Guest Chapter 5
Name: Matt Baca
Current Position: Director, Community Engagement Division, Colorado Department of Law
Former Post-Law School Positions: Staff Attorney, Colorado Legal Services – Migrant Farm Worker Division; Associate Attorney, Earthjustice (Northwest Office); Judicial Law Clerk, U.S.
District Court (E.D. Va.). Writer of short humor and fiction: http://www.mattbaca.org/.Law School and Year: Joint JD/M.P.P. at New York University School of Law and the Harvard Kennedy School, 2011
Time between undergrad and law school: None (which I don't recommend)
One or two books I recommend:
1. Just Mercy by Bryan Stevenson – Below I talk about being grounded in your values as a lawyer and a human, and there is no better example than Stevenson's belief in and work toward the notion that we are all more than the worst thing we've done.
2. To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee – I hesitate to include something so obvious, but for me, it still inspires as to how a lawyer's advocacy for an individual and for justice, even against long odds and even when ultimately unsuccessful, is sacred in our profession.
Prologue – An Anecdote
I woke up the other morning with a thought stuck my mind like a rock in my shoe: the year 2100. That year is not so far off, really. As of this writing, it is 79 years in the future, and there are of course many people alive today who remember 79 years in the past (1942). But yet, it occurred to me that by 2100 my four-year-old will be 83 and my two-year-old will be 81; if they have kids, those kids will probably be in their forties or fifties; if those kids have kids (my great grandchildren), they could be in college in the year 2100. All that to say something very obvious: it all goes so, so fast.
A Few Ideas on How to Be a Lawyer that Only Halfway Correlates with How I Have Actually Behaved, as We Collectively March Toward the Year 2100
That's the main thing.
If it were socially acceptable, I would end every sentence with every new lawyer: as we collectively march toward the year 2100. Because if you haven't yet, at some point soon, you will feel in your bones all these cliches about time that have survived for a reason. The only time we have is now. The days go slow, the years go fast. You will feel this as your kids grow from babies to school-aged in two seconds or your parents—who you remember as youngish—begin impressive decades, or friends’ kids become your colleagues. When movies you loved as a kid look pixelated and old.The worst I could offer would be to say life is short so do what you love, which I promise I won't do, at least not until the very end and not without an apology. But here's the thing I would tell myself if I could go back in time: now is when you examine what matters to you and to try with urgency to align those in your life and your career. I'll call these things that matter to you your values. The moment is now. The moment is now. The moment is now, as we collectively march toward the year 2100.
We can all scrap the idea that there is work and there is life and that these are two fully separate and sealed universes—it's all part of the one life you get. I don't mean to suggest that you shouldn't try very hard to protect non-work time from work—you absolutely should—but it's all life, all part of the same messy timespan you have between now and 2100. What I mean is: the values you have for life, those have to be the same ones you explore and interrogate and, ultimately, apply to your work.
Let's talk about these in two categories. The first is how you work. The second is what work you do.
How you work. Do you want to be a helpful, collaborative person? If you value kindness, don't expect to be happy in an unkind practice of law. Know yourself and know it before you spend eight or twenty years bobbing along in hostile waters. And if you don't instinctively value kindness and empathy and compassion, or even if you do, remember that we all stumble toward them and often fail; George Saunders said it persuasively:
“At the end of my life, I know I won't be wishing I'd held more back, been less effusive, more often stood on ceremony, forgiven less, spent more days oblivious to the secret wishes and fears of the people around me.
So what is stopping me from stepping outside my habitual crap? My mind, my limited mind.”Working on that limited mind's capacity for generosity is always worth the effort.
Also, do you value time outside of work? If I hope anything for you and for me, it's that—finding the balance that most brings you joy. The right balance will change over different seasons of your career, and while balance is a difficult goal for lawyers to achieve, it couldn't be more important. It is. It is, as we march collectively toward the year 2100.
The second category is what you do for work.
Your practice area and you are going to be like one of those older couples who, over the course of decades, start to look like each other, speak with the same idiosyncratic turns of phrase, wear matching clothes unintentionally. And it is so, so easy for a decade to slip by and all of a sudden you realize you're now a lot more like your clients and colleagues than the kid who wrote your law school entrance essay and you wonder—Do I even like these people? Why do I still have to care what they think about me?—so my suggestion, humbly, is that you start asking today if you value the values of your type of practice.
This question—if not fully unique to lawyers—is probably rare. I don't imagine optometrists have to ask whether treating this or that person's eyes will make them feel morally bankrupt. But here we are, as lawyers, with something to say and do about the operation of lives and society.
So there are some values to stay away from. How about the things you want to go toward? It's important to have these—nothing perfect or idealized or entirely fanciful but some value or ambition that calls to you. The waves will push you this way and that, but if you aim toward something you like, you're more likely to get there. So if you want a relatively stress- and angst-free career and to live in the mountains, that's good to acknowledge and to go for, starting now. Or if you want to live in Spain or Wichita, or if you want to write novels or be a teacher, these are all plausibly consistent with a career as a lawyer, but you have to be deliberate and bold about declaring them your values and pursuing them, even as those around you may wonder why you want to take a step off the ordinary path.
Inertia is as hard to overcome in a career as in nature—not impossible, but harder as your career gathers mass.But we also need to interrogate the values and goals we think we hold, that destination where you want to aim the ship. You need to do so honestly and to find in yourself and your values those euphemisms and half-truths you are trying to foist on yourself.
Like you might say: I want to make an impact, make the world better. What you may mean, when you really stop and examine it, is that you want power over people's lives. The former requires and generates humility; the latter will never be satisfied, even if you someday are the Czar of Public Interest (or of America, or anything else). As Victor Hugo said, “How easily ambition calls itself vocation.” I want you to want to make the world better—I want that for myself too—but my point is to please not let yourself get away with altruistic-seeming falsehoods in your own self-examination. Know what you really value, really want—even those things you wouldn't utter aloud, and then ask yourself hard questions about them.
Another you might say: I want the best legal training or to be in a practice with resources or to do cutting-edge, big cases. What you may mean: I want to be at a firm and the real reason is because I want money but I can't just say: “I want money.” Again—be honest with yourself. Nobody but you gets to judge whether you need the money to pay off loans or support family or just because you want the security of it or something else. But I ask that you are honest and in so doing to please not accept without examination the law firm recruiting bromide that law firms are the only setting where good lawyers emerge or decent livings can be earned.
So that's my advice: work on a set of values in how you work and in what you do. And give them the same scrutiny you would an opposing witness with questionable motives.
Epilogue – Quicker, Unranked Observations, as We Collectively March Toward the Year 2100
1.
Help your peers; this is intrinsically good. If you don't care about that, it's also cynically and instrumentally good (they may later help you).2. Don't look at your phone all the time, at all hours of all days. To be more concrete and even controversial: don't sleep with your phone in your room—stress-reading an email at 3 a.m. accomplishes nothing for no one, and sending an email at that hour makes the world less like the one we all want to inhabit.
3. Some values and instincts you hold are bad. Knowing your values is a start, but what if you have bad values, with roots that run all the way down? We all do. Wanting to show Ricardo—or whomever—and all his colleagues that he's a real idiot asshole and a bad lawyer will sometimes call to you as a motivation, and it will never, ever be good. That's where your faith tradition or moral compass comes in, where training on things like implicit bias matters. Acknowledge bad instincts, see them, and resist.
4. You aren't the smartest or the most superlative anything, and you don't need to be. You just need to be smart enough. The tools that have gotten you here will continue to serve you. Hone them.
5. Abraham Lincoln's unimprovable guidance on how we should act as humans (and lawyers): “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right.”
6. A project for a whole career: getting the dial calibrated so that you can hear criticism but not obsess about what others think—especially the unfair, petty stuff.
7. For when you don't have that dial set right, keep a kudos folder where you collect nice things people have told you so that you can, during the low times, give yourself a boost.
8. Everyone else is also trying and failing and blundering and eating and sleeping and crying and laughing, and if we can recognize we are all—your colleagues, opposing counsel, clients, bosses, paralegals—on this planet only briefly and only together, then I don't know what except that the world will be nicer. Better said by Bryan Stevenson: “We have a choice. We can embrace our humanness, which means embracing our broken natures and the compassion that remains our best hope for healing. Or we can deny our brokenness, forswear compassion, and, as a result, deny our own humanity.”
9. Life is short. The year 2100 is near. Do what you love. (Sorry.)