more than me. Other friends work as bankers (if they are not being made redundant), they work less hours, their work is more enjoyable, they get bonuses and regardless of those bonuses they get paid more than me. Other friends are civil servants (in Australia), they work SIGNIFICANTLY less hours, can go surfing regularly and get paid more than me. My secretary works less hours, gets paid 1.5*her hourly wage when she works beyond 5:30pm and regardless of that overtime gets paid more than me….
• What the F***? am I doing with my life?