Goodfellow: Learning how to get acquainted with the lawyer next door

My neighbor is a lawyer, which I learned about quite accidentally.

He’s not the type to volunteer his profession before you’re done shaking his hand. He is taking our legal relationship slow. And by that, I mean we’ve spent the past six years talking exclusively about sports and craft beer. He probably doesn’t want to come across as overly eager. We’re due to progress to contract interpretation any day now.

I’ve always been enthusiastic about my identity as a lawyer, and I am always perplexed to learn that many of the attorneys I have come to know and respect don’t feel the same way. And these are no slouches in the legal world. Which made me wonder: How is it possible to be a great lawyer without being passionate about the law?

A few weeks ago, I invited myself to dinner at a lawyer-friend’s house for a deeper dive into this subject. I hoped to identify the secret ingredient that made her such a good attorney. But I got distracted watching her make her homemade pizza dough with an extraordinary combination of toppings. (Think: broccoli, prosciutto, onions, garlic, and three types of cheeses. Seriously, who wouldn’t be distracted?). After seeing (and tasting) her true passion, it did not seem like the best time to argue that everyone should take lawyering more seriously.

I asked another really talented lawyer friend about the “job” versus “vocation” distinction. She was a little distracted because she hadn’t already billed her 200 hours this month. She asked if I knew of a billing code for the conversation, but she thought of one before I could respond.

I wanted badly for her to agree with me. “All attorneys would want to approach their careers with passion and genuine interest, right?” I implored.

She seemed unconvinced. “Well, I suppose it wouldn’t hurt,” she said. She always keeps her advice very concise, which makes me wonder how she ever makes it to 200 hours.

In the interest of getting a balanced perspective, I tried a third friend whose legal zeal is typically overflowing and who I already suspected would lean solidly toward the “vocation” camp.

Before I could ask, she made a very polished comment about how she was trying to relegate work to a few hours a day of “intellectual stimulation.” And I got the distinct impression that she may have been practicing that line with a therapist for quite a while, so I dropped the subject.

How lawyers treat their work is a topic not without controversy.

I attended where there was a Millennial-led open discussion about divergent needs and approaches in the workplace. It was such a disaster that I contemplated crawling under the table, mid-discussion, but then I realized it was already too crowded under the table for me to fit.

Those who didn’t crawl under the table and decided, instead, to engage in the inter-generational sparing, almost certainly left that conversation being firmer in their belief that Millennials are fickle and lazy; Boomers and Gen Xers are set in their ways. What everyone could agree on was that we should not under any circumstances revisit that conversation. In fact, bringing up this topic some six years later might be too soon.

For some, keeping a healthy separation between work life and home life is a necessity.

A few years ago, I read a book titled “Can’t Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation.” The premise of the book is that a combination of social and historical factors has led to untenable work hours and stress levels.

The author argues that the only way to avert career burnout is to give less, care less, and treat work as a job, not a vocation. The solution seemed incredibly flawed, until I surveyed a bunch of the best lawyers I could find, and they all told me it was solid advice.

What became clear to me with a little honest questioning, is that there’s more than one way to approach the legal profession, and they’re all equally valid. But that doesn’t stop me from wanting to talk about the subject.

The next time my neighbor goes on one of his sports-watching strikes (he does this occasionally when his teams are too painfully bad to watch), I am going to make my move and see if I can lure him in with some enticing conversation about proposed changes to the trial rules, or maybe even something about a recent appellate decision.

I’m not sure how he’ll respond, but I’m fairly certain he will hand me a beer.•

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Kayla J. Goodfellow is an attorney with the Law Office of the Cincinnati Insurance Companies and is a member of the DTCI Board of Directors. Opinions expressed in this article are those of the author.