experiment, day 2: five reasons my job is pissing me off right now
1) I worked fifty hours more than required in August. FIFTY. Five. Zero. I took all or part of four days off without putting in for leave, and I still worked that much over. (I'm salaried.)
2) I put in 14 hours of work this past weekend, including all functional hours of Sunday ...
3) ... and then came in this morning to discover from my friend Z, our intake paralegal, that my boss had changed the way we evaluate family-law cases so that many, many more could conceivably come flooding through our door, because he doesn't feel we're helping enough people.
(But that's not because we're falling down on the job, or doing something wrong, or Just Not Frakking Well Working Hard Enough. That's because there are sixty-two million people in the US right now who are eligible for our services, meaning that their household income is at or under 125 percent of the federal poverty guidelines for their household size, and there are a little less than four thousand federally funded legal-services attorneys in the country. There are also a fair number of legal-services attorneys in the country who aren't federally funded. A very generous count of those folks doubles the number of civil attorneys for poor people in the US. Call it 8,000 attorneys for 62 million potential clients. By my math, that's 7,750 people who need help for every one legal-aid attorney.
(... yeah, I got nothin'.)
For the record, for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, I am the attorney in the office who handles the bulk of the family-law cases we keep in-house. And yet, somehow I had no idea the floodgates were about to be opened until Z thoughtfully gave me an update.
... yeah, I (still) got nothin'.
4) I ran a report over the weekend against our client/time database comparing my case-closure rate with those of my two full-time colleagues. In my coming-up-on-seven years, I've closed two hundred and fifty more cases than my supervising attorney - who started three weeks before I did - and over three hundred more cases than my other full-time colleague. And that does not count the two hundred family-law cases that I don't get credit for closing because I filtered them to our pro bono network - as my boss desired - rather than handling them in-house.
I don't even know what to DO with that.
5) My damn right elbow hates where my work desk mousepad is. Also, our coffeemaker is broken. (What, you expected more boring attorney drama? Caffeine deprivation and tendonitis, people: these are the tragedies of our times.)
2) I put in 14 hours of work this past weekend, including all functional hours of Sunday ...
3) ... and then came in this morning to discover from my friend Z, our intake paralegal, that my boss had changed the way we evaluate family-law cases so that many, many more could conceivably come flooding through our door, because he doesn't feel we're helping enough people.
(But that's not because we're falling down on the job, or doing something wrong, or Just Not Frakking Well Working Hard Enough. That's because there are sixty-two million people in the US right now who are eligible for our services, meaning that their household income is at or under 125 percent of the federal poverty guidelines for their household size, and there are a little less than four thousand federally funded legal-services attorneys in the country. There are also a fair number of legal-services attorneys in the country who aren't federally funded. A very generous count of those folks doubles the number of civil attorneys for poor people in the US. Call it 8,000 attorneys for 62 million potential clients. By my math, that's 7,750 people who need help for every one legal-aid attorney.
(... yeah, I got nothin'.)
For the record, for reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture, I am the attorney in the office who handles the bulk of the family-law cases we keep in-house. And yet, somehow I had no idea the floodgates were about to be opened until Z thoughtfully gave me an update.
... yeah, I (still) got nothin'.
4) I ran a report over the weekend against our client/time database comparing my case-closure rate with those of my two full-time colleagues. In my coming-up-on-seven years, I've closed two hundred and fifty more cases than my supervising attorney - who started three weeks before I did - and over three hundred more cases than my other full-time colleague. And that does not count the two hundred family-law cases that I don't get credit for closing because I filtered them to our pro bono network - as my boss desired - rather than handling them in-house.
I don't even know what to DO with that.
5) My damn right elbow hates where my work desk mousepad is. Also, our coffeemaker is broken. (What, you expected more boring attorney drama? Caffeine deprivation and tendonitis, people: these are the tragedies of our times.)