Icarus


And for a moment I got to admire the glory of the sun at its brightest… Without a single care of the consequences. And without as much as feeling of regret, I am falling from the graces of the sky, from Helios, the sun god’s domain. Falling beyond my station into the depths of the abyss.

I generally operate under the philosophy that you work to live, not vice versa. Part and parcel to that, no job defines my life nor does it take over my life. And I’m never so invested in a job that I couldn’t quit if I wanted to. 

Regardless of the above… This one hurts.

So for the past few years I’ve been working as an insurance defense trial attorney. Not a fabulous job to be sure, but it was great career experience and was definitely a resume booster. Plus it helped that it was for a company with very high brand recognition.

The problem was, the city I was working in had one of the more dysfunctional offices this company had (at least from apocryphal stories we heard). I’ll end up coming back in the next few weeks to stories from this office, but today’s story is not about that. You see, one of the overriding issues at this insurance defense office was the workload (for a plethora of reasons). It was huge. So big in fact that as an attorney, you couldn’t actually manage the caseload. Internally it was referred to as managed malpractice — initially as a joke and later as accepted truth throughout the office.

Many attorneys left over this. I ended up having a conversation with the managing attorney which convinced me I needed to leave as well. So I began my job search in earnest yet again. It is significantly easier to find a job when you have a job, you’re basically considered to be already vetted if you are working for someone else. I had a handful of interviews before I landed the seemingly impossible.

A top 25 firm — As in the biggest of the big worldwide. I usually don’t bother applying because normally they don’t seem to even get back to me to give me the time of day, but hey why not. I originally applied for an associate position, but the HR rep got back to me and said they weren’t really looking for someone like me for those positions (not 100% sure what that meant… but whatever) but they did have a counsel position (non-equity track) which I seemed to fit the bill for and they suggested I apply for that. So I did, and lo and behold they setup an interview post haste.

The interview process almost seemed fasttracked. After the suggestion to apply for counsel, the interviews were setup nearly the same week.  I showed up to the firm for the interview and was surprised to find it was the same place I had shown up for the arbitration a couple months before. I got off the elevator and it hit me where I was. I hadn’t really taken note of the firm name when I had shown up before… mostly because of the above reasons that they never hired people like me.

The HR lady came out to greet me and I mentioned that I had been a witness at an arbitration here a few months ago to her. It is passed off as interesting coincidence and nothing more by HR. I’m brought down to talk with 2 partners individually. I have really good interviews with both, but randomly I end up also mentioning to each of them that I had just recently been there for an arbitration as a fact witness. I talked very briefly about the case and in fact they joked with me a bit about it since we all knew the various players (at least peripherally) involved; and it was again dismissed as a slightly interesting story and little more. One of the partners told me that their firm actually handled the employment issues for my previous firm from the arbitration… and “oh boy did he have a lot of employment cases with them.” (i.e. my prior firm was consistently and constantly sued for employment issues… no big surprise there). 

I was offered the position within the week. I put in notice shortly thereafter at my current insurance job where I was considered to be a mid-senior attorney at this point. Part of the paperwork to onboard at the big firm was conflicts paperwork. They wanted a list of every case I had been involved with in the past several years, which was substantial considering my workload at the insurance company. Included in that listing were also a fair number of cases from the plaintiff firm (which had as defendants most of the larger companies in this state), a handful of probate and immigration cases, and of course I put on the list that I was a fact witness for the arbitration. Because, well, I don’t really know; for completeness sake I suppose, plus I had already mentioned it multiple times and no one cared… anyway… it can’t be a conflict since I was a non-party and had no representation of any party and again… I was just a fact witness (this is actually true from a legal and ethical standpoint… there is zero conflict of interest for any party involved merely because an attorney is a fact witness in relation to a client’s case. Unless I specifically, not the firm as a whole, was going to be representing the client in the matter I was testifying about… this is actually a horribly short restatement of an actual ethics decision; also of note would be that I was working in a completely different section and had nothing to do with the employment section at all).

Anyway, I show up at the firm and it is everything you see in movies about law firms. The office was at the top many floors of one of the tallest buildings downtown. All the attorneys had a windowed office with a nameplate out front. When I showed up on day one, my name was on my office door. The breakroom was something I had previously only dreamed about. Huge, it had couches, it had a large coffee bar, it had a soda fountain, there were snacks… all of it free. It was just there in case we wanted anything. I had staff… coming from the insurance company which was setup to feel like we were working as solo attorneys in a weird office-share situation, this was incredible. All you had to do was think you wanted something and it showed up for you. The law firm was the size of a small city. It had a fair sized postal service in it, just for the firm; it had a massive staffed copy center, just for the firm. It had training rooms and staff working to do nothing but training you and your personal staff, it had a full library with more librarians working in it that most public libraries have at one point in time. It had event and catering staff… for the firm. None of this is hyperbole. It was crazy what I had access to. You want a digital subscription to (literally fill in the blank with anything) they already had a corporate subscription and here is the login and password. I literally couldn’t think of something that had I asked, wouldn’t have been provided very quickly from staff within the firm dedicated to doing just what I was requesting.

To say that the firm was oozing money was an understatement. unlike certain other firms I had interviewed at, none of the money here was being spent ostentatiously. It was all focused on business. Everything had a business purpose, there was no extraneous decoration in the office and it didn’t look like they were spending money just to spend money. No, they spent money on a massive server farm several floors down to create a network most universities would be jealous of. And this was mirrored in their other offices. It boggled the mind. I literally couldn’t believe how lucky I was to have been hired here.

I was let go one week later.

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