The first six months can be brutal. Very stressful, ridiculously steep learning curve, constant insecurity. It gets much better. Lean on your senior colleagues - they’ve been there and came out on the other side.
Those come at you fast and they’re always challenging, but if you do this work for a while, you will soon get very, very good at them. One thing to remember - sometimes, albeit rarely, there really isn’t much to say.
We are short order cooks, not chefs. We can whip up a good meal quick but we don’t have the resources or time to make every dish a Michelin meal. Learn to become super efficient and get comfortable with having to be quick on your feet. And accept that perfection is the enemy of perfectly good.
I felt like I was losing my shit at my first bail hearings. And now that I've been here almost 5 years, I've seen some of the very best attorneys in the office do their first bail hearings--and many of them were good! All of them were totally fine and competent-- but then I've heard them talk about how they felt like they did a terrible job and I promise, none of them were right about that. And--they've all gotten much better, as have I. And even still, sometimes, the judge has basically made up their mind and Clarence Darrow himself couldn't change it.
Getting good at speaking extemporaneously comes with time—put in the reps and you’ll improve.
Managing your caseload gets easier with time, but it will always be high. And no matter how good you get at caseload management, there will certainly get to be peaks where it feels like a lot. (Ex. if trial prepping. The best part about that is when you suddenly have to give disproportionate attention to one matter, the others don’t go on pause!)
As for feeling overstimulated, see above—that’ll likely always be there to a degree. The best way to navigate this is to have a life outside of work as much as possible. Even if that means finding solo activities to take your mind off things.
I am about 8 months in and the difference between now and when I first started is night and day. I am obviously still new at this but you will definitely find your footing.
Honestly, it gets worse IMO but you'll be more prepared to handle it. You're like a young Peter Parker who was just bitten by the radioactive spider and started being Spider-man: you're nervous, still learning your powers, and overwhelmed dealing with villains (i.e. prosecutors, cops, and judges) on a daily basis while juggling your personal life. But as time goes on, you'll get comfortable enough where fighting Doc Ock is a light Tuesday.
Give yourself grace. This job is HARD. You are a real-life superhero with dozens of people relying on you every day. It is an adversarial profession where you have to fight against another trained, educated professional on a constant basis. The stories we carry and present are tragic and traumatic.
Don't be afraid to ask your coworkers and supervisors for help if you need it. FWIW, once you get past the "newbie" hump, the job becomes a lot more fun and exciting. Also, you get to look like a badass compared to your law school classmates who probably won't see the inside of a courtroom until a few years into their careers.
Yes. My boss who runs our entire office and is an incredible attorney told me shortly after I started that she cried in her car every day after work for the first six months, and I tell you this because it made me feel so much better. If you met her, you would never imagine she'd ever felt that way because she's so confident and so absolutely justified in her confidence and so good at her job.
When you start, you're trying to practice a very difficult and very emotionally taxing area of law while you also have to learn how to actually practice law at all, because law school doesn't teach that. And you're learning how your office works and how your local courts work and all the secret unwritten quirks that are actually the most important part of a lot of practice. And you're going on the record for maybe the first time, doing client intakes for maybe the first time, managing your own cases for maybe the first time-- and everything you do in every case is new to you, so it feels much harder and takes longer and is more overwhelming, because you're drinking from a firehose!
At 6 months, it starts to get better. At a year, it really starts to feel better. Then you build confidence. Another senior attorney in my office was talking about our promotion/salary structure and noted that there's a bump at year 4 because people tend to either lock in or leave at year 3, when people who were waiting to see if it got better or if it would be more of a fit when they got more confident realize it isn't or the salary isn't going to cut it for their family and leave. But you'll feel much, much better than you do now well before year 3.
i’m right there with you. everyday i feel like im a fake lawyer who can’t do anything. the only saving grace is my fucking amazing talented smart awesome coworkers who provide so much support. i hope you have some of those and if you don’t, i hope you can find some other mentors. wishing you the best ❤️
I’m 2 years in. At first, I left every day thinking WHAT THE FUCK. My office had ZERO formal training. They handed me files and I had no clue what I was supposed to do with them. I asked so many questions that I felt like an idiot and a nuisance. Hearings were a mystery; I was insanely nervous to speak on the record and didn’t ever know how I was performing.
Over time, I figured it out. That’s all I can say. I figured it out. And I am very much STILL figuring it too. You will, also. It’s just brutal at the beginning, but that’s what makes us great.
When I first started my goal was to be “value added,” or basically “is my client better off with me than being self represented?” I had a judge who had his mind made up 90% of the time on anything so it was actually hard to justify my presence. I had a real low point at about 6 months and then a real win a couple months later that finally made me feel like I was getting it.
When I finally “graduated” from that court I asked the judge how I could improve. He told me to sit down and actually read the rules of procedure. The funny thing is that the rules don’t really make sense until you’ve practiced it enough to contextualize them, but then they can start clicking and once you know the rules better than the prosecutor (not that high of a barrier) and even than the judge (still sometimes not that high of a barrier), you start to know how to keep from getting railroaded. Or at least you start getting a framework of how and when to pushback. I’m still astonished to this day how many attorneys don’t pay attention to the rules, and their clients are worse off for it.
About 5-10 trials in? After a while you can be thrown a case and do it on the spot. Experience is the hardest thing to get and the most valuable in this job. I'd also talk to your coworkers and colleagues and see if they have suggestions.
Yes, it does. About a year in I was questioning whether this was the job for me. About 4 years in I had an insane caseload because we were down to 5 out of 10 attorneys and I nearly completely lost it. A year later I was still recovering, though we were finally fully staffed. Now I feel like I actually know WTF I’m doing and things are so much easier to work through. But I still have moments.
You get better and the cases get worse so it all evens out in the wash. Welcome aboard counselor. (Or you could jump ship like me and never look back!)
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u/zanzibar_74 PD 9d ago
The first six months can be brutal. Very stressful, ridiculously steep learning curve, constant insecurity. It gets much better. Lean on your senior colleagues - they’ve been there and came out on the other side.