Blue skies, smiling at me.
UNDERDOG - Criminal/Drunk Driving Defense in Maryland, Virginia, DC:
During my first summer in law school, working in the regulations and legislation division of a federal agency, I mentioned my interest in becoming a litigator. One of the staff attorneys — who had paralegaled at the ACLU, which was one of the places I wanted to work — exclaimed: "Don’t you know that is the legal path that causes the most ulcers?"
Ulcers shmulcers, I reasoned. I went to law school intent on learning better how to fight for civil liberties, and preferred — and still do — an ulcer doing work I enjoy than having a less meaningful life without stress.
Of course, ultimately I found the path to being calm even in the eye of the most virulent trial storm, as I describe here. Before reaching that path, though, many times in my first two years of practicing criminal defense I would walk into the courthouse feeling my heart sink to my stomach, obsessed over how much injustice was being done every minute in any courthouse I walked into. Ultimately, I reversed that view to seeing every visit to court as an opportunity to add more justice to the world and to reverse all the world’s injustices, although the opposite view still tugs at me.
Ironically, I probably would not have found this path of calm in the eye of the storm had I not met the eye of the storm so many times as a trial lawyer fighting tooth and nail for my clients’ liberty.
Too many people lose touch with the child within them as they get farther away chronologically from childhood. Look at the adults to whom children gravitate at holiday gatherings, at weddings and other big celebrations, and on…