Page 540 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
grew tenfold at Coronet. There I was functioning not just as a lawyer but also as a counterpart businessman (after a while, I was asked to join Nor- man, Fred, and Arthur for a weekly business meeting), and I could see business as it was actually done and plotted, from the planning stages up. Adding the business experience to the law firm experience resulted in my being a far better practitioner, inside or outside of a firm.
While I’ve talked a lot about my law firm life in earlier chapters, and my life as an attorney in a business atmosphere in this one, there is one subject that I have from time to time discussed with Kathy, and now is as good a time as any to talk about it here: I liked my life as an attorney in a firm and loved my life as an attorney inside of the client; however, I came to dislike my life as an attorney in a firm and to hate my life as an attorney inside Coronet.
That sounds like a paradox, I know, but paradox has to do, in my mind, with logical contradiction, with language. It has to do with words or actions frozen in time. But, one might feel one way in one moment and a totally different way in the next. Moreover, one might feel one way in one moment and a totally different way when one thinks about that same moment from “outside” of it.
I bitched and moaned a lot during my professional life. On the other hand, there were times, perhaps the same times, when I loved being a lawyer.
I think that I loved being a lawyer because I felt that I was really good at it. I felt that I was an excellent analyst, a skilled negotiator, a determined and very hard worker, an effective speaker, a sound writer, an unmatched draftsman (I thought), a penetrating reader, a good busi- ness mind, and someone who could speak the clients’ language and achieve the clients’ goals. And when you are good at something—or are regarded as being good at something—the positive feedback, whether from within or without, invigorates you and makes the job a craft and something worth doing.
On the other hand, what exactly was I doing? I’ve already spoken about how I disliked the work for Integrated Resources, even though I found it to be incredibly intellectually challenging and well performed
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