A Much Needed Update

The blog has languished, no doubt, so I'm going to make yet another psuedo pledge to blog more, if only because writing is a good outlet and the only writing that I do now begins with "TO THE HONORABLE" and ends with "WHEREAS, PREMISES CONSIDERED."  Yes, in all caps.  No, the rest of the motions are never in all caps.  Why these phrases?  Because that's the way we've been doing it since 1885 and who am I to stop it.  I've found one partner who is firmly in the Plain English Movement camp, but she is somewhat terrifying to work for because she doesn't appear to sleep or go home.   She was disappointed and somewhat put out when she found out that the office was closed the day after Thanksgiving.  I'm not going to pretend that I didn't also work the day after Thanksgiving, but I at least didn't go into the office.

So work is busy, busy, busy most weeks and then there's a week like this one where I do three hours of doc review a day, draft some pleadings that are copied and pasted out of old versions of the same pleadings (Rule 26(a)(1)(A) and Statements of Financially Interested Parties) and spend an inordinate amount of time perfecting pro bono memos.  And then Friday 4pm comes along and there's a memo due Monday, though I won't complain because it's on an interesting subject (receivership) and for an associate who I really like.

Which brings me to a (perhaps not so) surprising realization: I really like being a lawyer, even at a big firm like this.  I'd come close to saying there are times when I love it, even late at night when we're madly trying to get something filed.   I think a huge part of that enjoyment is the people I work for on almost all of my cases.  I basically work with one partner and a few other associates and they all enjoy being lawyers, and they especially enjoy being litigators.  They like to sitting around and argue about how to out-smart the other side and they are profane and hilarious about it.  So maybe I don't really like being a lawyer, maybe I just really like being these people's co-worker.  It's more than I expected from work, so I'll take it. 

Home life is also very good.  Eleanor is walking and talking and getting to the stage where she repeats what we say, so I have to watch it when I drive because I categorically hate my fellow drivers in Houston.  We had two cats and still have them and we have now added a yellow lab, Shiloh.  We got her from a rescue group and she already had the name when they got her, so I don't know it's origin, but I choose to believe she is named after the excellent Neil Diamond song of the same name and not the novel about a dog.

More again soon(er).