Novels at Work: Bad Call?

Q:  Hello.  My firm has already done one round of layoffs and it’s still totally dead around here.  I’m a second-year with literally nothing to do most days.  I’ve tried to get on pro bono matters and have done some office projects, but there’s really not much going on.  I come in every day from at least 9 to 5 but mostly surf the Internet.  My question: Is it completely off-limits to just bring a personal book to work to read in my office when things are slow?  I don’t see how that’s any more potentially offensive than surfing the Internet every day (which every associate I know does), but I don’t want to cross some unknown, arbitrary line of inappropriateness. [Read more]

They Can’t All Be Happy Endings

I’m not completely delusional.  I popped my Big Law cherry long enough ago to realize that this job—this life—isn’t for the faint of heart.  I’ve come to expect that on any given day, the Big Law grind will leave me ravaged with exhaustion. It’ll leave me straining to remember the faces of my family and friends.  It’ll leave me ranting at inanimate objects in the middle of the night and craving even just the tiniest hit of sleep, sex, style, sanity.  What I didn’t quite expect, though, was that it would leave me lying naked on a table in the middle of a hotel with some guy’s latex-covered hand crammed halfway down my throat. [Read more]