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Self-Motivation In the Face of Discouragement
We are on the cusp on making history. Hopefully soon, a new SCOTUS Justice will be confirmed and we’ll have the first Black woman on the bench. If you watched the confirmation hearings you saw that Judge Brown Jackson was grace under pressure and one response was a beautiful description of what it was like to feel so out of place in distinguished spaces. I encourage you to watch it here, which starts around 17:08. But today I want to talk about what happened a few minutes before (around 14:50). Senator Padilla starts his question with a comment about when he was a in high school a well-meaning counselor discouraged…
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Managing Angry & Volatile Clients
One thing they don’t teach you in law school is how to respond when you think a client is going to harm you. Hopefully you never need to know that, but reading a recent article of an immigration attorney who was stabbed by their client, it dawned on me how necessary it is to talk about managing experiences with volatile clients in order to keep yourself safe. First, I don’t want to talk about this to instill fear in people or make lawyering seem overly dangerous. However, in one study of 22 states, it found that up to 46.5% of registered attorneys had been threatened or assaulted. It helps no…
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Two Years Later…
Two years go by so fast that you don’t even notice how things change. I want to take some time to reflect on the past two years (times BC) because I think it’s important and also because, in general, people are so quick to dismiss the trauma and the shift we’ve experienced and that’s not healthy, bestie. First, and most important, there are so many people whose lives were upended because of this illness (to put it lightly). And as a country we’re really quick to overlook the loss of millions of people gone and what that means. I don’t have any solutions on how to make us more empathetic…
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Side Bar: Finding the Point
Ok, it feels slightly silly to do this when idk if we’re close to war. Again. On one hand I want to just throw everything in the air and say what is the point. And really, what is the point? But I also naturally am inclined to push back against that type of fatalistic attitude. It’s easy to stop doing routines, self-care, or working towards goals when things get tough but I prefer to keep at it (or maybe ignoring all the bad is my way to cope! Lol). Either way this is a no judgement zone! So welcome to March! It’s actually my favorite month because it’s my birthday…
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The Magic and Panic of Post-Bar Life
If you took the February Bar, I have one thing to say–CONGRATULATIONS! YOU DID IT! Ok, I actually have more than one thing to say (obvi). It is such a relief to be done but the reality is that even after putting in all that work, you don’t know the results for weeks and the anxiety of what if can really drag you down. Life post-bar is filled with both the magic of what is possible–your entire career ahead of you. And the panic, “what if I didn’t pass?” It’s a horrible predicament. I remember, still, the weeks after the test where I’d have moments so excited about what…
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Sidebar: Surviving a Chicago Winter
Happy new year (a month and two weeks late)! It’s so funny because in the fall, I wrote about how things felt a little more normal and then of course the next wave came and put everything back on pause. How much longer is this going to take? Very frustrating. But easing into the year wasn’t a bad thing, it let me really plan out my time and focus on my health a little more. And that was really the theme in January–getting more in tune with how I feel/making healthier decisions. So, I think I mentioned that at my annual the Dr realized I had extremely low vitamin D.…
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How to Prepare if You’re Not Taking a Gap Year
When you’re in undergrad and know you want to be a lawyer, there’s a fork in the road where you have to decide whether you’re going to go straight through or take a gap year. I have spoken before on why a gap year is helpful and I do encourage folks to take one. But maybe you’re like me and won’t. In those instances, being in your early/mid-twenties and going into law school does require a little extra preparation to ensure you go in steady on your feet. If I could do it all over again (I’d take a gap year lol) ok but if I was going straight through…
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Best Way to Calm Nerves When First Working With Clients
Ok, you’re a licensed attorney, you have a real lawyer job, with a client case and everything! But now you actually have to talk to clients-on your own and sometimes they don’t trust you because you look so young. Or they expect you to know about some random issue that has nothing to do with your practice area. How can you present a cool, calm, collected persona so that your clients trust you when you know there is so much you don’t know? First, take a deep breath. The good thing is that knowing there’s a lot you don’t know is the first step in good client counseling. It’s good…
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Red Flags to Avoid When Considering a Job Offer
It’s always exciting to receive a job offer (and what a relief!). During the interview phase, each party is putting their best face forward and there’s no reason to think you’re stepping into a bad situation. But it can happen that you go in with rose-colored glasses and suddenly a few months in (or worse, weeks), you realize they were selling you a false bill of goods because the office is toxic AF. How can you avoid that? Especially in an industry where the work is always high-stress, fast-paced and urgent? Are you doomed to just work someplace you hate always? Not so much. First, I went to differentiate between…
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The Best Way to Prepare for a New Semester
Congrats on getting through fall semester. For me, those were always a bit tougher. As you head into a new semester I thought it would be helpful to share some ways to assess and better prepare for a new year/new semester. Whether you were happy or disappointed with your grades, it’s helpful to stop and think about what went well—where did you do better than expected or what class took you by surprise by how interesting you found the topic to be? For those classes where you excelled, what do you think made the difference? And is there a way to replicate that for other classes? If you found a…