Begin at the beginning

By Raised by Wolves

Welcome to the initial post of Eff You, It's My Blog. If you don't like it, please refer to the title of the blog.

At the risk of repelling all potential readers right at the start, this is going to be a blog about contract attorneys. Might as well tell you I'm writing a how-to on catching STDs. Way to drive the page views. But I think once people get over their natural hatred of all things attorney-related (I assume here that I will have actual people reading this, and not just contract attorneys hoping I used their real names), they will find that the world of contract attorneys is pretty interesting, if not one you would want to actually inhabit yourself.

I'm not doing this because so many of my fellow contract attorneys said, “Hey, you should do a blog about contract attorneys,” because they didn't. I'm doing it because I finally heard one too many contract attorneys say, “I'm going to write a screenplay about contract attorneys.” I probably hear that every other project. Fine, sometimes they say novel, not screenplay, but it's all the same, because they never do it. And it's not because contract attorney projects leave no time for such literary endeavors, as this particular would-be screenwriter claimed. It's because if contract attorneys had any real ambition to excel, they wouldn't still be contract attorneys. The truth hurts, but there you are.

And while you're there, I'm here, trying to figure out how to do this in a way that makes sense. Since everyone knows that all wisdom flows from “The Princess Bride,” I figure I should take to heart the words of Inigo Montoya – no, not the part about how you killed my father and should prepare to die. I'm talking about when he said, “Vezzini said go back to the beginning, so here I am.” So let's begin at the beginning.

That means I have to tell the uninitiated what a contract attorney is. We're not talking about an attorney who negotiates contracts. I have a lot of friends from law school who went into sports and entertainment law, thinking it was going to be Jerry McGuire with a law degree. To their unending horror, they found that it meant negotiating contracts for athletes or celebrities you almost never actually meet. And as everyone who ever sat through first-year contracts in law school knows, the only thing more boring than contracts is tax. There is no Cuba Gooding Jr. shouting “Show me the money!” There is only some pudgy, balding, middle-aged white guy across the table saying “The party of the first part . . . “ at which point you fall asleep. So we're not talking about that guy. Not the pudgy guy, and not the guy who fell asleep.

No, the guy we're talking about, the contract attorney, does piece work. The contract attorney is a legal temp, like an itinerant minstrel wandering from job to job. Any time there is a merger of major corporations, or a government investigation, or a major lawsuit between corporate giants, there are vast quantities of documents that must be reviewed to determine whether those documents are germane to the issue at hand and must be turned over to the other side.

This is every bit as thrilling and intellectually challenging as it sounds. Contract attorneys sit in front of a computer for 8, 10, 14 hours a day, reviewing documents that are stored on a server that probably is a) in Houston; and b) moving very slowly because it is overloaded. They make a yes/no decision – give it up, or not? – click a box, and move on to the next document. I went to law school for this?

Actually, yeah, apparently I did. Which brings us to the question, where do contract attorneys fit into the legal community? To answer this, it helps to envision the legal community as an actual community – call it Legal Town. (It is worth noting that Legal Town only exists in this form in certain large cities – Washington, New York, Chicago and LA. There are similar versions in almost every major city, but the big cities are the ones with substantial contract attorney industries. But I digress.) In Legal Town, the partners at the big firms are the politicians, the shakers and movers, the ones who are Born to Run Things. They fear no man and are ruler of all they survey – until their firm summarily cuts partners to reduce the number of people sharing the profits pie, or just goes belly-up like the law firm Howrey just did. But for our purposes here, they are akin to royalty.

One step down the hierarchy are the almost-partners, the attorneys who are of counsel, special counsel or whatever their particular firm decides to call this not-quite-partner position. These guys are like the government staffers of Legal Town rather than elected officials and captains of industry. They swing some stick, but not like a partner.

On the other hand, they swing more stick than the folks on the next rung down, the associates. Don't feel sorry for these guys – they're the middle class of Legal Town, and they are doing all right for themselves. Some aspire to be partners, most realize they probably never will be, at least not here. Like many members of the middle class with high aspirations, their opinions of themselves can be somewhat loftier than reality might dictate. Doesn't make them bad people, but it does make it fun to mock them behind their backs.

Still another rung down the ladder in Legal Town, we now get to the staff attorneys. These guys are the blue collar pukes, the ones who have no realistic chance to move up the ladder yet do much of the grunt work. Many used to be contract attorneys, which tends to make them either sympathetic to the plight of contract attorneys or genuinely eager to flaunt their superior status in the faces of their former colleagues. The former are rare and appreciated, the latter risk being fragged by the troops.

Lower still are the paralegals and legal secretaries, the staffers who do the back-room low-end white collar work. Oddly enough, their position in Legal Town is exactly the same as their position in real life. No analogies necessary. They usually have no contact with contract attorneys, but often are happy to look down upon C.A.s when they do cross paths. Gotta look down on somebody.

Finally, we reach the basement, or whatever level is below the bottom rung on the ladder: the contract attorneys. In Legal Town, these guys are the garbage men. They are absolutely necessary for Legal Town to work, but that doesn't mean the rest of Legal Town wants to invite them into their living rooms. I mean, they're garbage men, right? So what to do with the garbage men?

Naturally, we set up a neighborhood, a slum for them to work in: Temp Town. Like any other slum, it's in the city, but most of the city's residents don't go there and try to pretend it doesn't exist. The temp agencies that provide the contract attorneys for the law firm's big document projects run review spaces, big rooms jammed with contract attorneys clicking away, thus sparing the law firms the need to rub elbows with the great unwashed. Sometimes the firms have to bring contract attorneys to the firm office, but they try to stick the contractors in the basement, on floors that haven't been built out yet, or in rooms that used to be storage rooms – or sometimes still are. In other words, they create a slum. Instant Temp Town. Welcome to our world.