Much has happened these past few weeks since I wrote that chippery and overly positive piece of garbage I call a plan of action. My document review project, which I accepted under the rationalization that I will utilize it to the best of my ability to maximize my ability to support my family while I pay the bills and start my law practice; well, let's just say that like so many things, it is not working out the way I planned. The initial plan was to get to work each day at 7am, put in 8 hours (the required minimum). Early afternoon, I would head off to a law library or to Starbucks to do legal research on how to practice the areas of law that I have chosen for myself and my practice.
That worked for a few days, until they ran out of documents for us to review and I was let go for a few days. Then I was called back for one or two days, and then let go again because again. It seems as if the people behind the document review project can't get their documents in order for us fifty attorneys to review them. In other words, they were overzealous in their hiring so many attorneys when really they only had the workload to keep just a few of us working.
Then a week or so they called me back again, this time for a different project for the same client. I worked my butt off to help them make their deadlines, often working well into the night. I practically killed myself (staying all hours into the evening, and even coming in on a Sunday all in one block of time) thinking that all these extra hours would really help us out financially. It was the financial boost I was looking for. Then came Tisha b'Av and I had to take off that day. I resumed the following day with the crazy hours and over the rest of the week I finished off the project. But, it turned out that with all the days the week before that I was out because they had no work for me (I was off half of the week the week before), plus the day I had to take off for Tisha b'Av, I averaged 40 hours for each of the two weeks -- in short, the minimum number of hours I would have worked had I just shown up each morning and left at 3:30pm to work on my law practice.
Wow was that a disappointment. On top of that, the project provides no benefits, no overtime, no soda or snacks (I really don't care about that, but it was something I noticed about the project right away), and in short, the guys next to me call the floor we work on a sweat shop.
So as of yesterday, I resolved to only work the minimum amount of hours and to resume the studying to start the law firm practice. I hope that soon I'll be able to move from studying about how to practice to generating clients and actually practicing law. The goal here is to get enough clients so that I can walk away from the document review project and start focusing full-time on my law practice.
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