1 week down

I have one week at The Firm under my belt.

By my calculations, that means I have a mere 442 weeks until I (hopefully) make partner, and only 1,819 weeks until retirement!

The first week was fine, and was 99% training and orientation. We traveled to Indianapolis for our firm-wide orientation, and I somehow acquired the second-worst migraine I’ve ever had, in my whole life, and it stuck it to me with a vengeance from yesterday late morning until late evening. It was wretched, and it actually made me get sick–that’s only happened once before, I think. I had to run out of my orientation session and sprint to the restrooms… not exactly what I wanted to occur while I was getting "oriented," you know.

I felt badly because I was sitting there in the meeting room just kind of constantly rubbing my temples, neck, and pressure points just trying to keep the intense pain down (and thus, keep the nausea at bay) and I’m sure it must’ve appeared rude to the speakers. (But, then again, certainly not as rude as me actually getting sick right there in the meeting room, or having to constantly keep running out of the room, I suppose.)

So, other than a day of massive head pain and nausea, the first week was fine. But I’ll be glad when Monday arrives with actual work to do rather than just orientation, because I am not quite sure how many more times we could be told about our orientation subjects before it made us all just go crazy (most of us had been subjected to the same orientation subjects at least twice at different times this week, not counting the presentations of most of them last summer!).

So actual work is actually looking pretty good.

During orientation, there was a panel of associates who discussed their typical days at the firm, and I was extremely pleasantly surprised to hear them each say that they left the office (on most days) by regular "quittin’ time," around 5:00 or 5:30. Now, each of them also got in to the office in the morning relatively early (around 8:00ish or a bit before), but still, that’s awesome.

Each of them also stressed that when they were in the office, they really focused on being as efficient as possible and trying to bill as close to every single minute as they physically could, thereby allowing them to leave early and work minimal evening and weekends. I love that that’s a possibility at The Firm; that you can do a great job without becoming your job and losing your personal life. Besides, I’m very much a get-in-and-get-to-it person at work. I don’t like to dilly-dally around; if I’m at the office, I want to be plowing through some bizness. So hopefully, after some time to adjust for the learning curve, I’ll be able to get myself on a similarly efficient schedule.

Oh–and if I don’t discuss case-specifics here relative to work? That’s because I can’t. Seriously. The attorney-client privilege is super, super important, a vital part of an attorney’s existence and the overall functioning of the legal system, and as such, I can say things like, "I’m working on a really fascinating jurisdictional issue" or something vague like that, but I cannot go into detail. I just wanted to point that out, especially for my family members who read this and may not realize that–I’m not leaving you out of the loop because I don’t care to talk about work; it’s that I’m leaving you out of the loop because that’s part of how we serve our clients.

Until next time…

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