bosses, help reduce heart failure: scroll all the way down.

I wish that every time I thought about writing a blog post, it would magically appear…

The last few weeks have been a little nutty – but mostly in a good way.  Since news broke at my firm that I am retaking the bar, I have been slammed with work.  Not slammed in the volume of work, but rather, the quality of the work.  I’ve had major client contact lately and was even told one day, “Congratulations, you have your first client.”*

That same week, I had one of my first real “lawyer moments,” in which I was frantically running around parts of the office, trying to get a letter for a client to the government out to FedEx in time.**  My boss told me that once I had made the changes to the letter that we’d talked about, I could send it (i.e. without having her do a final check – she was out of town and her only access to email was via her Blackberry).  I worked first on the chunk of the letter that we’d deemed most important, and copy/pasted it into an email, saying, “Good?” in the subject line.  I’d incorporated all the edits we’d discussed.  Since I didn’t hear from her by the time I had to send the package, I just went for it and trusted myself.  Of course, as soon as I returned to my desk from the FedEx drop-box, I got a reply from her, asking, “Where are the cases we discussed?  I thought you were going to add a section?  Send it to me, and I’ll help with edits.”  So, of course, I choked on the Diet Coke I’d just slammed (why don’t law firms keep Red Bull in the fridge?) and frantically wrote back, “I just sent the doc…DO I NEED TO INTERCEPT THE PACKAGE????”  When I didn’t receive a response 3 seconds later, I called my boss.  I said, “I put in the cases we talked about – did I not include enough discussion?”  and she said, “You did?  Oh, yes now I see….. [laughter] … Guess i didn’t scroll down far enough on my Blackberry!  Ok that’s great, thanks!”

I then walked down the hallway to find a defibrillator to bring me back from my massive heart attack.

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* Note: This client was for consulting work, not legal work, if any of you are wondering how that whole lack-of-license thing played into the equation.

** This is a legal client.  My boss is the lead attorney, but we’ve both been very actively involved with research, writing, and client interaction.  I even had to handle a couple of client calls by myself!