A Taste Of The Life Of A Practicing Lawyer

If you want to know what it’s really like to practice my kind of law, you might want to spend some time thinking about what it would be like to read someone else’s e-mail. A lot of someone else’s e-mail. For instance, if you were investigating whether or not a key employee engaged in some sort of a wrongful act, you would look through every piece of e-mail you could find, because you can’t know for sure where some mention of the wrongful act might come up.

To get a taste of what it’s like, imagine that you were investigating whether or not Tom Brady should be suspended for four games because of allegedly conspiring with an equipment manager to underinflate footballs. You’d read all of Tom Brady’s e-mails, including these dealing with the purchase of a $8,300 pool cover. But really, about the only thing that’s even remotely interesting about this exchange is the price tag for the product and the fact that a personal assistant, rather than the homeowner himself, arranged for the purchase.

Then, imagine what it’s like to read thousands of e-mails like that, only not even involving expensive things like a $8,300 pool cover with the color selected by a Brazilian supermodel. Now you have some idea of what it’s like to be me.

Burt Likko is the pseudonym of an attorney in Southern California and the managing editor of Ordinary Times. His interests include Constitutional law with a special interest in law relating to the concept of separation of church and state, cooking, good wine, and bad science fiction movies. Follow his sporadic Tweets at @burtlikko, and his Flipboard at Burt Likko.