My Attorney Blog

Sometimes I get asked by non legal types what it’s like working as a contract attorney. The mental picture that best describes it is a combination between CBS’ Survivor and Bill Murray’s Groundhog’s Day, where everyday keeps repeating itself endlessly.

Survivor

Contract work is by definition not a permanent proposition. You move from project to project and longevity can be difficult to predict sometimes. I’ve been on projects where I was brought on to serve for several months. Only one disorganized week later the project was already over. The opposite has happened before too. I was brought on for a projected 4 week project, and 6 months later I was still there with no end in sight.

Like the Survivor reality show where contestants have to live on a tropical island and remain in the competition for as long as possible before getting voted off by other contestants, I just try to stay on board my project as long as possible before bouncing.

Projects can be unpredictable and oftentimes there is little feedback to let you know where you stand and what’s the current status of the project. You just keep working until someone tells you to stop.

But sometimes you can tell something is going to happen when the natives start to get antsy and restless. When the project is near its last legs, some of your co-workers will inevitably start panicking and start talking like Armageddon has arrived, while frantically dialing their agencies for salvation. Why the panic? From experience they should know that rolling over onto another project is a common and likely occurrence, whether it be with the same agency or a different one. I’ve never had a voluntary gap between projects longer than a few weeks.

So long as you get along with your Survivor workmates, do good work and put in decent hours, you won’t be voted off the document review island. No one wants to get the dreaded announcement or phone call that the project is over for them. Play it clean and you will likely survive another day.

I try to stay away from childish office politics although I enjoy watching them unfold. It gets particularly entertaining when I see female contract attorneys bicker to death about the most trivial and ridiculous things such as thermostat temperature. I’m almost hoping they will start something with each other just to break the monotony, which brings me to my second point.

Groundhog’s Day

In the world of contract attorneys, everyday is the same.

Hmm…let’s see, what did I do today at work? I came in, got my free Flavia coffee, sat down and clicked away at my workstation. What did I do yesterday? I came in, got my coffee, sat down, and clicked away. And the day before? Basically the same. It’s true, contract attorney work is not very exciting. The social interactions I have with other temps are the highlights of my day.

If you want to be in court or interact frequently with clients, this is not the line of work for you. Everyday is basically the same. I have a hard time distinguishing one work day from another sometimes. Although I do want to point out that it’s not really that much different from my past jobs frankly. In my last full time attorney job before working as a contract attorney I often experienced the same deja-vu feeling, so this is nothing particularly new.

But if you’re like me and understand that this is just a stress free way to make a living and fund your side projects, while still having time to pursue your other professional and personal goals, it’s not so bad.

With the near fraudulent way law schools have been shamelessly advertising their misleading employment statistics, the last few years has seen an increase in the number of students choosing to attend law school with the expectation that they will all be rewarded with lucrative six figure attorney salaries upon graduation. I think the sad reality is that many of these hapless students will be in for quite a shock and won’t fully understand the saturated state of the legal employment market until they’ve graduated. Saddled with huge burgeoning student loans, many law school graduates will ultimately enter into a form of financial servitude as they struggle to find a way out.

My own law school loans are comparatively tame and I managed to consolidate them at a time when interest rates were extraordinarily low. But I know many who are struggling with the realities of being debt ridden. There are those who end up spending months or years submitting resumes for attorney positions they may never get. Others transition into another non-legal field altogether, while others choose to perform contract attorney work until they get their employment life together.

Working As a Contract Attorney Because Of Student Loans

Talking to some of the other contract attorneys at work, I get the sense that many chose to perform document review work out of financial necessity to pay off crushing student loans. Contract attorneys get paid pretty well, albeit for relatively short stints at a time. But during those periods of available employment, they have the potential to earn quite a bit depending on the overtime hours available. When you are indebted with a sizable amount of student loans, sometimes your realistic employment options are limited.

I know a few contract attorneys who left law school with dreams of working in the non-profit sector or working in areas that would allow them to help low income people. Eventually financial reality set in and they ultimately could no longer afford to work in those relatively low paying areas of law. Some of these people did not willingly choose to work as contract attorneys but their financial realities ultimately did not give them much choice.

Instead of being bitter, I would hope that they would see contract attorney work as an honest and sensible alternative that can help them stabilize their financial lives and help them tackle their student loan payments. Everyone eventually has to find his or her own path and we are fortunate to have this type of work available as a stop gap solution.

Recent Observation

I’ve noticed something recently that disturbs me. It seems a few staffing agencies are vehemently against hiring contract attorneys who also work as solo practitioners on the side. At least one staffing agency has indicated in its job posting that one qualification criteria is that the applicant is not a solo practitioner. What is the deal with that? Do they want only lifers or something?

In this contract attorney business, we all pretty much work for ourselves. There is some loyalty in the sense that if you have a good working relationship with your agency, they may give you the heads up about an upcoming project quicker than they would offer the same information to another contract attorney. But the bottom line is we move from project to project like nomads, chasing the next available assignment, and loyalty is only a means to an end. My sense is that most contract attorneys will stay loyal to the project so long as it is still ongoing and continues to provide a living wage and working benefits. But when the project is near its last legs, or when the working benefits are curtailed or non-existent, there may be a feeling for some that the time to bail is near.

It’s Important To Stay The Course and Not Bail

There have been times I’ve been staffed and ended up stuck on a bad project. Maybe the hours were too short, overtime was limited, internet usage was banned, with no meal reimbursement, and under stifling working conditions. In those type of situations I have seriously given thought to leaving the project mid-stream for another one. My advice is, don’t do it! Projects don’t last forever and they eventually will end.

Ditching an assignment before it is over is a sure fire way of getting on the staffing agency and law firm’s bad side and could and likely will result in you becoming permanently banned from working with them ever again. Many contract attorneys like to overlap their projects seamlessly and may try to jump ship before it is over to catch the next project before it sails. Once again, don’t do it. The damage you’ll do to your working reputation isn’t worth it. This is not just for contract attorneys, the same goes for anyone in any profession. Do you think any client would be pleased if the person they hired left them in a lurch the moment a better assignment came along?

I have known people who became blacklisted from certain agencies because they left their project before it was over. Don’t expect to hear from the agency again anytime soon about upcoming projects if you do that. They will likely remove you from all future project consideration. Of course, the blacklist is agency and law firm specific. You can easily go work for another agency and law firm, but because the contract attorney world is so small, it is likely you will bump into the same law firm again in the future and find yourself regretting that you burned that particular bridge in the past.

Try to maintain good working relationships. I know there are some bad assignments out there with working conditions akin to that of working in a sweatshop, but from my experience, only a handful of projects are really that bad.

In the event that you do burn an agency by jumping ship and you find yourself blacklisted. Given the passage of time, it is sometimes possible to get back into the agency’s good graces. Remember, they need you for staffing purposes just as much as you need them for job leads. You just have to convince them by apologizing and assuring them that it was an isolated incident that won’t be repeated. Some agencies have been known to take people back. Just don’t make it a systematic practice.