I am tired

I am tired. 

I am tired of the practice of law. 

I originally was going to post this just to a private social media page with other lawyers. I posted this to my blog instead because I want to be candid with the general public about my feelings. I feel like it will be more therapeutic if I am perfectly honest and open with the world at large.

I am tired of clients' unreasonable expectations. 

I am tired of clients submitting case inquiries regarding complicated legal matters through text messages, then expecting answers within seconds.

I am tired of them acting like everything is a life or death emergency when in reality it is rare that things are truly urgent. 

And the emails.

My GOD the emails never stop coming! Why didn't anyone tell me before going to law school that practicing law entailed spending hours and hours of your day just replying to EMAILS!

It is triggering for me whenever clients complain that I supposedly don't answer the phone. Where on Earth do clients get the expectation that they have their lawyer on speed dial all hours of the day and night? Even before I went to law school, I understood perfectly well that lawyers are busy people, just like doctors and accountants, and that it was unreasonable to expect them to respond at the drop of a hat and it could often take days for them to reply and you should be grateful if you even have their email address or cell phone, because otherwise the only time you can talk to them is during a scheduled appointment. 

It was triggering for me during a recent continuing legal education seminar about mental health for lawyers that the speaker encouraged us to establish boundaries with clients. 

WHAT DO YOU THINK I AM DOING ALL DAY???

That is precisely why I am exhausted! I spend ALL DAY EVERY DAY establishing boundaries and enforcing boundaries. I establish boundaries in the consultation. I establish boundaries in the contract, I establish boundaries through emails, text, and phone calls!

And yet people bulldoze those boundaries constantly! 

Why can't people just have reasonable expectations to begin with so that I don’t HAVE to deal with boundaries all the time? 

It is aggravating how often my clients seem to make an enemy out of me when the whole reason I made immigration my career is because I am on my clients' side, advocating for them fiercely. I work pretty much 7 days a week, easily 60 hours per week fighting for them. 

And yet they often have the gall to claim I did nothing on their cases.

The audacity to treat me like I am being lazy or negligent is insulting.

Also, it is telling that that CLE about mental health was shorter than all of the CLEs I listened to at that seminar. It speaks volumes to how this profession cares little about the well-being of attorneys. The lack of compassion and understanding from clients is bad enough but it sucks that the judges have little compassion, the law has little compassion, the government has little compassion, the disciplinary committee has little compassion, nobody has much compassion for us attorneys. 

I feel like there is no room for humanity in this profession. Everyday is a race against the clock. I wake up feeling dread and anxiety, manifesting itself in what feels like my stomach dissolving itself, because I have countless deadlines to meet each day with drastic consequences for missing any deadlines. There are the deadlines that I can explicitly recall and I constantly worry that there may be even more deadlines that I might have forgotten about. 

I remember as a child frequently hearing commercials say, “Allow six to eight weeks to arrive.” 

That was many years ago but that is still recent enough to be in the age of fast food and microwaves. It was normal even back then to wait a long time for products ordered over the phone, despite society being used to fast service in other areas of life. It seems like people back then understood it was reasonable to expect some things fast and that it was reasonable to expect somethings slowly.  

Why the HELL has that mentality disappeared?

Any efforts to try reducing my workload, to have a reasonable work-life balance, to achieve the pipedream of working at most 40 hours a week results in catastrophes. I have learned the hard way that hiring help can be a waste of money on people who do the job poorly and late, resulting in more work for me to put out the fires those employees made for me, defeating the whole purpose of hiring help. 

The only way I can ensure the job gets done right is if I do it myself, which puts me between a rock and a hard place. I oftentimes feel like I HAVE to do it myself but I lack the time to do it all myself and it feels like no one has the compassion and understanding to appreciate what I am going through. 

Here is one of my biggest pet peeves, unique to the niche I carved for myself but I just have to vent about it. Hopefully my frustrations are clear even for the uninitiated:

YOU DO NOT HAVE A USCIS ACCOUNT!

Good grief, I am sick and tired of explaining that to people. Where on Earth do people get the notion that everybody has a USCIS account? 

I have lost track of how many times clients out of the blue tell me, “give me the username and password to my USCIS account.” That demand bothers me because there is an underlying assumption that they must have a USCIS account and that I am supposedly withholding the login information from them. They never ask, “do I have a USCIS account?”  

Yet this is such a common misconception that I have actually had multiple clients have intense disputes with me about this. One client claimed that literally everybody has USCIS accounts. Another client, after I told him twice that he didn't have a USCIS account, insisted that he must have a USCIS account and demanded that I share with him the username and password, forcing me to waste my time explaining why he doesn't have one. I called him out for that inappropriate behavior and I told him that the conversation should have ended the first time I told him he didn't have a USCIS account.

It is offensive to me how many of my clients refuse to believe me, their attorney, the person who knows what they are talking about. That is the whole reason you hire me, after all, dear clients. Why bother giving me one red cent if you have it all figured out? Save yourself the money and continue getting all your answers from Google and TikTok and stop wasting my time if you are going to disregard my hard-earned knowledge.

It is as if people believe that USCIS automatically generates accounts for all immigrants. It baffles me where people get that idea from because if they understand anything about USCIS and the creation of those online accounts, they would know that it is a newfangled to doodad that was created only recently and it is an optional thing and that actually most people LACK a USCIS account.

I get that some clients just want a way to know how to keep tabs on their case but they never frame the request that way. The request is always framed as a demand for login information to an online account that they supposedly must have, and they seem to believe that I am getting in the way of obtaining that information.

I am sure part of the problem is clients wasting time on social media, steeping themselves in misinformation. Why is it that despite the fact that everybody has electronic devices in their pockets with access to the vast array of information found on the world wide web, nobody ever seems to use that tool for anything useful, like how to fill out a five-year work history and five-year address history? Why do people seem to prefer to waste their time on the most pointless nonsense?

I am just so very tired of this whole thing. If I had enough money to pay for my needs and the needs of my family I absolutely would close up shop and be done with this. 

I am tired.