Things that Happen When I'm (Briefly) on Pace to Bill 3,000 Hours/Year*

*Please note that this is said with tongue firmly in cheek. While I did work that much for a few weeks in January, it was mainly due to an unusually urgent project of a type that isn't likely to recur often. At the rate I was working, I still would only have billed 3,000 hours if I didn't take any vacation and also worked at that exact same pace for the entire year. I don't expect to be anywhere near that busy again for quite some time, and thank goodness for that! Now, two months on, I'm already significantly "off pace" for getting anywhere close to 3,000 hours billed in 2019. I'll probably come in around 2,100 at most, if I had to guess.

I'm told there may be a number of biglaw firms where regularly billing close to 3,000 hours/year may be necessary to be a tip-top associate, but hours like that (as opposed to a "mere" 2,100 or 2,200... which is still a lot) are not terribly common. Lots of things need to align just right (or wrong) to get close, including that one's practice group may need to be consistently busy the whole time. A lot of practice areas are subject to the whims of the markets, and not every firm or practice group is always able to bring in enough new business to sustain hours like that. While I was in biglaw, I was on track to fall slightly short of 2,000 billed hours that year, even with significant pro bono hours included in my total (firms generally allow pro bono service to account for a small percentage of an associate's total hours for the year, usually not much more than 200 hours out of a 2000 target). Most of my fellow junior litigators there were also struggling to hit 2,000. I could speculate on what that says about where the biglaw litigation market is going, but I only have a small sample size of my old firm and my friends' firms to go off of.

Back in January, that intensely hectic period was unlike anything I'd ever experienced before. I didn't mind it too much, actually, I enjoyed having a lot of responsibility, but I was definitely also feeling sleep-deprived and exhausted by the end. At least for me, there is a point at which one works so much that performance and efficiency inevitably deteriorate. In no particular order, here are a few observations about what life looks like with just two or three weeks of working so hard that I'd potentially be on track to bill 3,000 hours that year if I kept it up:

A recent email from Ally, Bank where I keep my savings account. While it's great to save that money from coffee, if one wants to save and invest more than that, then further steps in other areas of one's finances would also be necessary!

1. // Latte factor: I tend to go to coffee shops a lot more often than most people who like to save. (Though I think we're all well aware that cutting out a frequent coffee shop habit wouldn't, by itself, be anywhere near enough when it comes to longer-term saving and investing for retirement and other big needs.) There have been times in my life, when I had a killer commute and needed to wake up hours earlier than I'm used to, that I had a latte almost every weekday morning and considered it "worth it". Given that I'd taken a large pay-cut at that time, I felt extremely sheepish about my habit, but in the end, it wasn't a big deal, relative to my larger financial situation in the long run.

This past January, though, when I started getting that fancy latte almost every morning, I was surprised to find that those purchases gradually started losing their value and appeal to me. I suppose that might have been because the biggest challenge at the time was the intensity of my work, not my feeling tired or sleepy from needing to wake up a lot earlier than comes naturally, so the extra caffeine boost wasn't as useful anymore. Also, the lattes finally stopped feeling "special" because I had them so often. My propensity for going to coffee shops has been significantly reduced in the weeks since that busy period. We'll see if the trend continues for the rest of this year!

Book and Podcast Life Lately

After taking a bit of a break from reading for fun for a few months (I read a few books that were emotionally intense, in a really good way, but I needed some time and space afterwards to reflect on them), I'm easing back into the habit. I've read a few things recently that I greatly enjoyed, and that I wanted to share. First up is Nicole Chung's All You Can Ever Know, a memoir about the author's childhood as a transracial adoptee and the process of reconnecting with her birth family once she was an adult. It's a really wonderful book, she writes with a remarkable sensitivity, and she has a deft and clear-eyed way of describing the highly emotionally complex things she has experienced. She has a somewhat restrained and understated writing style that nonetheless packs a huge emotional punch. It's a very powerful book, and I think you'll be swept away into her story. 

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While the focus is largely on the emotional and other implications of adoption and transracial adoption, and on her family, All You Can Ever Know also has some very sharp, very real things to say about race in America in general, and the experience of living in this country as a person of color. I can't recommend this book enough. 

I've also been reading a lot of much lighter fare. In particular, I recently rediscovered the work of Mira Grant, whose Newsflesh series I read years ago and found quite clever and fun. (Mira Grant is a pseudonym for Seanan McGuire, but I've only personally read her work as Mira Grant.) I found her Parasitology series a bit of a dud, unfortunately. It was a cool premise, but the pacing was really off and it would have been much better off as two books instead of three. The first volume of her new series, Into the Drowning Deep, is fantastic however, a fast-paced adventure with a great sense of humor (and a fair bit of horror movie-type violence and gore, I should warn, in case you're sensitive to that). It's so much fun to read and quite original. 

As to podcasts, thank you again to everyone who recommended some in January! It'll take me a long time to get to all of them, but I've already started listening to some, and they're pretty great. In particular, I wanted to second the recommendations for The Dream. It started off as a slow burn for me because I find some pyramid schemes or multi-level marketing schemes ("MLMs") more interesting to learn about than others, and a lot of the ones they mentioned at the start were ones I'd never heard of. But once I gave the series some time, it really grabbed me. They've done a lot of research, and they did a great job weaving together a lot of seemingly very different, fragmented stories that all fall under the same central theme of pyramid schemes and the way they sell that "dream". The episodes about the history of (ultimately mostly failed) attempts to regulate and take legal action against MLMs were particularly interesting to me. 

Another podcast I wanted to recommend, though this is just part of a single episode rather than a full series, is the second half of the February 28, 2019 episode of Stay Tuned with Preet*, which features an in-depth interview with Bryan Stephenson, the author of Just Mercy, one of those two books that had such an emotional impact on me late last year. Mr. Stephenson is extraordinary, and what he has accomplished through his work at the Equal Justice Initiative is so important, even though the nature of such work is that there is always, always more to be done. 

I can also recommend a few other somewhat new and recent podcasts, both in the "true crime" genre. First is The Dropout, which is about Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos. The podcast doesn't necessarily tread much new substantive ground that wasn't already covered in the excellent and incredibly comprehensive Bad Blood by John Carreyrou, one of my favorite books from last year, but it is interesting to hear the voices of the people in the story, including the whistleblowers and Ms. Holmes herself. Second is a less well-known story, Over My Dead Body, about a murder case in Florida that may be tried later this year. Attorneys or law students who frequently read Above the Law, our main online news source for law school and biglaw industry gossip, may already be familiar with the underlying events, as one of the writers feels a personal connection to the story (he's interviewed in the podcast as well).

Have you read any great books so far this year? Discovered any new podcasts? 

*The whole podcast is very high-quality, but it's just not quite my cup of tea. I spend so much time thinking about legal topics at work that I don't necessarily want to listen to a lengthy podcast episode about it every week!

On Well-Loved Shoes and Shoe Repair

At the time these photos were taken, my nearly four and a half year old Sam Edelman Petty booties had just been freshly resoled and polished and had yet to be worn since. Otherwise I'd never put them on a desk!

Until after I graduated college, I never knew shoes could be repaired or resoled, sometimes many times in just a few years of normal use. I suppose that gap in my knowledge makes sense. For much of one's childhood and throughout one's teenage years, one's feet are probably growing too fast for shoe repair to be much an issue. And my feet still grew while I was in college, I mostly wore a size 7 shoe when I started, but by the year after I graduated, I wore a 7.5 and occasionally an 8, or even an 8.5. Plus, I was never on my feet as much and never did half as much walking until I moved to NYC. Also, from college through my first year or two of law school, I had a terrible "success rate" with buying shoes that I'd actually wear, probably worse than 50%. (After that particular "after" photo was taken, I eventually decluttered another four pairs of nearly-new shoes from it without ever actually wearing said shoes again.) And if shoes don't actually get worn, they're not exactly going to need a visit to the cobbler.

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I've had this pair of Sam Edelman Petty booties (discontinued in leather, though lingering pairs remain in size 6 only, and they're still available in suede) for a little over four years now, and I've worn them frequently throughout fall and winter each year, a period lasting from late September through practically April most years. They're likely my single favorite pair of shoes, so well-loved that I bought a second pair while my first was still in fairly good shape. That newer edition was made of a stiffer leather, so I've never liked them as much, though I wear them sometimes, mostly on more formal occasions.

I'd only ever needed to get my first pair of Pettys reheeled before, the sole was still in great shape until very recently, when they started to peel off. Thankfully, that was also easily fixed at the cobbler's. My current go-to shop reheels my boots for $20 and replaces the sole and heels for $40 total, which I think is a fairly good deal by NYC standards. Because I generally needed to reheel my Pettys twice a year, and most shops are a little pricier than my current one, I've definitely spent more than the original ~$120 cost of the shoes on repairs by now.

But it's been well worth it, because I don't think I'd quite know what to do when I finally need to replace my main pair of Pettys. I so rarely see anything with a near-identical design. Currently, it's maybe just the Blondo Villa booties, but they use a more suede-looking leather that wouldn't be as versatile in my wardrobe. Neither of the current Sam Edelman booties (the intentionally distressed leather Packer with their more casual look, or the more pointy-toed Walden) are that similar. The Petty booties might not have the most fashionable or interesting look, with their round toe and fairly low heel, but that's probably what I like about them. I even consider them appropriate for court in the fall/winter, when I wear them with black tights and a skirt suit. 

How often do people normally get their shoes reheeled and/or resoled anyway? I go often for new heels for my boots, basically twice a year each for both Pettys and my knee-high riding boots; Generally once at the start of NYC's extended fall/winter season and again a month or two from the end. I'd expect that high-heel shoes with skinny heels probably need new heel caps fairly frequently, but I wear them so rarely that the issue doesn't come up (the also-discontinued Sam Edelman Tristan pumps, which have a slightly shorter heel than their current basic pump, the Hazel, are my current super-conservative job interview shoe of choice, but basically no other event, even most court appearances, could convince me to wear them). I'd never actually needed any repairs done on any of my ballet flats before, I'd wear them out completely in a way that probably couldn't be repaired, by rubbing unsightly holes in the outer edges of the uppers (due to my wide feet and probably how I walk) long before reheeling or resoling was ever an issue. Now that I own a pair of leather loafers, however (another Sam Edelman shoe, the Loraine - clearly I'm very fond of the brand, and their shoes typically work well for my feet), those seem to need reheeling semi-frequently, maybe also once or twice a year when worn on and off all year round, though a lot less often in fall and winter.

This post was partially inspired by my having done some shoe shopping during the recent Shopbop sale. I tried on the Rachel Comey Mars bootie I was so taken by a few months ago, but alas, that particular shoe wasn't right for me at all. There's no zipper, which makes them hard to put on, and the shape of them is such that I had to maneuver quite a bit to get them on my foot, despite having sized all the way up to an 8.5 (which did otherwise fit). I also found the leather a bit oddly stiff and thin-seeming for a shoe of that price, it just wasn't what I was used to. I was terribly disappointed that they wouldn't work for me, because they can look so chic on others. I also ordered the Sam Edelman Leah because of their Chanel-like look and my general good experiences with the brand, but those just didn't fit me, they may run a bit bigger than expected, or just are difficult to get a good fit on because of the slingback design. Both shoes had been on my main shopping list before I made the order, though I took the Leahs off now that I know I'm not going to want them, and could delete the Mars booties too*.

*I guess that's one complication with how I've been maintaining my main shopping list on Pinterest, because I put items on, but remove some inconsistently when they've been purchased or because I've tried and rejected them. It'll be hard to keep track of how the list has changed over time that way. I have to think about whether there's a better, slightly more consistent way to manage the list!

Money Life Lately: Net Worth Zero and Tax Time

Chloe "Tess" wallet (affiliate link)

I'm approximately a month and a half away from a significant financial milestone: "Net worth zero", where my total assets, including what's locked away in my 401(k) and my Roth IRA, will be equal to the balance of my student loan debt. At nearly four years since law school graduation, it's taken me longer than K and most of my close law school friends to get to this point (most of them are so good about aggressive repayment that, if they worked in biglaw that whole time, they were close to paying off their loans in full by then) because I took a year off to clerk, which, due to the timing; the ~7% interest rate on my student loans; and my inability to refinance while I was still relying on income-based repayment to manage payments during the clerkship, created a nearly two-year delay in my student loan repayment schedule. That was despite my best efforts to be good about money during my first relatively brief stint in the private sector. I'm super-excited about getting to net worth zero! It'll feel great to finally be "worthless".

Tax Time: Back to Turbotax 

Whenever it comes time to do my taxes each year, I'm always reminded about just how bad I am at anything to do with tax. I took the introductory tax class in law school, which discusses personal income tax no less, and while I was typically a top 10 to 12% student at almost everything else in law school, I was solidly rock bottom in that particular class. My sheer incompetence in that subject was distressing, and absolutely boggled my mind. I worked hard to study for that exam, possibly harder than for almost anything else! How is it even possible?! I came away from the experience convinced that the way words are used in the Internal Revenue Code does not resemble the actual English language. I'm probably just bitter. I swear though, words actually don't mean what you expect when you read the provisions of the tax code, even more so than in any other federal statute I'm familiar with. While the interpretation of any statutory text can be surprisingly complex, it's only in the tax code that things I think sound like one thing might actually mean the opposite, particularly when the tax code explains how to do some math.

In any case, having a legal education can be surprisingly unhelpful for things you'd think all lawyers might naturally have a comparative advantage at because of the nature of their job. I'm definitely no better at interpreting or navigating my health or dental insurance plans than anyone else (now there's a context in which the way words are used in key documents barely resembles English). I'm not necessarily better at negotiating anything. It seems that I'm also much worse than your average American when it comes to understanding my taxes. If you're able to use just about any other software or self-preparation method for your taxes besides Turbotax, I'm convinced that you can probably count yourself more knowledgeable and capable than I am.