A lot of days, though, my primary goal can be hard to keep in front of me. This business is not for the faint of heart, especially the practice of family law. People can be mean, especially in this business. One lawyer told me that family law attorneys are the oncologists of the legal profession . . . nobody's ever happy no matter how well you do the job. He may have been on to something.
It doesn't help when colleagues and judges can add to the stress with their own steady stream of criticism (they do). Or when clients fire me because [I didn't do what they told me to do] [I didn't do a perfect job according to them] [they believed the other lawyer who bad-mouthed me] [they just didn't want to pay me]. When I was a new lawyer, I handled the stress by erecting a coat of armor that I thought would keep me protected from the daily barbs, but no surprise, all it did was keep the human being I am hidden from the folks I work with. Now, I've learned to just go out into the arena every day, whether I win or lose, and allow my heart to get broken. Allow myself to make mistakes (Yes, Virginia, even lawyers make mistakes, only the ones that lie say they don't). If I'm not a wholehearted human being, I won't have empathy for the pain my clients bring to me every day. And that empathy is as great a gift as my legal knowledge, skill and experience.
