Lawyer training, in many ways, is similar to raising a baby. *cue eye-rolling from billions of parents*

I feel as though I’m raising a baby lawyer – right now I am growing the lawyer I want to become, but that idea-lawyer is still very much a baby and as the progenitor, it’s basically all long days and sleepless nights and a lot of poopy diapers to clean up. Endless poopy diapers. Just non-stop.

And then once in a while the law-baby does something amazing (or rather, I find an absolutely fascinating facet of the law that leaves me marvelling at it for a while) and it’s like that moment when your baby smiles at you. This is my law-baby smiling at me.

And I hope that someday the poopy diapers will decrease and eventually stop, and there will be more smiles, and the law-baby will grow to the point of being somewhat independent and I’ll know all the slogging would have been worth it.

But right now, it’s just poopy diapers and it’s just something I’ll have to deal with in the process of raising (becoming) a lawyer I can be proud of.

Another one of the GLBs left the programme last week. He has a Master’s degree from Yale, I don’t think he’ll be left jobless for long – I guess he just burned out after having been a student for so long. Not 100% sure on his reasons – he just decided law wasn’t for him.

And yet the more I see people leave, the more convinced I am that the law IS for me, mediocre grades notwithstanding. I like the digging through old bound journals, knowing that if I don’t do a decent job, the intern at the opposing law firm will find a case that blows ours to smithereens. I like the intellectual exercise even though I am still shite at it. Above all, I like how honest the profession is (yes, snicker all you want). We’re not shy about gunning for the best-paying jobs or about the fact that some parts of the profession are bullshit, but it’s bullshit we all have to collude upon in order to keep the system running, because sometimes it feels as though we are the last bastion of order in a world collapsing from entropy.

Our networking session with the mentors last Friday helped to cement this view. Sure I’m not going to rise to the top of the judiciary without a First Class honours degree and a sharp legal mind, but I can be good enough to make a better living than I would have had at TLL, even accounting for opportunity costs. And most of all, I will no longer have to excuse myself for merely being a “tuition teacher”, because I realise now that was my subconscious shame at taking the easy way out in life. Lawyering is SOOOOO not the easy way out.