In Brief**, 08/05/2003

In my working life, I am an attorney. What that means, is I spend a huge amount of my time researching obscure issues and trying to find authority to support what my client has already done. On rare occasions they will come to me before the fact and say, "I want to do X. How do I accomplish that?" but mostly my job is about damage control.

Like the client who got sued and just decided to not do anything and only called me after they got the notice from their bank that their checking account had been garnished.

Or the client who did $30,000 worth of work based upon a conversation over coffee and then called me when the other party refused to pay the bill.

Or the client (which I guess probably isn't fair because it was really the out-of-state lawyer who did this) who got a judgment in another state, brought it here and garnished the debtor's bank account without following the proper procedures; now the debtor is in the bankruptcy court and the client is spending colossal amounts of money trying to hang on to that money.

I then have to write masterful prose to convince a judge, or sometimes a group of judges, why my client is right. My job isn't anything like what you see on television. I don't go to court much. I don't have dinner with my clients. Some of them are nice people (clearly not all of them) but we don't have that much in common. My job is conflict driven but generally there are no shouting matches with other lawyers.

My life is generally spent writing. My writing takes the form of what lawyers, in their odd sense of humor, call a "Brief." That is an oxymoron if ever there was one! Briefs are never brief instead they are long, tortured, convoluted, distorted and sometimes down right silly pieces of writing. I'm often startled and amazed at the things I find myself writing. "There is absolutely no evidence Mr. X has any type of miniature donkey operation" is a line from my last Brief.

I recently overheard a conversation the GirlChild was having with a friend. Apparently they had been discussing in school what their parents do for a living. The GirlChild had been quizzing me about what I did, was it hard, did I like it, how did I do it and what she gleaned from my explanation was "My Mom helps people fight over money." I guess that's it in a nutshell.