Irrelevant

Originally written during the blackout

Click. Surrounded by that constant sound. White noise. Ambient sound. Click. A gun fires on an empty chamber. Click. Nothing escapes your senses here. We’re professionals.

A storage room converted into a computer barracks. Lawyers of all ages and backgrounds find themselves uncomfortably numb for all roads have led them here.

As lawyer’s salaries boomed in the nineteen eighties and nineties, so did the number of lawyers entering into an already overcrowded marketplace. Supply soon overtook demand, and all those promises of fame and fortune misled those that followed in their wake. Where junior associates would once bill out hundreds of dollars an hour to review tens of thousands of documents per case, the surplus of attorneys made this grunt labor far more expendable.

And so the junior associates were given more demanding tasks earlier in their careers. But greater responsibility breeds greater compensation, and these first year associates recruited out of the top law schools were about to break the bank. To justify the upward adjustment of the market, firms sought out attorneys from only the highest echelon of law schools. The more qualified the associate is on paper, the more the client will want to pay for their services.

Law schools were not oblivious to the realignment of the marketplace; they merely chose to turn a blind eye to it. And so in a legal environment like Chicago, where tuition for any number of the lowest tier law schools can be upwards of forty thousand, over two thousand attorneys per year were graduating through the system and flooding the market. There were no jobs for these highly educated, hopelessly indebted young attorneys. All those years of laboring, the sweat and tears poured into college, law school, graduate school, the bar exam, it was all to be for naught.

The document review process had been streamlined. Instead of two or three attorneys sifting through thousands of private emails and spreadsheets for months upon months, now it would take mere days for twenty lawyers to scan through the papers online. There was no opportunity for advancement, there was no one to impress. The project coordinators were simply contract attorneys just like you. They just happened to have been doing it for years, and were a little more dead on the inside from it.

Click. And there we sat, for ten hours a day, never knowing whether this hour would be our last on the clock. Two options; whether the document was relevant or non-relevant. Click. I had always thought the opposite of relevant was irrelevant, but there I go again using that education. Click. Each one putting to use a lawyer’s heighted sense of reading comprehension. Click. Each a step closer to being sent home again.

Projects would start and end in a moment’s notice. For the recruiters and coordinators, there was no incentive to share timelines and schedules with you. After everything we have done, we were expendable, replaceable by hundreds of other faceless attorneys aspiring to be something more. The young and impressionable were sold on the idea that document review enhanced your legal credentials. The truth of it was, after six months, you were irreparably pigeon holed into this lower class of attorney.

You had to feel for the older attorneys that had fallen back to this point in life. This was not the stepping stone we once thought it was. They were bottoming out. Click. A man in his mid-fifties whispered to me that he hoped the project would last another two days. He needed this to pay for his daughter’s college textbooks.

One week every month I would get on a project, and for that week I would make just enough to pay off the student loans and the minimum credit card payments. I was adrift. Click. In six months of this work, after reviewing thousands of documents, I had found only five relevant documents. Over and over again it would be the same task, click, and another non-relevant moment filtered away never to be thought of again. Click. Twenty attorneys daydreaming of being something more than this. Click.

I have dined with and lobbied political leaders on three continents. Click.

I graduated valedictorian of my law school class in Hong Kong. Click.

I lied, cheated and stole an election to become the state chairman of Kansas. Click.

I lived a thousand lives of anyone I wanted to be in the clubs of Lan Kwai Fong. Click.

I passed the Illinois Bar exam. Click.

I was a hero once. I was the Big Bad. Click.

I was a twenty-seven year old living in my sister’s childhood bedroom. Click.

My closest friends abandoned me when I needed help the most. Click.

There was never a reason to wake up before noon. Click.

I was never supposed to make it back. Click.

Click…

Click…

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