Working Again (Temporarily)

A couple of months ago I decided to swallow my pride and signed up with a number of agencies for temporary (or contract) attorney work. I didn't realize that I had "pride" about my law firm career until my first assignment, which was doing document review at a large law firm's offices for about a week last December. The firm was similar to the ones I used to work at; more prestigious than my most recent (now dissolved, bankrupt, kaput) employer, but smaller than Allen & Overy. Contract attorneys are pretty low in the pecking order when it comes to New York lawyers. This was fairly obvious from my interviews at the agencies, where I was told that "people don't like to hire people like you to do this kind of work." This kind of work means reviewing hundreds of documents online and coding them as "relevant" or "not relevant" for an ongoing litigation or securities investigation. A very well-trained monkey could do it, which, in itself, does not necessarily distinguish this work from the work of big law firm associates. The pay is not too bad (for a regular assignment 35-40 dollars an hour, for the foreign language document reviews I actually was planning to do it's more like 50-60), probably even marginally better than what your hourly pay would be in a really terrible month (i.e. 300 hours and up) at a law firm.

The difference is how you are being treated. As a temp attorney you are hired help: the nice people treat you politely and say thank you; the mean people are obnoxious and condescending; either way, it is understood that you belong to a different class. And this bothered me because I have worked at these places (which none of the other temp attorneys on that assignment had done). I felt that being treated as a second-class citizen by an institution (the large law firm) that I am (sadly) so familiar with and have so little respect for was just too much. Or rather: too little. I did meet a very nice and interesting girl during that assignment and I found out that this whole world of New York contract attorneys is something I never knew existed (they have their blogs, which tell tales of sweatshop conditions in awful doc review hangars, techniques for getting assignments, milking the assignments for what they are worth, agency misbehavior and blackballing, etc.). So in the end, it was an interesting social experience and I learned something about myself.

I am now working on a different kind of temporary assignment. This is in-house at a bank and it pays much better and I will describe it when I have been there longer (I completed my first week today).