September 15, 2019: My First Real Job

For years, I didn’t like participating in class, or doing any sort of group work, or explaining anything. It was too difficult; no one understood what I was trying to say, and, when I tried further to address all those blank, or frowning, or bewildered faces, it only became worse. I’d develop a small stammer, or explain the same thing two or three times.

Then suddenly, during my senior year, in a class that I think must have had a lot to do with the European novel, I had to give a long presentation about one. For some reason Thomas Mann’s Confessions of Felix Krull: Confidence Man comes to mind.

So I strode to the front of the room while our professor, Dr. Rose, leaned against a window, smiling faintly. About now is when I’d start to feel uncomfortable. But not this time: I put my notes on the podium, rested my left hand over them, and suddenly I felt as though I belonged there more than anywhere else in the world. And off I went. I spoke for the allotted time and didn’t want to stop.

I may have imagined Dr. Rose looking a little put out—because I was clearly enjoying myself, more than he did when he taught? I felt more at one with myself than at any other time in my entire life, except when I was pitching. I don’t understand why the transformation occurred. I do come from a family of teachers, going back several generations. Maybe it was simply hard-wired? So when I titled this “My First Real Job”, I was thinking that teaching was just fun, unalloyed joy, which it wasn’t, but still. I was happier than when I was practicing law.

If you’ve glanced at the About Me page on this website, you know that I left teaching at Auburn for law school. The two careers aren’t so different, theoretically; you’re teaching either the judge or classroom what you want them to know.

So then why would I feel so uncomfortable speaking in a courtroom? I was virtually tongue-tied in Bankruptcy Court, allowing the trustee to run everything while I represented one of the sleaziest loan outfits in history. Maybe it was my unfamiliarity with the subject matter, though I doubt it. I was simply afraid.

My first real job was as an associate in what was then considered a mid-sized firm in Greensboro, NC, the city where I’d gotten my MFA. My job was to learn everything, which was an antediluvian concept: I had to fill out a form indicating everything I’d done: written a will, closed a property sale, engaged in this or that act of litigation, wrote an agreement, sat in on a contract negotiation, handled a traffic ticket (we didn’t do much criminal law), organized the documents for an ERISA plan, supposedly handled a divorce, and I was miserably lost at sea in all of it. The firm’s idea of training was to hand you the file and say, “Don’t screw up.”

Here is a list of everything I did wrong in my first two years, in no particular order, not even of egregiousness. This is so bad that you don’t have to be a lawyer to get it.

· After having certified at the end of the brief that I’d affixed first class postage to the envelope, I mailed off about fifteen with no postage whatsoever. Amazing how many got through. Thanks, USPS! And funny how no one complained about NOT having received our brief. Lawyers can be really scattered.

· Filed untold numbers of something called a UCC-1 without the required signature of the person granting a security interest. The partner called it “malpractice per se”.

· As noted in an earlier post, mailed a notice that should have gone to the IRS to the NC Department of Revenue instead, which couldn’t be bothered to give me a quick call to say, hey, you screwed up.

· Forgot to reply to a Request for Admission. Fortunately, it was only one question, and not a big one, but speaking of malpractice per se…*

· Consistently failed to check pocket parts. Books containing a state’s statutes are so big and bulky that it would be too expensive to reprint them every year. So the publishing company puts together soft-cover inserts each year with that year’s new statutes; they stick into a pocket at the back of the original book. Thus pocket parts. I usually forgot to check them. Once in a hearing, I was looking at the other side’s brief, and I thought, Huh, their version of the statute looks different. Oh….

· Wrote a will that the wills associate said contained two residuary clauses. What’s a residuary clause?

· Offered a security (a real estate limited partnership interest) in Virginia where for some reason or other it wasn’t allowed. The partner drafted something called an “offer of recission.” I can still see her massaging her forehead over the document.

· Completely mismanaged organizing a company’s ERISA documents.

· Something so awful I can’t recount it here, but, take it from me, when the senior partner saw what I had filed with the court, he put his head down on his desk. Poor Dan. He was probably glad to die young, at 70, just a few years ago. His dying thought was probably, Well, I don’t have to deal with Jarecke anymore.

I hope that the careful reader will note that the above incidents implicated litigation, secured transactions, tax, wills and estates, securities law, ERISA law, and, a hint at the last, domestic relations. What person, first out of law school, can understand all of that? Though I’d like to lay it all on the firm’s utterly anachronistic personnel management, I was also sloppy.

At some point later in our legal careers, Nancy said, as I wrote in an earlier post, “You’re intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually unsuited to being a lawyer. You’ve been successful out of persistence and sheer intelligence.” As I noted earlier, too, that statement was extremely generous in all of its nouns.

She probably made this statement out of revenge for my having said, after a tennis game, “I’m no tennis coach, and I can’t figure out what it is, but you’re doing something wrong. It’s only through sheer athletic ability that you’re getting the ball over the net.”

Those statements being a kind of tennis game itself, amirite?

I’m so glad I don’t have to practice law anymore. I did get better, I promise, though I later made the worst mistake of my life when I was at AIG. More on that later, perhaps, as my boss Robert was so funny about it. Ironically, when later, in Seattle, I finally got good at negotiating software-related contracts, the whole process became boring beyond words. I wonder now why I thought I should be a lawyer. I must have simply misunderstood.

* But I learned something that would come in handy in my later life as a corporate transactional attorney: so much stuff that you think is crucial simply washes away at trial. A forgotten Request for Admission? No one would notice or care.