Just a small town girl, living in a lonely world…

The title of this post is not completely on-point, but I do love Journey, don’t you?

It is a lovely Friday night at the end of an incredibly hectic week, dear readers. Despite the fact that it’s only 9 pm and I am tempted to go to sleep, and the fact that I spent approximately 12 hours on the computer today at work, I thought I’d do a little blogging. I know at least 2 people who are disappointed when I don’t post more often, so here you go (hi, M. & T.)

This week I had a whirlwind trip up to Seattle to attend a fundraising event sponsored by one of my firm’s biggest clients. It was a very positive trip and a great thing career-wise. I got to meet the 2 main in-house litigation counsel of our clients, who I talk to on the phone a lot; tour around their offices (a pretty office park, but the cublcle-ness was a bit reminiscent of Office Space); and spend lots of QT with one of the big partners at my firm. He’s an incredibly impressive man who somehow is able to manage the firm, be one of the highest billing lawyers at the firm, and have a family life. (He doesn’t sleep more than a handful of hours a night, I guess that helps.)

Aside from all that, it was really nice to be in Seattle (albeit for only 24 hours) and I started to think (again) about what it would be like to move to a different city. When you get right down to it, I’m a Pacific Northwest girl, and so, even though I have never lived in Seattle and haven’t even visited it that many times, being there felt like coming home. The feel of the morning air, the trees and the river, the intangible something I can’t describe. On Wednesday night I went to a Mariners game, and being outside as it got colder, everyone bundled up in coats and watching the game, I remembered going to football games in high school, even when it was cold, even when it was raining, it was always so fun. I looked around at the crowd and I felt, for lack of a better word, like myself. There is some fundamental way in which I still feel, even after 10 years of living in Southern California, like L.A. isn’t really “me.”

This is going to sound ridiculous, but at the game sitting in front of us was a guy. He was an all around average guy — jeans, flannel shirt, darling smile, glasses. He talked baseball a bit with the men I was with, but I didn’t get much of a sense of him. Still, I had a strange thought: maybe this is the kind of guy I should be dating. A regular, attractive guy who likes baseball. Someone uncomplicated. Someone who doesn’t work in the entertainment industry. Someone who doesn’t wear designer jeans or spend as much time getting ready as I do. Do guys like this exist in L.A? I guess I won’t find out till the mancation ends.

But I digress. Anyway, I found myself imagining what my life might be like in Seattle. Perhaps I would get a job at a law firm in downtown Seattle and live in a condo and keep living the big city life. Perhaps I would leave the firm life and live outside the city in a real house. I could do anything, really. And being within driving distance of my parents woud be so nice!

Then I think of the reality of what such a change would mean and it’s terrifying. For starters, I’d have to (assuming I want to keep being a lawyer) take another state’s bar. Yuck. Maybe even more daunting, I’d be in a city where I don’t know anybody. Now, I’m a social person, but the friends I have in L.A. are friends accumulated over a decade: college, law school, work. Even with all the friends I have here, I am still lonely from time to time. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to start from scratch.

Then again, if I’m going to make a change, now is the time. Yes, I have a great job and fantastic friends. But I have no BF/husband, no mortgage, no real problem with tying up loose ends, loading up my car and driving off into the sunset, just me and Noodles.

Dear readers, what do you think?

Little Miss Law is not a morning person …

You know it’s going to be a good day when you see a full moon on you way into work.

I don’t have time to blog today because I am trying to get things done before my first-ever pseudo-business trip (more on that when I return), but I didn’t want to leave you hanging.  So, for my law aficionados, some entertaining tidbits about the new websites at Gibson Dunn and Quinn Emanuel.

Little Miss Law on Recruiting, part II

Happy Monday, dear readers. This promises to be a truly hectic week, as I am juggling my pro bono case, an appeal brief, a motion, and my first ever pseudo business trip. For tonight, though, I am taking a deep breath before I dive in, and focusing on the real priority — the blog, of course! Ha.

Last week I wrote a bit about the recruiting process at my firm, but I think I gave it short shrift. Those outside the legal world may not quite grasp the stress involved with interviewing for a summer associate position. First of all, it starts before you have barely taken your first breath in your 2L year, with a series of on campus interviews in which you try to set yourself apart from the 20 some-odd people those given lawyers are interviewing that day, and simultaneously try to fake that you know something about the firm. This is rather difficult since unless you were an aspiring lawyer in the womb, or already have some obscure practice specialty chosen (yeah, right), the fact of the matter is that a lot of the firms are, on paper, virtually indistinguishable.

Then, if you are lucky enough to survive round 1, you move on to callback interviews at one or more firms. Most firms have the same basic interview format — 20 to 30 minute interviews with several attorneys, followed by a meal. For me, the meal was always the most nerve wracking part. How to eat while maintaining an engaging conversation; how to appear relaxed and down to earth, yet poised and professional, while wearing an uncomfortable hot suit and secretly sweating bullets. I remember so well the meal I had when I interviewed to work at my current firm — it was at the Lobster, which is a great restaurant, but instead of enjoying the food, I was compulsively thinking, Boy, it’s hot. Boy, I wish I could take off this suit jacket. Can I take off this suit jacket? Is it unprofessional to be in just a shell at lunch? Doesn’t exactly make for the most relaxing lunch.

When I started at the firm as a real associate and learned how the recruiting worked from the firm’s end, I began to wonder, How in the world did I get a job here? My firm, unlike most, is incredibly democratic in its hiring process — which means that each and every week, whoever wants to attend the recruiting meeting sits around and discusses the candidates one by one. The most minute details about a person come up — sometimes I think that if we would just post the recruits’ photos on a projector, it would be identical to the greek rush process (but with better criteria). I’ll never forget the 1st recruiting meeting I attended where one attorney wrote on a recruit’s evaluation, “She laughed where she could have just smiled.”

Wow. If that is a crime, I am guilty as charged.

Now, one firm in Los Angeles has departed from the typical recruiting model. In lieu of the typical day o’ interviews, Quinn Emanuel is now offering its recruits a three day retreat in Deer Valley.

I have two polar opposite reactions to this idea. My first reaction was, Oh my God, why would you ever invest so much in recruits? and Oh my God, if I had to spend 72 hours bonding with some of the recruits I have met in my tenure at the firm, I would commit hari kari.

However, upon further reflection, I decided that perhaps this type of hard core recruiting process is exactly what all firms need to do. First, instead of dragging out callbacks over a month or more, they would be over and done in a weekend. That would be a lifesaver right now. Second, we would definitely weed out the people who have no real idea what our firm does, and come to interview for the hell of it/to get a free trip to L.A./etc.

Last, and most importantly, we could weed out, once and for all, those people who manage to keep on their game face for a 1/2 day, but who, when they come over the summer, turn into full-scale freak shows, drama queens, and the like. I haven’t seen this too frequently, but still — better to spend 72 hours with someone who makes you want to stab out your eye than an endless summer.

So good ol Quinn may have a stroke of genius here. Only time will tell if his little “experiment” works out.

Till that catches on, us oldschoolers have another good month of recruiting to weather. Onward and upward!

The age-old question

First of all, dear readers, I am proud to announce that I am the new owner of a laptop, so you can expect more regular blogs from me from now on…without interruption of the billable hours. Yay.

And now for the topic of the day, a question that my girlfriends love to debate with me: can men and women really be friends? Harry and Sally of course had this infamous discussion, and my friends like to emphatically opine that no, they can’t be. I have long argued that of course they can. I’ve always enjoyed being friends with guys. Then again, recently I have discovered that the guys I’m friends with all fall into a handful of categories that could, I suppose, be deemed exceptions to the general rule that men and women can’t be friends, as opposed to proof that they can. These categories include: 1) guys I grew up with; 2) guys I’ve dated in the past; 3) my friends’ significant others; 4) work colleagues; and 5) gay men. Until recently, almost ALL of my guy friends fell into these simple categories.

Then recently I met a guy who doesn’t fall within any of these categories. I met him through a Spanish conversation group I joined, in my effort to return to those things I love to do. He is fun, outgoing, easy to talk to, a sweetheart and fairly cute to boot. But he is also a few years younger than I am, (which could be the subject of a post in and of itself) so combined with the mancation, this caused me not to think of him as a potential date from the outset. Still, this week we ended up having a phone conversation the likes of which rivaled my marathon phone calls in middle school, and made plans to go to the movies.

Now, we had made the movie plans almost as soon as we met (a long story, involving a scavenger hunt and movie tickets as the prize). So I didn’t feel strange about going to a movie with him. I thought it would just be friendly. However, all of my friends started nagging me that I was stringing the poor guy along and that if I didn’t want this to be a “real” date, I needed to tell him. Though I was too chicken to call him and tell him this on the phone (oh, the horror), I did muster up the courage to email him and tell him that I was taking a break from dating and that I didn’t want to be presumptuous but I also didn’t want to be misleading, but that I was still happy to hang out as friends.

I was relieved when I received a return email that said he was happy I brought it up, that he was worried about the same thing, and was glad we were on the same page.

Whew! So we went on what he dubbed our “platonic date.” Still, there was definitely a tinge of awkwardness that made me wonder if perhaps he wasn’t completely honest about us being on the same page. (For the record, if I was in his position, I would have said exactly what he did regardless of how I actually felt.)

At the end of the night, Mr. Platonic told me he had a present for me, and extracted from his pocket a CD he had made at work of various songs from bands/artists that his company represents. The label of the CD said, “Songs for Little Miss Law.” (I listened to the CD twice already–he has excellent musical taste.) It was such a sweet thought, but was it just a friendly gesture? As a girl who likes to make new friends, I’d like to think so. But the skeptic in me (spurred on by my friends) is…well, skeptical.

So there you have it. Can men and women be just friends, dear readers?

To be continued…

Putting Things into Perspective

Sometimes, dear readers, it’s really hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel.  It’s so easy to get caught in the daily grind, the gripes and complaints and the headaches.  Days and weeks and months can go by, just trying to get from one day to the next.

Then, sometimes, you have a day that helps put it all into perspective.  For me, today was a day like that.

I think I mentioned in passing a while back that I have taken on a very interesting pro bono case.  Without revealing too much, my client is seeking asylum in the U.S. due to persecution she has suffered in her home country based on her gender identity and sexual orientation.  I agreed to take her case over a month ago, but just before I was supposed to meet her for the first time, she was sent without warning to a different detention center in another state.  For three weeks, I fought through phone calls, letters, and even a court motion to get her back here so I could actually begin preparing her case.  Finally, last Saturday, she returned, and today, I had the opportunity to meet her, face-to-face.

First, the whole experience of visiting the detention center was a bit of a shock to the system.  Thankfully, the social worker accompanied me so I knew what to do.  There was a whole sign in process, and finally we were escorted into a miniature booth where, just like in the movies, we sat on opposite sides of a pane of glass and talked to each other on the telephone.  Eventually we were moved to a small room where we could sit next to each other at a table, but we spent a good hour in the tiny booth first.

The thing that struck me the most about the visit today was that my client is truly an amazing person.  She has been abused her whole life — by her family, by officials, you name it.  She has worked on the streets.  She has been a drug user.  Since being in detention, she has watched a fellow cellmate and friend die.  And yet, she is an optimist!  Today, she seemed truly peaceful and hopeful.  She told the social worker and me that she really hoped she would be allowed to stay in the U.S., and that she wanted nothing more to do with drugs — she wants to learn English and work in an organization that helps children with AIDS.  It was incredibly touching.  I really, really, really hope that we are able to prevail in her case.

If she can learn to be an optimist, then truly, anyone can.

Honing my Dating Skills, on the Job

Dear readers, I apologize for my lack of blog-ness recently.  My recent lack of a computer at home has made blogging difficult (as I can’t bill this time to anyone!) but hopefully I will be buying a shiny new laptop this weekend.

I know what some of you (ahem, Knittikins) are going to say about my post title.  “But Little Miss Law, you’re on a mancation!  What is this talk of dating??”

Relax, dear readers.  The mancation remains in full effect and there is no dating to speak of going on.  However, I have discovered that I can somewhat maintain my dating skills in the meantime, and get paid at the same time!

How, you ask?  Three words:  Summer Associate Recruiting.

If you really think about it, dating is a lot like interviewing for a job.  You suss out your date/interviewee for potential red flags and make a mental checklist of pros and cons, all the while trying to put your best face on and appear attractive to this person that you may not even like.  You make sometimes engaging and sometimes banal chit-chat.  With some people, the time flies, and with others, you want to stab out your own eye.  Of course, the criteria you use are different depending on whether you are interviewing for a future boyfriend/date/life partner or interviewing for a future co-worker/lunch buddy/research slave.  But the process is essentially the same.  As one summer recruit put it this week as I ushered him from office to office for a series of 20-minute interviews, “This is a lot like speed dating.”

Dating has its advantages over interviewing.  For example, it often comes with a meal.   Then again, if I had to sit over a meal (even free) for two hours with some of the recruits I have interviewed, I might have to fake a death in the family and run away before the entree, so the advantage of interviewing is that typically the (potential) torture only lasts for 20 minutes.

At any rate, over the past two weeks I have been given a crash review course in how to: listen to boring speeches; smile and nod encouragingly at asinine comments; ask thoughtful questions; and be generally perky with a complete stranger.  I feel that once the mancation ends this may serve me very well when I re-enter the world of First Dates.

Things that are complicated about dating that recruiting helps with not at all:

1)   Picking out the first-date outfit.  Especially disastrous now that I have no roommates and hence no one to approve or veto.

2)  Dealing with the X factors.  Does your date drive like a maniac?  Drink like a fish?  Write on his Crackberry during dinner?  Who knows! 

3)  How to meet potential dates in the first place.  Online?  In a bar?  Set-ups?  Blech, blech, blech.

I could regale you, dear readers, with a series of stories of bad dates and bad interviews that would make your head spin.  For instance, the date who took me to an obscenely expensive restaurant, ordered an obscenely expensive bottle of wine, and then made me split the tab with him.  (My HALF was $260.  I was a first year law student.  I wish I were kidding.)  But I’ll save those stories for another day.

Until then:  bill, bill, bill.

“Didn’t your parents teach you better than that?”

Last night I went out again with J. to her local bar — not to drink, but just to get out of the house and spend some time with J.  As always, though we weren’t there too late, it was a highly entertaining evening. 

First, we spotted our good friend TL, in all his beige-jacket-over-a-T-shirt finest.  You’ll recall that he had sent me the lovely text of “Did we meet last night?” after the last time I chatted with him.  Sure enough, last night he looked straight at me and smiled with not even the vaguest hint of recognition.  He appeared to have charmed some (unsurprisingly, intoxicated) girl into hanging out with him.  I wanted to warn her, but J. advised me not to ruin things for the poor girl who was clearly enjoying her misconception that he’s a cool guy.

Then, even worse, I ran into The Bad Texter.  I had met him 3 weeks before, he had sent me a few badly spelled texts, and I had never followed up with him.  I spotted him, and oh-so-maturely, I swiveled and ran in the opposite direction and then cowered upstairs.  Eventually I realized that I was going to run into him eventually and that I needed to just suck it up, so J. and I headed back downstairs and I prepared to face the music.

Sure enough, before long I found myself face to face with him.  He looked at me and whined, “You never texted me back!”  “I know, I apologize,” I replied.  “No you don’t,” he said.  “If you apologized, you would have texted me back.  That’s rude.  Your parents taught you better than that, didn’t they?  Why didn’t you text me back?  Be honest.”

I hemmed and hawed a bit, and when I realized that he wasn’t going to let this one slide, I replied, “Like I told you last time we met, I’m taking a break from dating.”

Oh boy.   I had no idea what kind of floodgates that was going to open.  I then was regaled with a speech about how women are irrational, why was I imposing some artificial rules on myself, blah blah blah.

I didn’t tell him, of course, that if I met the right guy I would consider ending the mancation, but he wasn’t it.

At any rate, for the next half hour or so, Bad Texter alternated between bitchy (“Fine, it’s your decision!  Whatever!”)  and sweet (“I just couldn’t stop thinking about you!”)  When J. and I went to say our goodbyes, he asked, “So if I text you this week, will you text me back this time?”  This guy just won’t take no for an answer!  Luckily J. chimed in with, “She can’t date you!  She’s on a mancation!”   He was annoyed (J. got a not-quite-joking finger) but I think he finally got the point.  Whew.

Ah, the fragile male ego.

Tonight I am having dinner at Knittinkins’ abode and get to see her father, who has sort of adopted me into the family (after all, I did live with 2 of his daughters for 4 years), and apparently reads my blog! 

Have a lovely weekend!

Little Miss Law Hunts for a New Home

Well, dear readers, the house hunt has officially commenced!  I have met with the mortgage guy and found out what I am qualified to buy, and met with my agent and told him all about what I am looking for in my dream condo.  (Both of them are the people who Knittikins’ BF used in the purchase of his darling home, and they are fabulous.)  Today was my first time going to see a condo with my agent, and it was fun.  He really knows his stuff, so amusingly, he walked me around the condo explaining all the features to me while the seller’s agent just stood there mutely. 

When we got outside, he turned to me and said, “Ok, I want to get inside your head.  Are you in love with that place, did it make you want to throw up, what?”  I laughed and said no, it definitely didn’t make me want to throw up, but that I also wasn’t planning to put in an offer.  There were great things about it:  it was very spacious, had a huge balcony, and the neighborhood was fantastic.  The not-great thing was that the bathrooms needed some updating, and I’m not looking for a place that I need to do a lot of work on — especially since I won’t have any leftover money for that!  Luckily, I’m not in a rush, so I can take my time finding the perfect new home for me and Noodles.

The one thing that is giving me pause is that buying a place will really handcuff me to my job, which I change my mind about every day.  But I won’t make a decision until I know it’s right.  Also, since I want to buy a 2 bedroom, I could always get a roommate if things got tight, so that is comforting.

I’m out of here…it has been so quiet today because of the Jewish holiday, I felt like I should be embracing my heritage!

Small Victories

So today I had my very first ever substantive oral argument in court.  As I wrote yesterday, I was quite anxious ahead of time, and as expected slept very poorly and had strange dreams.  (I watched House just before bed, leading to a dream in which Hugh Laurie was my judge.  But he was much nicer of a judge than House would be.  Also, I just remembered that in a different section of my dream, Hugh Laurie kissed me.  Am I crazy, or does anyone else think he’s attractive?)

The morning got off to a rocky start when the clerk handed us the judge’s tentative written ruling, and it was 100% against me.  (A bad tentative ruling is the judge’s way of saying, I’m ruling against you against you convince me otherwise.)  My heart sank, but I thought to myself, Well, if he already wants to rule against me, things can only get better!  Time to turn this thing around!  Opposing counsel (who, mind you, is a name partner at her small firm) was reading the tentative ruling smugly and smiling and whispering with her little associate who was probably my year or younger.  You’re going down, I thought.

I won’t bore all you non-lawyers with the details of my argument, but basically I convinced the judge that the other side was wrong on one of the issues, and he decided that the parties should be able to submit further briefs and do another oral argument.  When opposing counsel said “Your Honor, I’m actually leaving for vacation on Saturday,” the judge said, “Great!  You can do your brief by Friday then!”  (I have an extra week after that for mine.)  I’m sure she is sticking pins in her Little Miss Law voodoo doll as we speak.

Then, at the end, was what made my day.   As we began to pack up our things, the judge looked at me and said, “Good argument, counsel.”  I wanted to hug him!  It was like the lawyer equivalent of getting an A on an exam.

So basically, while we may still lose when the judge hears the issues again, I managed to talk my client out of a bad result today, and I actually feel like a real lawyer! 

On a final note, I just looked up Hugh Laurie online and he’s 48 years old!  Seriously?  Sheesh.

Litigation is scary.

So this week, Little Miss Law’s laptop (aka the laptop she borrowed from work a lifetime ago and never returned), has managed to become infiltrated with a number of computer viruses.  (NO, I was not looking at porn!  Sheesh!)  This means that either I blog at work, which isn’t so good for the billable hours, or I don’t blog at all.  Since I hate to leave my dear readers blogless, I wanted to write a few words before heading out.

Tomorrow marks my first ever oral argument in court.  It’s sort of late in the game for me to be doing this for the first time, but every other hearing I have been scheduled for was either decided on the briefs, or else we submitted on the Court’s tentative ruling (in other words, I drove all the way to federal court in Riverside to say “Thank you, Your Honor”).  But tomorrow will be a real live argument in front of a real live judge.  Very scary.  Cross your fingers for me!!!  My biggest fear is that the judge will ask me a question and I will say “uhhhhhh…..” and blush bright red and not be able to spit it out.  This is unlikely, since I drafted all the papers and I know my stuff, but still.  Also, I never sleep well the night before I go to court, even if it’s just for a case management conference, because I think I will oversleep my alarm.  (Luckily I have my backup, the cat alarm.  Meow!)  So tonight I expect to wake up every hour, on the hour.

In other news, the countdown to the Emmys has officially commenced!  I am recycling the same dress I wore last year (part frugality, part laziness and lack of desire to shop) but my friends and I are renting a cheap limo, so it’s going to be oh-so 80’s prom.  And while I am going to attempt to keep my celebrity stalking in check, you just never know what might happen…