My BigFirm job was rotting on the vine, and I was desperate to find something that would get me out of their office. Mind you, I think I could have stayed there for quite a bit longer before they finally kicked me out. Plus as we all found out in March of 2020… work was about to get a lot weirder.
At this point, I was reaching out to any old colleague I could remember trying to find someone who was hiring that will get me out of my empty BigLaw office. I started reaching out to <shudder> headhunters, just on the off chance they had something worthwhile.
In this limited instance… someone did.
A headhunter I spoke to contacted me back and told me she had a smaller branch office that needed someone ASAP. I figured it was going to be another crap offering like every other one a headhunter had offered up for me, but she told me the managing attorney’s name… and I did a double take. I knew the guy. And he was a really nice guy. He had been opposing counsel on a big case I had been involved with years ago. Sometimes you walk away from a case and just really like who you work with; in litigation, it is damn rare. It happens, but not frequently. This had been one of those rare instances.
We had a phone interview, where we both started chatting quite literally about old times and the people we knew in common and what had happened in the interim since the case we had both been on had ended. We met up for coffee at Starbucks as the ‘formal’ interview and he said I was hired if I wanted it. He showed up to the interview in sweats and a T-shirt as he was a krav maga instructor and was showing up after class to talk with me. The more I found out about him, the more I liked him. I told him the full disclosure of what was going on at my current firm. I liked the guy too much not to disclose something which could still come back to bite me. He listened and said that none of those people were clients of his firm, so fuck ’em. He didn’t care but he appreciated the honesty.
I quit the BigLaw firm and I am sure several people breathed a huge sigh of relief. I’m sure it was completely coincidental (a friend later told me it wasn’t) but the day after I put in notice, the office for the first time since I had started working there sent out a mass email saying they were having a happy hour and the first drink was being bought by the managing partner. I didn’t go. On my last day there, I think there were all of three people I said bye to who might notice I was missing. I only told one where I was going… and that attorney swore he wouldn’t tell anyone he knew where I went.
The new firm I started at was a midsize regional firm. Probably 50 attorneys in the main office, but I was in the satellite office, and there were only 4 or 5 of us. I say 4 or 5 because one attorney was in the process of retiring and was trying the tie up the last very few cases he couldn’t disentangle from; so he was nearly never there — which was a shame cause he was hilarious. It was a great office. I honestly liked everyone I was working with. The managing attorney was a great guy with tons of experience and very approachable. The rest of the team were snarky and funny and right up my alley. And my office had a beautiful view. I felt like I had finally clicked. The only weird part about the office was that I had to take 3 different elevators to get to it every day. It had apparently at one point in the past been a tiny museum of sorts and therefore was weirdly difficult to access for security purposes. The building wasn’t going to renovate just to fix access to the floor just because the museum left, but ultimately that too.. sorta added to the charm of the office. It was eclectic, and so were the people.
I started at my new firm Mid-February 2020. After about three weeks in that nice office, I pretty much never saw the inside of it again.