Becky Turtle

2004-06-16T08:09:00.000-07:00

I think I'm abandoning this thing. A lot has happened since I last wrote. Someone in my office was giving me shit about this blog, and I decided to stop writing it. It was like another straw on the camel's back in an already strange department. For a while there the office politics got really ugly. I was thinking about taking an offer from a different firm and then a medium-term project opened up overseas so I'm actually camped out in a London apartment and have been flying back and forth for the past couple of weeks between offices. I should be fully moved in in London for a stint that will last maybe two years. That's one of the best things about working for a really big firm -- you can get the hell out of dodge for a while and have a complete change of scene, change of co-workers, change of partners, change of clients, and you haven't actually quit or been fired. And if you want to come back you can. I don't know if I'll want to go back. So far the folks in the London office are pretty cool.

2004-05-27T07:25:00.000-07:00

So for a couple of days there I was getting little post-it notes left in my desk or in the middle of a stack of papers, one even on the door to my office, that said "BeckyTurtle, I know your secret" or "BeckyTurtle, you look cute today," or "BeckyTurtle, I know what you're thinking."

They used the name "BeckyTurtle" not my real name. Which means only one thing.

Anyway the notes have stopped but I am not sure who it was, or who else knows, or who else might have seen the notes, or what is going on.

If you're the person who was leaving the notes, please email me. I want to talk to you.

2004-05-25T19:43:00.000-07:00

Things are getting pretty weird here. I am not sure what I should say about it.

I get the feeling someone has been reading this, is about all I should say. Maybe I take it down.

Work is in a funny stressful phase where we all have to pretend not to be stressed because the summer associates are here and we need to let them think the whole profession is fun and games.

One of the summer associates paid for his first two years of tuition at a top 10 law school through online gambling. He makes a ton of money betting on these offshore casino sites, like on the WNBA and ice hockey and things. Not baseball or football though. He's either going to be a lawyer or do this professionally. Interesting.

2004-05-19T18:34:00.000-07:00

When I first started at the firm, I'd been here maybe six or seven months and I got sent to do a closing for a small business that I didn't know anything about. The seller was a tennis buddy of one of the partners here -- actually, the guy who keeled over at my desk a couple of weeks ago. He's doing much better, and has even come in a couple of times, escorted by his worried wife. He's not working though -- it was just to visit, and to divvy up a bunch of work. Anyway. It was his wife's tennis buddy, and it was just a little sale, and the deal was pretty easy and so the partner's approach was pretty laid back, and on the morning of the closing he got called into a crisis with the financing of this very very very big supermarket deal he was on. So he kind of ran into my office and handed me a redwell and told me to show up at a firm I'd never heard of for a 2:30 closing.

Of course I panicked because I didn't know what I was doing. I ended up calling a fifth-year associate about four times during the closing itself, because the buyers counsel kept asking me questions I didn't know the answer to. I would excuse myself as professionally as I could, walk out into the hall, and call him on the cell, trying really hard to remember exactly what I needed to ask. It was very embarrassing. Everyone knew I was an inexperienced idiot, but I was trying so hard not to let anyone know that I hadn't done this before. I mean, looking back on it it's pretty embarrassing. There really wasn't much for me to do at all. But the partner's file was a mess, and there were a couple of documents he didn't have, and of course I had no common sense or experience or judgment so I would panic every time the buyer's counsel asked for something that wasn't clearly labeled with the exact words he would ask for it in. (Like, he asked for the "noncompete" and I didn't feel completely confident that the "Agreement of Nonsolicitation and Noncompetition" was the right one.)

The seller got sort of stressed out because of how serious and nervous I was. Buyer's counsel was pretty nice, though -- an experienced lawyer from a small firm. I should have loosened up and joked around with him, but I didn't know if that would be really bad to do. Anyway, he sort of calmed the seller down whenever I would leave the room. And the Buyer himself was so excited to do the deal. He brought shiny silver dollars for everyone in the room -- Seller, Bank, Bank's counsel, his attorney, and me. That was pretty cool.

I've lost count of how many closings I've been to since then, but that one was so fresh and terrifying, and I was so relieved when it was over, and the silver dollar made it all feel like a big deal, that it will always seem important. Even though it was just a rinkydink little franchise.

2004-05-18T09:58:00.000-07:00

Hmmmm. I'm not really sure what to do about this. I was playing around with this site counter thing and you can tell what websites people were looking at you from. One person found me by looking at Google and searching "pale flabby belly" which doesn't really sound like me, although I'm not as tan as I'd like to be right now. But you try working inside as much as I do and looking better, and then we'll talk. Anyway, I discovered a guy who has linked to my site, which is nice, but he's also linked to my boss's site, which I've been reading on the sly with much amusement. Which means it's not going to be long before someone, like my boss, figures out that I'm here blogging too.

Which I don't know if he can say anything about it, since he's doing it too. And I know some of the skeletons in his closet, let's just leave it at that, so if I had to I guess I could offer up some threats of my own. But still it makes me nervous.

2004-05-18T09:51:00.000-07:00

Attention summer associates:

If you don't know how to dress, you should really ask someone who does before you show up at your summer job. And it shouldn't be your mom, because she doesn't know.

Or you should go work in Boston or DC, where it seems like you can get away with, well, looking a lot less put together. It doesn't fly here, that's for sure.

2004-05-17T15:39:00.000-07:00

Here's another test post. I was surfing around some law blogs and found one called Memory's Outbox and noticed that he said you can let people leave comments so I looked and lo and behold I found a button that seems to do so. I don't know if it will work or not but it's worth a try.

Now I know there are people reading what I write you can actually talk back if you want. Be nice though, or I'm not going to tell you anything interesting. Maybe it's not that interesting even now. I don't care, I'm telling this stuff because it's just about all I've got to tell, these days.

2004-05-17T14:50:00.000-07:00

There's this great rumor at the firm that I am proud to have helped start, a couple of years ago, with one of the associates (now a partner) in Tax. (Isn't it wierd how tax folks, who should be the geekiest ones, turn out to be really fun? IP lawyers too -- way cooler than you'd initially think. It's the ERISA and the environmental lawyers who are a lot less interesting. And health care people seem more uptight than the rest. I don't know if it's universally true but its definitely true here, and a couple of my law school classmates confirm it at their firms.) Anyway, back to the rumor. There's a legend of "the blackball" that I started at a summer associates cocktail party two or three summers ago, that's kind of taken on a life of its own. I don't remember how it originated, but I ended up telling one of the summers that they didn't have to worry about getting the blackball and over the course of the next week three of them separately came to me and asked me about the blackball, and one came to my buddy in Tax and asked him, and we got a gleam in our eyes over lunch one day and the whole thing sprouted. I embellished the story over time so now this is our story:

After your first year, every year you're at the firm you get one "blackball point" per year. So second years have one point, third years have two points, etc. Partners, any partner, get 10 points, and that's a blackball. We tell the summers (or occasionally a real wanker of a lateral, I can think of one who actually believes in the blackball system) that in any year you have the choice of using your blackball points on anyone who is being considered for a job here, or who is having an annual review done. Since all of that takes place around August or September, we can use blackball points on summer associates or regular associates. We tell the summers, as if to comfort them, that it's rare that people waste their blackball points on a summer, because it's better to save up another year and hit them harder after they start as an associate, when you've got an extra blackball point to count in the vote. Plus, we tell them, it's hard, though not impossible, to annoy anyone in a summer that much more than some of the annoying folks who are here all the time. The partners might get more than 10 points with seniority, but all partners definitely get 10 points, and (we're fuzzy about this part) we think, but can't confirm, that 10 is definitely enough to get rid of someone. So if three fourth-years have it in for you, well, you'd better hope there's not anyone else willing to cast a blackball vote. Enough people are in on the blackball thing that it's got reasonable credibility among some of the first and second year associates, plus the lateral that a bunch of us don't like. And of course if someone asks about it and gets an "I don't know what you're talking about" response they think it just means they've been blackballed or they're being fed a line.

These little games get us through some of the really late nights. If you're not working at a big firm you probably think this is wacko, but trust me. It makes the time pass, and it's innocent fun.

2004-05-13T13:49:00.000-07:00

Okay, now that I know people are reading this with my handy new site counter I guess I should tell you what my deal is: I am a sixth year corporate lawyer somewhere in California. I am thirty three years old, single, no kids (yet. Maybe ever, although my mom is badgering me). There's a guy in the firm I sometimes fool around with but it's not like a steady thing, especially since he's married. Which is usually just fine with me -- I get the fun part without having to deal with his dry cleaning and all that crap. I used to be a runner but not so much these days. I like my job okay but sometimes it gets to me. This blog is where I vent. My name is not really Becky. From now on I won't use anyone's real names or even real initials on this blog because I don't want to be found out. I might go back and change people's names just in case. Please don't try to figure out who I am or where I work.

There's a partner in my firm who has a blog, and nobody but me knows its him. He does NOT know that I have a blog, and I am not going to link to him in case he figures it out. Not that he could do anything, I mean, it seems like we would cancel each other out, right? But it just sounds like a controversy I do not want in my career just now. I'm doing pretty good, and I haven't gotten any signals that partnership is a long shot for me and I don't want to screw that up. Mostly I don't think people here even know what blogs are. I didn't until a couple of months ago. They're pretty cool and now I check up on a handful a couple of times a week or so. It's kind of addictive. So is writing in it, although sometimes things get too crazy here and I sort of forget about it or just want to stare out the window instead of writing. I'm on the city side of the building not the ocean side but it's still a pretty nice view.

2004-05-12T19:35:00.000-07:00

I don't think it worked.

Wow -- it did work. It's the next day. And 15 people have visited. Cool!! Hi guys. I wonder who you are? I wonder if you're lawyers? I wonder if I know any of you? If I do, I wonder if you know me?

I guess I better watch what I say a little more.

2004-05-12T19:32:00.000-07:00

This is a test post. Ethan is here in the office killing time before a date and promised me he would install the site counter. Which he said would be easy but which has taken a pretty long time for something easy. Now let's see if it works.

2004-05-12T16:59:00.000-07:00

The first batch of summer associates are getting here next week, and then I guess we'll be getting another bunch of them a couple of weeks after that. I can't really remember. There are the usual office scrambles in preparation for their arrival. L from human resources stuck her head in my office this afternoon trying to see if I needed my second chair. Yes, I need my second chair. Even if it's covered up with a stack of papers. I'm a sixth year associate, I'm not giving up my second chair just to cover the butts of the recruiting team who didn't bother to count up the right number of chairs for the summer class they've been working on bringing in for the past six months. It's ridiculous. Somehow there's always this sudden realization that we have more or fewer summers than we'd planned offices for and this frantic shuffling around of desks and rearranging of a corner of the library and I wonder, you know, why does it happen every year and why is it always such a scramble? And don't the recruiters know these summers won't know the difference, and won't care?

There's the usual griping by the assistants about who's assigned to support summers and who isn't (and how come they are never told what the deal is going to be until a day or two before the summers arrive) and whether it's fair and whether the summers are guys or girls and whether they're cute and whether they're the smart ones or the dumb ones. (The dumb ones are actually much easier to support than the smart ones, is the word in the assistant pool.) Helen's in the midst of all this so I get the rundown on how these summers act to the staff, which I will occasionally make sure the hiring partner knows, if it's egregious or extra sweet or something. Actually I'm not sure anyone cares except the staff if you're extra sweet to the staff. And actually I'm not sure if the hiring partner cares that much if you're egregiously obnoxious to the staff -- everyone has gotten an offer here for at least the past few summers, I think, unless I'm forgetting someone. But trust me, I know who from the last two or three summer classes Helen and her posse of support staff friends think is a total asshole, and I'll give Helen a wink and call them up if I have an especially boring and nitpicky rush assignment for an especially jerky client. So even though it probably won't affect your offer, it'll affect your life to be a jerk to the staff. I also take no pity, though, on the summers who are insincerely, ass-kissingly, ingratiatingly nice to the staff. That gets you less respect and more abuse from me and Helen and her pals than just being a straightforward asshole.

I didn't go to very many of our recruiting parties this year so I can't remember if there's anyone particularly good looking showing up for the summer. A couple of the tax guys and one of the other corporate junior partners and two of the coolest of the paralegals and take bets on which summer associate a certain estate planning partner is going to end up dirty dancing with at the midsummer party, and which summer associate is going to cause the most gossip, and which one is going to be the one we're most outraged about if they get an offer. And for those of us who are single, which of us will be the first to kiss a summer associate. We have to place our bets in the first week they get here, and it's funny because it's not that easy to predict. But it makes the summer pretty entertaining because we act all friendly and we go out to lunch with them and try to instigate things to make the betting pool go our way.

2004-05-10T12:34:00.000-07:00

This firm pays 3/4 of the cost of a pretty swanky gym membership. It starts out at half and for partners the firm pays the whole cost. It's a pretty nice perk -- when I've thought about backing off and going to a bank or a VC firm it's not just the pay cut that makes me think twice about it, it's the gym membership. Because I've gotten pretty used to the place -- an ordinary gym just wouldn't compare -- but there's no way I'd ever step up and pay the whole cost myself, especially if I was working on a lower salary. Anyway, I manage to go only a couple of times during the week and usually one weekend day I take a class: yoga or Pilates or sometimes spinning. I was hooked on spinning for a while but haven't done it in a bit.

Usually I go mid to late afternoon, if I've passed along a set of drafts to a partner who is going to review them and get them back to me on his way out of the office around seven or so, I know I have a couple of hours to kill before they're ready for me. Today I went earlier because I had a lag and I knew my afternoon would be a mess. Anyway it's not unusual to see a celebrity or two there, this being LA and all, but today I was on the elliptical trainer next to Calista Flockhart. !! She really is tiny. She asked me what time it was, but otherwise I didn't talk to her. I should have told her how much I used to love Ally McBeal.

2004-05-05T09:51:00.000-07:00

Coming in after a weekday out of the office is why I don't take weekdays off very often. Like, never. And why in the last four years I've not taken more than three days in a row off, and only then to go to weddings. It's just too hard to recover.

Four of us girlfriends from college made a vow we'd take a trip at least once a year to stay in touch. I've missed the last two; they came out to California to be with me last year, but I was working on a deal so I only got to spend a day and a half with them.

2004-05-04T13:41:00.000-07:00

I didn't go into work today. I woke up this morning with a migraine, which might have been because I ate nuts last night. I don't get migraines as much as I used to -- thank God! I don't know if nuts are what triggers them -- I went through all these tests a few years ago and got really inconclusive and unsatisfying answers, or non-answers, from the doctor. But I sort of have my own hypothesis that nuts might be one of the triggers.

Anyway I started feeling human around 10 AM so I decided I would play hooky and take myself to the beach. But while I was driving to the beach I decided to go shopping instead and took myself to Bloomingdale's. I'm not liking my butt right now so I skipped the clothing section and went right for shoes and got a couple of good pairs. Check these out, just for fun. And these, which I think I'll enjoy wearing to work. And I had to have these. There's nothing like shoes to make a girl feel good again.

So then I was heading to the jewelry counter and lo and behold who did I see there but S. And he does look noticeably better after his little bit surgery, let me tell you. He grinned when he saw me because he knew he'd caught me at hooky, which I didn't even try to hide. It's not like I don't have anything to hang over his head. He was buying jewelry for his wife. HA. Guilty conscience. The ironic thing is he asked me to help him pick something out for her. I picked out a sort of ugly bracelet, and convinced him that she would love it. And I batted my eyelashes and told him what a good job the plastic surgeon had done and he bought me a pair of earrings. Nice ones. Nicer than the bracelet, that's for sure.

So now I'm home, with a pretty good haul from Bloomie's and I'm going to go for a run and then maybe to the beach after all.

2004-05-03T11:42:00.000-07:00

Finally I'm breathing again. We closed two deals last week and it was madness. I tried to post a couple of times but the screen kept freezing -- I could see what I had written but it didn't publish. And then when I went back to screw around with it those posts got deleted. It wasn't very interesting -- just complaining about work. Helen's not being transferred but her friend is, so she was kind of pissy to me for a couple of days, which when there is a deal about to close is not very cool.

Anyway things are a bit quieter right now. I've got a million little things on my desk that I pushed aside last week to push through the deals but my hours are way up and none of these little things are urgent so I'm playing around a bit.

Been reading the blog of the partner here. He says he got elective surgery over the weekend. I haven't seen him yet today but I wonder what he had done. Maybe love handles tucked. He's not too bad looking as far as partners go, actually. A lot of them get to be decidedly pear shaped the longer they work here, like their chest kind of slid down into their belly. This guy's chest is still a chest. I try to keep in shape by running at least 10 miles a week, although last week I only got six in because it was so hectic. When I was in law school I did a couple of marathons a year. I used to be in great shape, but if you look around here the people who are the best looking are definitely the assistants or maybe the associates right out of law school who haven't gained their 15 pounds and gotten the sleep-deprived pale flabby look of a seasoned lawyer.

Maybe I'll start tanning a little bit.

2004-04-22T01:29:00.000-07:00

The corporate group had a wine tasting event tonight -- we do these group social events every couple of months or so and they're actually pretty fun. After about the fifth flight of wine people started getting rowdy and ordering in real drinks because it seemed like the flights were taking too long to come out. And from there it just devolved. We have a pretty good group here. I mean some wankers are to be expected but we have fewer real blowhards than you would think. Anyway I had a cosmo or two and when I was going to the ladies room I ended up standing in the foyer for a minute or two talking to the partner whose blog I've been reading. He was pretty well lit up too, and was being a little bit flirty with me, and I told him that I knew a secret about him and ran into the bathroom and laughed for a while in there. And he was waiting for me when I got out and made me tell him. I don't think he was expecting that his blog was the secret (wonder what he was thinking about?). He looked relieved at first and then looked a little worried and he made me promise him I wouldn't tell. This isn't telling, is it? I won't tell anyone in the office. I didn't tell him I had one, so he doesn't know about this one yet as far as I know.
My feet are killing me because I was wearing pretty high heels yesterday and of course a couple of us left the restaurant and went to a bar where we danced for a while. I think a bunch of them are still out right now but there's no way I could drag myself in tomorrow if I had stayed any longer. Flats tomorrow for sure.

2004-04-21T10:03:00.000-07:00

Busy busy busy!

Also think I'm catching a cold. This is a terrible time of year to get a cold.

Ethan says he's going to come over this weekend and teach me how to put in a hit counter. I have no idea if anyone is reading this thing. He said that last weekend though and our schedules didn't work.

2004-04-20T14:17:00.000-07:00

Whoah. It's wierd to be able to read the blog of someone you work with. The partner here who has a blog is going through a midlife crisis or something. He's afraid he's lost his soul.

And he describes people in the firm he thinks have souls, and doesn't include me. Which I don't really like. Just because I don't talk about what I do outside of work at the office doesn't mean I don't have interests -- I still run, and I go dancing sometimes, and see my family when I can. And when these loans are paid off I'll be able to work for a bank or something and have a little more of a life.

He did have links to some pretty cool blogs -- the Uncivil Litigator one I'd already linked to but also this guy is really funny and this chick seems cool, although maybe a bit of a flake. And the associate who emailed me and tipped me off about the partner has a blog too, which is here. She sounds like fun from what she writes about. I don't know how she finds time to do all that stuff. I guess the partner here would think she has a soul.

2004-04-20T09:13:00.000-07:00

There's nothing better than being really busy. I've got two deals that I'm pushing through for an end of the month closing. One's a pretty standard private equity round of financing, and we represent the investor so the deadline doesn't matter to us as much as to the company, though we certainly don't want to be the reason it doesn't close. The other is this really complex agribusiness asset purchase; our client is buying some producers and some processing and canning plants. Some of the assets are here and some in Mexico, so I'm getting to use my Spanish a little. Who would have thought agribusiness would be so cool, but it's really interesting. There are so many pieces in this deal -- so many licenses and permits that need to be transferred, here and in Mexico; all the employment and immigration issues and the federal agricultural statutes as well as the regular diligence and terms that go along with any corporate asset purchase. And I kind of look at my food a little differently when I'm in the grocery store, knowing now about the irrigation equipment leases and the rolling stock of the trucks that move the product down to the canning plants and the entire payroll for the plants. Anyway, I'm pushing through all this stuff with hardly any time for anything else and it's a total rush. There's a bit of a flutter in my stomach which the litigators tell me they have when they go into court. For me it's about what am I forgetting, and what needs to happen first, what's mine and what can be pushed down to a third year, what needs the partner, and how do I keep all these balls in the air that's such a rush. A scary rush but still full of adrenaline.

The partner who had the stroke is at home now, learning to walk again. There was some damage to his left side. I'm thinking I'll visit tomorrow if I can steal a little break in the action.

2004-04-19T08:59:00.000-07:00

I've got clients in this morning and then I'm out of the office for a closing this afternoon, but there's a minor train wreck happening with the assistants. We were down three or four legal secretaries to begin with, which is a lot, and last week we lost a couple in the tax department. So now there's all this scuffling going on about moving people around and Helen's in the middle of it which makes me in the middle of it too. There's no way they're taking Helen away from me. And she wants to stay with me. But there's all this office politics drama going on and Helen's asking me to step up and put in a word for another assistant who works on our floor and who's tight with Helen, and help swing it so she doesn't get moved. This is not where I want to waste whatever small amount of influence and seniority I have around here. Which is not much. But I don't want to tick off Helen either. It's delicate. I'm not doing a very good job dealing with it.

2004-04-18T14:45:00.000-07:00

Okay, so it is upside down week at the office. I just got an email from someone I don't know who told me that there's a partner here who has a blog. I'm not linking to it here because Ethan told me people can tell if you link to them. Which obviously I don't want. But it's very, very wierd to read. I mean, he doesn't have his name on his blog but I totally know who it is, and it's like reading someone's diary or something. It is not his office persona at all. The whole thing kind of creeps me out. In one way it's interesting, you know, to read someone's thoughts when they don't think you know it's them. And I'll definitely look at him in a different light. On the other hand I feel sort of strange about it. It's not necessarily a better light I'm seeing him in. It's like when you walk in on someone and they're picking their nose or something.

And to tell you the truth it was wierd and kind of cool and a little bit creepy to get email from someone I've never met before. I didn't really imagine that anyone would read this. I'm not sure what I think about it now. I don't know how she found out about me.

The partner who keeled over is in stable condition, still at the hospital but now he's talking and they say it looks like he's going to recover, if not full motion, at least a bunch of his functions. I don't know how I'm going to sit at my desk and not keep having flashes of looking over at him and watching him fall over. Tomorrow I've mostly got meetings and so won't have to be in there too much. I might just take my laptop into one of the conference rooms for most of the week, just to kind of get my groove back.

2004-04-17T15:27:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the wierdest day of my legal career. I've been working on a presentation and a paper with a senior partner and he was in my office, leaning over my desk working with me on the paper. I asked him a question about one of the edits he made and when I looked up at him his face looked, well, wierd. He wasn't himself in kind of a spooky way. But sad spooky, not Dracula spooky. I don't know how to describe it. And just as it was registering to me, "he looks kind of wierd, I wonder what's up" a half a second later he lurched to the side and fell down. He hit his head either on my lamp or on the corner of the desk and got a cut that started to bleed, and he knocked over my wastebasket with his arm and so there were papers and a banana peel and soda cans there on the floor with him. He wasn't passed out, his eyes were open but he wasn't talking either.

I freaked out, put a napkin over the cut on his head and called Helen, my secretary, in. I had no idea what to do. When I was in high school I had a first aid certificate but I don't know how I earned it because I just felt panicky and desperate and had no idea if you elevate or try to give mouth to mouth or what apply pressure or what you do when someone falls down on your desk. Helen was very cool and calm. She called security and started taking his pulse and telling me what to do (unbutton his collar and sleeves, take off his shoes, get some water and a cold paper towel for his forehead). I don't know if those are medical things or not but I did them and was glad to and the knot of anxiety and disbelief never really left my stomach. The office was pretty soon full of people, me and Helen and a couple of the corporate partners and eventually some ambulance guys who asked me a bunch of questions about how he looked and what he said and how he fell and took him away.

When he was gone I closed my door and tried to clean up my office and then just sat at my desk shivering. I have no idea what happened to him. One minute we were talking about the order of the sections in this paper and the next he's on the floor bleeding and kind of cold and yellowish-blue and clammy, breathing and moving his eyes a little bit but not saying anything. He's not that old, maybe early sixties. He smokes like a chimney but never seemed particularly unhealthy to me. One of the partners and Helen and I were talking about it and Helen said she was pretty sure it was a stroke, and one of the medics had said that too. I don't know anything about strokes. I've been reading about them a little on the internet.

The partner's wife called in a little later, from the hospital, and she wanted to ask me the same questions the medical guys had asked about just how he looked the minute before he fell and how he was acting while we were talking. I felt like a disappointment because I hadn't noticed anything odd until I looked up at his face, which maybe did look wierd because the left side was droopier than the right, but maybe I'm just imagining that because of what I've read about strokes. Anyway, I didn't have much to tell her but I asked if I could go to the hospital and she said only family were allowed there. I wished I could give her a hug.

I couldn't work so I left and went for a long run and thought about keeling over one day at work and whether I would feel proud of my life so far. Which I'm still thinking about today, back in my office, trying to catch up on the things I didn't finish yesterday.

2004-04-16T09:35:00.000-07:00

My sister and brothers and I are trying to set up a big party for my mom this Mother's Day. My older sister and brother are being kind of jerks about it. I guess they don't mean to, but they don't have the kind of jobs that I've got. My younger brother works for Bank of America, and he's logging more hours than me at the office. But the other two are constantly sending emails and drafts of invitations and ideas about, like, the color of the plates and who should bring what, and they get mad at us for not responding. Just tell me when and where to come. It's not that I don't love Mom. I just have a demanding job. I don't think they get what it's like to have so little energy left over. Especially in my first couple of years I would have to cancel or I would show up late to family stuff. Or I would miss calls. They thought I didn't care about the family. It's not true. It's just hard.

Plus at the Mother's Day brunch it's going to be even more depressing. I get very few days, full days, where I don't go into the office. It's precious time for me. But I know what I'm going to get. Guilt trips from older brother and sister, and my sister in law, for not pulling my weight in party planning and making devilled eggs or whatever. Plus it's always fun to see my nieces and nephews but Mom will look over one of their heads at me, raise her eyebrows, and say, "So, Becky, have you decided when you're going to give me some grandchildren?" And my sister will say something mean like, "Forget it, Mom. She doesn't care about that -- all she cares about is climbing the corporate ladder." Pretending like she's getting me off the hook.

I always thought I would have kids. I still want them. Once upon a time I had a choice to make, and I chose to be a lawyer instead of choosing to be a mom. Which was good, I was too young and way too screwed up and I have no regrets about my decision. I never would have thought I'd be here at thirty-three starting to wonder if I'll ever get to make the decision again. Maybe I should freeze some eggs or something. Most of the female associates I've been here have dropped off the partner track and gotten pregnant. A couple have come back but most just gave up law. I don't know. I cry about it sometimes. It seems like it would be impossible to do both. I don't want to end up like the tax partner screaming at her family with the door closed.

Anyway now I need to respond to all these emails from my sister-in-law.

2004-04-15T11:56:00.000-07:00

The partner I work with is breathing fire today. I guess he came in and made a phone call to one of our clients and asked for the old CFO, not the new CFO, because the contact database wasn't updated when the old CFO was fired. He was embarrassed (and he should have been, because we had to buy the old CFO out of his contract, and it was an involved and protracted negotiation that both he and I were part of, and I can't understand how he forgot in the first place). Anyway, he's asked me to go through all of our clients and make sure the firm database is accurate with the personnel of the company and their correct address, etc.

It's a huge pain in the ass. I've pushed some of it down on a third-year, but a lot of it is just me looking at the files and dictating to my paralegal, "ok, let's see, BigCo just opened a Colorado office, make sure we have that information, you can get it in the annual report, and I think they laid off a bunch of their management, so pull me all the contact cards and let me look at them." I mean, I keep so much of this in my head that I can't just delegate it. Plus it's sort of a rainmaking function -- I call whoever my best contact in the company is and say "hello, hey, Alex, can I just make sure we have everything right, and is the chairman of the board still Pete, yeah, I thought so, and is there anyone new or anyone gone," well, half the time Alex has a question he was meaning to call us about.

But it's a huge hassle (well, except I can IM my friends while I'm doing it, which is kind of fun, since it only takes about half a brain). It means a million voicemail messages and not much uninterrupted time to get real work done. And I know I'm going to lose hours. I mean, it's billable, I guess, especially in the cases where there turn out to be real changes or where they have legal questions or something to tell me. But a lot of it's not, and even the stuff that is -- I have to open a million different matters and bill each one with .1 or .2 and it's just a real pain.

2004-04-15T09:04:00.000-07:00

Nightmare day. Already. More later.

2004-04-14T15:08:00.000-07:00

I sometimes feel sorry for the partners. It's because the savvier clients, even though they like the partners, will go to one of the associates with five or six years of experience to do a lot of the work. One, it's because they can often get us on the phone quicker, and two, it's because they know they're getting something nearly as good for a lot less money. I mean, a partner might write a better letter than me on behalf of the client, but it's not going to be THAT much better, and it might not be better at all. And I don't care whether you've been practicing law twenty five years, writing a decent letter is going to take a partner about the amount of time it's going to take an upper level associate. But it's going to cost the client $200 or $300 more for your letter than for mine. Wierdly enough, the further along you go in the profession, sometimes the less you are able to give your clients a really valuable service.

2004-04-14T09:37:00.000-07:00

I forgot that I drunk-dialed Ethan last night and must have told him that I was having fun with this blog. He emailed me this morning and told me I need to link to other lawyer blogs. He sent me a bunch of sites that he found that I thought he would like. I haven't read them all yet but most of them are boring. This one's pretty cool -- it's a young litigator and he tells it like it is. I like what he says about not being afraid to look stupid. That's not just true with the lawyers you're working with. You have to be able to tell the client you don't know the answer to a question they have. Even harder than that is asking the client for clarification of something the client assumes you know. But you'd better speak up, interrupt and say, "Wait a minute, I'm a step behind you here, could you tell me why we're talking about the Series B investors in connection with this?" It feels horrible the first few times you have to do that. But it's a lot better to have done that than to be reporting on the call to the partner in charge of the deal and have him look at you and ask the question that you should have asked and you admit you don't know. Invariably the question you get is, "Why didn't you ask?" That's when you feel stupid.

For general corporate law stuff this blog is good too. Ethan got all excited about this one as well, but Ethan's more of a geek than I am.

Ethan says he's going to come by this weekend and install a hit counter for me. Cool. It's wierd to think about people actually reading this though.

2004-04-14T08:47:00.000-07:00

So a couple of us from Corporate, and a bunch of guys from Tax and two or three from Environmental went out last night with an eye toward getting the kid from tax drunk enough that he would try to hack into the email system and send some juicy emails. We didn't succeed. Instead we cooked up all the stormiest gossip we might send around the office. I was crying, I was laughing so hard.

But you know, today, sober, I'm remembering some of the stuff that got said. There are very few secrets at law firms, although some stories take a long time to come out. Last night I learned that a tax partner I've always liked and looked up to, who was great to me when I was a first year associate and who still takes pains to have lunch with me a couple of times a year, closes her door and screams -- literally screams -- at her kids on the phone daily. That just creeps me out. Lady, go home to your family. Something is seriously wrong. It's harder to look up to her, even though she's always been a role model and a mentor to me.

And of course we got into all the divorces going on with the more interesting partners. And from what I could tell it looks like there's a romance starting between a couple of the third-years who were out last night, both of whom are married. I do admire the lawyers who can do this kind of work successfully and stay married to the people they were married to when they started. But even among those supposedly happy couples, well. All I know is I've been groped in the back of cabs on the way home from closing dinners where everyone had too many scotch and sodas. When I was a fourth year I had a little thing with a junior partner in litigation, who was "separated" from his wife but has since gotten back together with her. I don't think anyone at the firm knows about that but listening to the talk last night I got nervous. I have some secrets I'd prefer to believe will be kept.

2004-04-13T14:25:00.000-07:00

Truth is stranger than fiction. I was wrong about the tax associate -- he was just joking around, as it turns out. The h.r. people actually sent a memo out threatening us that they're counting pens and paperclips and sticky notes. Are you kidding me? It's already a huge hassle to send a fax or make a photocopy. You have to enter codes identifying you and the client and the matter and if you screw up even one number you have to fill out an end of the month summary report and if you do that too often you have to attend a "procedures" session. Like this is the best use of the people billing out over $290/hour. Their "efficiency committee" should make sure the Internet works around here all the time. When I thought the tax guy had done this it was funny because it was so absurd. Now I'm just depressed.

Maybe I'll see if I can bribe the tax kid to hack in and send out a memo saying the office supply memo was a joke and should be disregarded. I mean, we're all going to disregard it anyway, except the first and second years and the paralegals and the assistants.

The kind of babysitting that goes on in this place is just amazing.

2004-04-13T13:36:00.000-07:00

In the corporate department the partners and the associates who work on deals frequently gripe about the i-bankers, and how much money they make compared to us and how much harder we work. I don't know if they're that bad. The ones I know work pretty hard. Although they do make even more absurd amounts of money than we do. My younger brother is a first year investment banker, and his life now is even worse than my first couple of years here.

One of the 2nd year associates in Tax who used to be an IT guy logged into one of the administration people's email account and sent out this bogus email about office supplies today. Hilarious. It totally sounded like the crazy policies they put forward. There's usually some kind of really mind-numbingly stupid memo circulated around this time of year as they prepare for the summer associates to come -- dress code "clarifications" or mail delivery schedules or refrigerator leftover clean-out policies. What's even funnier about this one is how few people realize the thing that went out this morning was a joke. The tax associates are really funny, which you wouldn't think but there it is. Anyway, it's going to be a little tempest in a teapot and I expect there will be some kind of firm wide investigation into the "hacking" when the H.R. person convinces the partners that it wasn't her (if any of the partners even question the memo -- if they even READ the memo) but I'll put my money on the associate in tax over the "technology committee" of partners if it comes to that.

2004-04-12T08:50:00.000-07:00

I had a pretty good Easter. One of my sisters lives in San Diego and so I spent the day with her and her husband and their two little boys. Playing with them is really fun, and makes me want kids.

I came into the office for a couple of hours last night but didn't get much done. One thing that amazes me about our firm is that the Internet doesn't always work. Like, maybe twice a month goes down for a couple of hours. How does that happen? We have a whole tech support team and reasonably good equipment and this very fancy office and then suddenly you can't send or receive emails from clients. It makes me crazy. Sometimes it's kind of nice because it eliminates the worry that something's just come in by email that's going to change the whole day's priorities. Anyway last night I couldn't get Internet from the office so I revised a couple of agreements and then went home.

2004-04-10T09:53:00.000-07:00

The only thing worse than having too much work is having not enough work. A friend of mine in the environmental compliance group is sweating a little bit. When there's not enough work the partners keep what there is for themselves and the associates start sweating. You can only drag out research projects for so long. Everyone thinks this work is nonstop all kinds of hours and that's usually true. So you'd think when our workload eases up it would feel good and we'd just go take some time off or start hitting the gym again and be happy about it. But we're not normal people. We're lawyers. You worry, because you know your billables are low, and you can't do work if you don't have any, but you don't want to leave the office in case work comes in and you're not there to get it and someone else gets it instead. And you know those low billables are going to look bad at the end of the month, and you start to sweat and you wonder if your practice group is getting a bad reputation or if your rainmakers aren't that good, and if your bonus is going to suck and the managing partner is going to cut back the department. We had a couple of months of slow time my fourth year and it was scary. We all thought we were going to be fired. People think it sucks when it's busy. Well, it does. But it sucks, it really sucks, when it's slow. My friend in environmental is talking to other firms.

2004-04-09T15:41:00.000-07:00

People in LA have too much money. I have a client who's the wife of one of the CEOs we do a ton of work for. The CEO is also best buddies with one of the partners here. Anyway, this woman has a little hobby that she thinks is a business and she "wants nothing but the best" for her little business so she's forever calling me and asking me to read, like, the photocopier service agreement and the lease agreement for her little retail store and the fine print on the invoices she ordered. Then when she gets me on the phone she wants to talk forever, about the color of the new product she's going to do, or the new idea she had. Always she's telling me how "dog-tired" she is or how she's been "working non-stop" on this business of hers. From what I can tell that means chatting up the ladies she does Pilates with and calling me. She keeps me on the phone for huge amounts of time and has these crazy "what if" scenarios. The business, by the way, is preposterous. It's a high-end personalized pet product store and mail order business. She's got like six terriers. Maybe only four but she's nuts over these dogs and has personalized silver dog bowls for each one and all kinds of stuff. I mean, it's not really a business at all -- it's this woman's fantasy about what a business might be, if she really knew anything about running a business at all. So every time she calls me she's saying something like, "I'm thinking about taking the business in a new direction," and telling me about some "Internet community idea" or about the important meetings she's going to have next week that are going to be shocking and exciting.

I don't have time for this. I have to be nice to her, and encouraging to her, because, well, her husband is Mr. Big, not to mention she's over to dinner or playing golf all the time with one of the important partners in this practice group. And she LOVES me. She's all the time calling to "update me on the business" and complain about how exhausting this schedule is for her and how her creative energies are being drained by, well, doing anything practical at all. And when she's not calling me she's sending me inspirational e-cards and things. Which I have to respond to. But, you know, I'm drafting prospectuses and handling mergers and this woman wants to talk to me for forty minutes on whether she should get the new product line manufactured in the United States or overseas and thinks there are important international law issues to discuss. I can only put her through to voicemail so many times before she starts getting bitchy but it is hard always to be nice. She pays her bills, though. And trust me, I bill her for every minute of every call.

2004-04-09T07:12:00.000-07:00

I love mornings here. Nobody on my floor but me is in here this early (and a couple of the IP guys but they're pretty odd anyway) and it's quiet and sunny and I can crank right through the morning's work and feel like I have my act together by the time my assistant and the other associates get in. This place doesn't really start going until 9:30; some partners don't come in until 10 or later. I've always been a morning person and I think that has helped me out in my career because most of the deals we're involved with, maybe three-quarters, have some party who's on the east coast or who uses an east coast lawyer. So they start calling here at the crack of dawn and sending emails that they expect a response to on New York time. The partners I work with like it that I'm here and up and so they can kind of relax about that stuff so when they show up to the office and find fourteen emails and voicemails about some problem with the latest version of the P&S they find a fifteenth email from me taking care of it, or at least telling the East Coasters when they can expect a response.

Anyway I think word got out among the partners that if you were working on a deal with me you could drive your kids in to school or get a morning workout in or have an after-breakfast quickie with your wife and things would still be under control when you got in, you wouldn't need to be on your Blackberry the whole time. So I think I got pulled into some deals because of that and it's turned out pretty good for me -- I was working on stuff that six-years weren't getting when I was three, four years out. I didn't realize when I was starting out how much political positioning shit goes on at these firms, who gets the good work and how you stay friendly with the other associates even while you're sort of hoping you, not they, get on the hot deals. I mean we're friendly too but it's more competitive than they tell you starting out.

2004-04-08T18:51:00.000-07:00

The blogs I read are Tequila Mockingbird, who is a friend of a friend. I used to read one called Patent Pending by a lawyer which I thought was pretty funny but I guess he stopped. And I sometimes read Pound. Also my friend Ethan's blog which is a secret. I guess I shouldn't use names on this. Beckyturtle is a nickname, obviously. In grade school it was my nickname because in my kindergarten class there was a girl who had the same first name as me so somehow the teacher decided it would be clearer if they just used my middle name instead of having two girls with the same first name. And somehow we all just went along with it. Anyway, so I was Beckyturtle for first through fifth grade. The turtle part came because in kindergarten my family gave the class a turtle that had been my brother's and so it became the class pet. My grade school friends called me that. I guess if you know me from grade school you know who this is. But I moved away in fifth grade and when I got to my new school I went back to using my real first name so I don't think anyone is going to find me because of this blog. Which is good because I want to be able to be totally honest here.

2004-04-08T17:15:00.000-07:00

So today was another terrible day. I got totally gored by a client. Which I knew would happen. These guys are generally pretty cool, and the CFO and I have a pretty jokey relationship but the CEO can be a real prick to deal with and he only wants to talk to the partners so even though the senior partner doesn't have a CLUE what's going on and if the client knew the idiotic questions this partner asks me during the conference calls he'd think twice about the $475/hour rate. One of these days the partner is going to think he's pressing the mute button on the speakerphone and his finger's going to slip and the client will get an earful.

(My buddy who's an investment banker says you can completely tell when someone on a conference call has hit the mute button and is talking shit about you during a call. There's something about the silence that's just too quiet. I think it depends on the kind of phones you use. Sometimes I think I can hear it -- a little variation in the static background noise -- but I'm not sure. Guess I'm just not on enough conference calls. Seems like I'm on them all the damn time.)

So this partner, besides having this thing for the mute button on the speakerphone, spends these calls either asking me questions I already gave him the answers to, or saying something to the client that's just wrong, and I need to make faces at him and correct, or he's not paying any attention at all and surfing the ESPN site or shopping for golf clubs while he's listening with about 1/10th of a brain. Anyway. It makes me crazy sometimes. I'm not there yet and so I got reamed, and the partner stood by (although he sort of placated the client in the end). I did make a pretty big mistake, with a UCC filing slip up. We've got enough leverage with the debtor that I don't think it will turn out to be a huge deal but, you know, it's something like $75K which is enough to piss off the client. (They got the numbers mixed up in the call and were thinking it was closer to $60K, which I didn't chime in to correct.)

So the scary part of the day was I was just totally panicked about how many OTHER securities filings for other clients might have lapsed. Crappity crap crap. I'm going to work on it some tonight and then I think I'll see if my paralegal can do some more checking up to cover my ass tomorrow.

2004-04-08T17:12:00.000-07:00

I don't really know how to do this but my buddy Ethan has one of these that's hilarious, only no one knows it's his so I guess I can't tell you about it. But I read it a lot and there are a couple of others I read that if I knew how to link to them I would.

Anyway Ethan says it's really great to get all the shit he wants to complain about out and I can tell you I need a place to do that. I mean my friends don't want to hear it and I can't really talk about work except to a couple of people who really get it, and some days I just want to throw myself off a ledge. So I'm going to try it out for a while.

2004-04-08T17:09:00.000-07:00

Is this thing on?