Thoughts on Lawyers

I stood in my boss’ office, stacks of files all over the desk, and replaced the supplements in the Lexis Nexis books of DC Tax Code. The thin paper and ordered volumes felt like the Encylopedia used to as a child, heavy with information and valuable beyond its size. The DC Law Manual was held in two giant binders, the chapters needing individual replacement between labeled tabs. As I thumbed through the stack of papers to delineate each chapter’s sheets, I felt shaky and excited, as if I was handling the Top Secrets of our city. The replaced chapters were laid in a pile on the desk where there was room, growing as the binders were updated. With each movement from the binder I decided to take it all home, anxious to pour over the pages and see what was inside, to find all of the answers. It felt like organizing the Bibles used to, when I was quite little, when it was a privilege to handle such worthy words.

I have always been wary of lawyers. Growing up in an upper- middle class town, just north of Washington DC, parents were lawyers. Sometimes they were surgeons (the Dad) or nurses (the Mom) or Lobbyists (the Dad again), but most likely they were lawyers. And who knew what that meant? It meant they wore suits and sat in an office and were there rarely for the Halloween Parade and sometimes for the Spring Concert. They were always there at mass, fidgeting with their ties, and at the Parish Picnic in July, wearing flag-colored shorts and holding their seventh beer.

My father, on the other hand, was not a lawyer. He was a carpenter/cabinet salesman/graduate student/ snail farmer/ house restorer/boat captain/sculptor… the list went on. He never held a job for more than a few months and I am still unsure what to say when people ask what he does. I say “he works with wood” and leave it at that. He was never at the Halloween parade, never wore a suit, and did not come to the picnics and sometimes to the concerts. He always smelled like sawdust and beer and sweat. He always made up great stories. He was not a lawyer, but he was my father, so why were these other Dads any better when their stories were boring and dry?

In high school the lawyer Dad was equally disinterested in my friends’ lives, and entirely too involved, all at the wrong times. They pushed for Ivy League schools, bought them expensive cars, and showed up at our father-daughter balls. They not only had boring stories now, but seemed to be utterly confused at what to do with a daughter. They ignored you when you were dumped, but were furious when you had a date, and that certainly made no sense.

And in college the lawyer became something else altogether, it became my friends’ futures. The lawyer was what you studied to become, it was no longer your father or your friends’ father. It still made no sense though, because the lawyer was what made you stay home on Wednesday nights studying when you could be out at the bar, and it what made you sound like a pretentious asshole in class when you picked apart the logic of Pascal. The lawyer was obsessed with Nietzche, with Marx, with the particular application of words. The lawyer rarely recognized beauty, rarely made room for love. And the lawyer was boring. And he lawyer was confused.

So with this understanding of lawyer in mind, I interned for one. I had no idea he was a lawyer when I fought for the internship, and I understood entirely that he was not boring or confused or chauvinistic when I worked with him. Working with him gave an entirely new meaning to lawyer, as someone with a particular interest that wants to change the way it is applied in the world. Now, there was no “lawyer”, there were lawyers. There were divorce lawyers and tax lawyers, county defendants and litigators, lawyers who were not working as lawyers but were moms instead, or teachers and professors. This lawyer, in particular, was an environmental lawyer now only because he was working with the environment. Previously he had been a divorce lawyer. To me, that was two different people.

And so it came into my head that I wanted to be that one lawyer, the environmental lawyer, who did just what environmental lawyers do. They are not boring or confused. They are passionate and particular, studied and will trudge out knee deep without waders to get a great bottom sample. They too can smell like sawdust and beer and tell great stories.