Curveballs - or Speed Bumps - in Life
When we are young, say law students, we envision a career with an ever-upward trajectory, transitioning from law student to articling student to associate to partner. We don’t always stop to think about what happens between those steps—we imagine our perfect careers and just assume that everything will fall into line, perhaps because we aren’t aware of all of the potential pitfalls along the way.
We think that if we focus on our work, ensuring that we give all of our files our best effort because, of course, why would anything else happen, everything will work out just as planned. And, as Dr. Phil used to say, how did that work out for us?
Most of us will have had to re-jig our career plans at least once. Our choice of articling firm might work out—or it might not--and there is no shame in not “marrying” the first firm you “date.” And firms and other legal employers change over time. I really enjoyed my first five or six years working in-house, but corporate changes ushered in a new philosophy that drastically affected how I felt about the work I was doing (essentially my sense of purpose). While I had completed my pension eligibility documents once I was eligible—being all of 33—as I came closer to age 40, I found myself realizing that I wouldn’t be retiring from that position. That was my third job, and I have held four jobs since then, as well as a corporate secondment. All worked for a while, until they didn’t, and when they stopped working, I looked for something new. And I am not unique in having worked for multiple employers over the span of a career.
We also have unexpected life events. To quote the philosopher Lennon (John Lennon, not Vladimir Lenin), “life is what happens when we are busy making other plans,” or the philosopher Jagger (Mick), “you can’t always get what you want!” We can plan our career trajectories, map out our retirement savings, and hone our professional skills, but we can’t control the exigencies of life. What happens when life challenges clash with our professional realities?
I encountered this issue when I was in private practice when opposing counsel on a transaction required emergency surgery and became very ill. There were three lawyers on the file—a seller, a buyer, and a lender, and I can’t remember which one I was on for or which one the lawyer needing surgery was on for. But the remaining two of us worked with new counsel from the seriously ill lawyer’s firm and we got the deal done. No one groused—not the lawyers, not the clients. We all knew that each of us could—and perhaps would—be the lawyer with the emergency one day. Without knowing the term, we paid it forward (or exercised the golden rule, treating others the way we would want to be treated!)
And I also had the experience of being the successor lawyer, coming into the office on a Monday morning and learning that a colleague had been in an accident and had three closings in the next two days! The firm reallocated my less-pressing files, and I began placing calls to introduce myself to the clients and the other side on the newly acquired files. Everyone was gracious and helpful and we got the deals done—not in two days, but more like three, but the closing dates were a bit flexible—thankfully.
It is especially challenging when you are the junior lawyer on a file and have an emergency. We all like to think that we are indispensable, but in reality, as my two anecdotes, show, we can be replaced with some adjusting and reallocations. But when I was a senior associate, my firm used to take delight that my classmate and I were “fungible” like we were chattels—they had trained us to be both indispensable and indistinguishable (or, we were indispensable because there were two of us!). We didn’t appreciate being compared to chattels.
Senior lawyers were not always gracious when they had to allow a junior to exit due to a personal matter. While some things have improved in the practice of law over my thirty-five plus year career, I am concerned that our profession has become less likely to pay it forward or to model the Golden Rule or the maxim “there but for the grace of God go I.”
We hear that incivility is on the rise while professional courtesy wanes. I hope that lawyers will still pull together when a colleague has an emergency.
I am thinking about this as I face another elder parent crisis. When your parent is a nonagenarian, you dread the phone call about a fall and/or a broken hip. But my family is instead dealing with a slow Bronco chase emergency that started as walking pneumonia that was truly disabling. We spent Christmas Eve at the ER, followed by an EMT home visit (!) to keep an elderly person from going into an ER filled with contagious people on New Year’s Eve and then a hospital admission early in January. And I have visited the hospital every day since then.
I would have told anyone who asked that I was a busy lawyer with a demanding job and not a lot of free time. Just try finding 2 hours for a hospital visit to your day to see just how little personal time you have!
To keep my being well, I am practicing gratitude. The first night that my sister and I visited our parent, I couldn’t find my car in the hospital parkade. Watching my sister's lips turning blue, I sent her to wait inside while I walked through all levels of the parkade, pushing my key fob button every ten seconds or so. I now make a point to memorize where I had parked since my overwhelmed brain didn’t record that information on its own. I am grateful that I found the car before we both froze—and that I discovered that my new high-tech car has a “find your car” feature which I will no doubt use in the future when I park while preoccupied.
And after multiple trips through the labyrinth that is the Rockyview Hospital, I started getting the hang of the twists and turns (and the signs with different orientation—you can see a map in one hallway with the ER featured as a large orange blob in the SW corner, and then you encounter another map a few hundred metres away with the orange ER in the NE corner!). A couple of days ago, a woman asked me how to get to the cafeteria and I was able to provide accurate directions. I have progressed from being hopelessly lost to being able to help someone else, and I was grateful for being able to be of service to another person.
Our situation is tough, but there are tougher ones. While I was getting a glass of water for my parent, an elderly patient asked me if I knew where his wife was. I said that I didn’t work there (I was in the little kitchen with a microwave and ice dispenser that I had just discovered!), that I was just visiting my parent. He asked what our names were. I am hesitant about getting chatty with strangers, but he looked kind-hearted—and no one looks very menacing in hospital pajamas. He listened attentively while I gave our first names, so it felt safe, and I asked him what his wife’s name was. He said, “That’s the problem—I can’t remember.” I realized that he asked me my name in the hope that he would realize that it was his wife’s name, too. I felt grateful that we are not in that situation, and I felt even more grateful a few days later when I saw a woman I assumed was his wife sitting with him—and that she hadn’t disappeared and could probably tell him her name next time he forgot.
I am grateful that my job allows me some flexibility in my schedule—I am not chained to a desk during specified business hours, although I generally work regular hours. This week, I am experimenting with taking a long lunch break to go to the hospital to have lunch with my mom since neither of us are at our best at the end of the day—but my days end much later than usual.
And I am grateful for my sister who flew up from her home in the US to help me manage the situation. Instead of focusing on the fact that I have had a houseguest for a month (!), I am grateful that I didn’t have to have difficult conversations and visits alone, and that my sister and I have always gotten along.
Besides practicing gratitude (and a bit of cognitive behavioral therapy), there are some practical steps you can take, even as a busy lawyer, when you need to step back a bit at work. These practical tips are based on the assumption that you are dealing with people with at least average degrees of empathy. If you believe that your colleagues and employers are empathy-deficient or completely empathy-devoid, please think about whether you would thrive in a different workplace.
When a crisis is looming, please consider giving a heads up to your firm as early as possible, and be mindful of not overpromising your availability or deliverables. Most employers and co-workers would prefer to be on standby unnecessarily than to be caught short-handed. You can tell them that you are facing a personal, health or other challenge that may cause an unavoidable absence or delayed availability, but that you are working on contingency plans, and then have viable contingency plans to pull out if needed. Managing expectations, both for clients and colleagues, is an important strategy.
And, again, because I have been in practice a long time, I have experience with this as well. I was asked to work on a great file at a time when great files were rare due to a poor economy. But I had just suffered a miscarriage. As a female lawyer, I kept everything relating to potential pregnancy deeply under wraps, but there was a possibility that I would need to have a medical procedure—a D and C—and I thought it was only fair to tell the partner in charge of the matter that I could need a bit of time off due to this. I discussed this risk, was welcomed on the file, and everything turned out fine.
But thinking about how your work could be reallocated in the event of an emergency can be a good strategy. If you overthink the way I do, you are probably always thinking about contingency plans—this is part of lawyerly prudence on steroids. Everyone’s work situation is different, but consider whether you should take on work for which you have no back-up when you know that a situation is brewing.
If you are a sole practitioner, it is especially important to have a contingency plan so that your firm can continue to operate if an emergency makes you unavailable. The Law Society of Alberta has a contingency plan guide to help you address these issues . You may want to make a reciprocal arrangement with another lawyer!
And think about how your staff can help. A lawyer in recovery shared a story at our recent webinar on talking about addiction about realizing that he needed to go to rehab. Being a sole practitioner, the lawyer sat down with his firm’s only other employee, a great legal assistant, and disclosed that he might need to go away for a few weeks. The assistant pulled out a notepad and started reviewing key issues like who would sign trust cheques. His practice survived and thrived, and this assistant is still with him, many years later. Sole practitioners can arrange for another lawyer who has Responsible Lawyer status for trust safety purposes—learn more in the contingency guide.
I hear horror stories about junior lawyers advising their firms that their physicians have recommended that they take medical leaves whose disclosure meets with resistance. “Suck it up, buttercup” may be a polite version for what they hear. Recently, a senior lawyer said that juniors may be misinterpreting a ham-fisted attempt from senior lawyers who are trying to say that they value the junior lawyer—that may be. But if you have to meet with your firm managing partner or practice group leader, it can be a good strategy to be prepared with ideas about how your work could be covered. While it is true that some people will be hostile no matter what you do, it is usually true that being a person who brings solutions, and not just problems, is valued.
As much as we want to avoid making disclosures about our mental health at work, there are times when earlier is better, even if you are not sure you need time off or another accommodation, like my miscarriage story. Stress increases as we get closer to events like trials and closings. If you approach the senior lawyer the day before a trial or closing and ask for time off, the senior lawyer is in their own ramped up stress scenario. It is counter-intuitive, but if you know that your stress is reaching a critical point, can you arrange for backup before a critical time? Each situation is unique, and you are best positioned to know how a request will be received, but know that the senior lawyer may be close to their breaking point, too, and will have less empathy than even a few days earlier.
Many years ago when I found myself having to address needing a medical leave as a mid-career lawyer. I called my General Counsel to advise of my pending medical leave, but I also said that I would defer starting my leave for one business day so that I could come to the office and dictate transfer memos on all my files. I believed that I could do this without endangering my health and I didn’t want to leave my colleagues in difficult positions. But as I said above, our situations are unique and while doing something like this may work for some, others will need to go cold turkey from their doctor’s office. You know yourself and your work responsibilities best, so it is up to you to determine how to implement your leave. I was also a world class people pleaser and I would have loved it if my colleagues had been impressed with my dedication and kindness to them—but I bet that they didn’t give it a moment’s thought (life lesson: enough with the external validation—learn the value of internal validation instead.)
And I discussed my plan to defer my leave for one day with my physician. She wasn’t thrilled but she accepted that one day would be okay, but not anything more. Please consult with your doctor if you want to try to review your files before going on leave.
Of course, being comfortable that everything in your files is well-documented and up-to-date is a great strategy in a perfect world. But most of us live in reality, and our files are not always ready to hand off. Please think about whether you can take phone calls or emails from your co-workers who assume your files—and discuss this with your physician and counsellor to ensure that this will not cause a setback. But if you are able to volunteer one call per file, but no more than one phone call per day, or something like that, your colleagues may appreciate it. Most won’t even need to call you.
Think about how your colleagues could support you. If there is a more senior associate on your file who you trust, could an internal reallocation of day to day assignments enable you to stay at work? Or is there a way of pitching an alternative work approach (a.k.a. a file swap) to a colleague who is really interested in the file causing you distress. Be open to finding win-wins when you can.
We don’t all have a valued colleague down the hall who can help out and share strategies. One alternative for sole practitioners and small firm lawyers is a locum. The Law Society has a program called Locum Connect where lawyers interested in taking on term assignments can post profiles and a lawyer seeking temporary help can then reach out to them. See https://www.lawsociety.ab.ca/resource-centre/programs/locum-connect/.
Please remember that peer support volunteers who have taken medical leaves or have had work interruptions due to personal issues can also be a great source of encouragement and strategies. We can help connect you with someone who has been in the boat you find yourself. Your situation does not have to be identical in order to benefit from a peer’s insights.
Assist is here to help you navigate life crises and work interruptions, along with your physician and counsellor. Call us—we can help.
Loraine