Carolyn Elefant has an important post at My Shingle which delves into the “freshness curve” that all lawyers go through, and where you should want your curve to end up.

After twenty years of practice, I can do an appeal from start to finish with my eyes closed.  I’m intimately familiar with the Three-Bears like requirements for timely filing (too early can render the petition incurably premature; too late and the petition misses the unforgiving statutory deadlines and gets unceremoniously bounced) to the arguments – standing, waiver, jurisdiction and harmless error – that appeals courts embrace.  I know which side of the aisle to sit and what to say when I open and how to prepare so that I never, ever need to look at my notes but can still cite to the Appendix, nonetheless.  In fact, I’ve grown so jaded that sometimes, I’ll write my opening sentence the morning of argument and most importantly, I no longer need to bite my lip to avoid giggling when the court clerk enters chanting “Oyez, Oyez.”

While many readers won’t have twenty years under their belt, my somewhat hazy recollection is that the phenomenon sets in at about five years, just about the time that you’ve gotten some real lawyering under your belt, you’ve done the same work a hundred times, and you are finally beyond feeling comfortable with your ability to perform a task and boredom starts to slip in.  You wake up at your desk and realize that you’ve just completed a motion in your sleep. 

But the excitement of the salad days and all of the firsts soon fades and inertia sets in.  Sometimes, it’s easier (not to mention more financially rewarding) to stick with the cases that you can process without thinking than seek out new challenges; to keep the same old system in place (because if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it) instead of striving for ways to improve; to avoid asking questions to avoid the embarrassment of not knowing it all.  And yet, if we don’t change, we run the risk of being left behind – like  the sixty six biglaw partners who now earn less than associates after their compensation was slashed or the old lawyer in the hallway. Being a fresh new lawyer may be tough in these trying times, but staying fresh is harder, hands down.

The first sense if one of satisfaction, that you’ve reached a plateau as a lawyer, fully able to do your job well, efficiently and, frankly, without a lot of effort.  You’re happy with yourself.  You’ve “mastered” the law.  You can crank out paper like nobody’s business, and it all perfectly acceptable work.  No muss, no fuss.  Enjoy it for the rest of the day.  You’ve earned it.

The next day, however, your momentary joy begins its inevitable slide.  If that’s it, and you’ve now grown all you need to grow to present perfectly competent work to the court and client, what do you plan to do for the next 20 years?  Looking at that path from the other side of the hill, let me tell you.  It’s boring.  It’s tedious.  And, in retrospect, the work is only competent, not masterful. 

Congratulations on reaching the first plateau.  But if you stop there, you will endure a career of misery and disappointment.  I know lawyers who have performed the same task, in yeoman fashion, day after day, year after year.  They are not happy people.  They are not proud of themselves for very long.  True, they have reached their first goal, but then they saw no more goals ahead of them, and they stopped growing.  They grew stagnant.  In time, they stopped caring, both about their work as well as their clients.  Life became mundane and routine.  They were just going through the motions of being a lawyer.

There are a number of plateaus you have yet to scale.  There is still the climb from yeoman to master, a place that very few reach and the place where lawyer who create law, who discovery solutions to the insoluble, reside.  This place takes many years and great effort to reach, and it’s questionable whether anyone truly reaches it.  But every morning the trek continues and brings with it new invigorating challenges.  Do what everyone says can’t be done.  Find a way.  Create a way.  Take the bad that everyone else shrugs off and change it.  At least try.

Another is the plateau of holistic lawyering.  Just as every motion begins to look alike, so does every client.  They are not, but the yeoman lawyer only sees a small part of the client, the part she’s been retained to represent.  But each brings a new bag of issues, problems, needs to the table, and you can make it your responsibility to help one human being.  Some will be frustrating, or tiresome, or difficult, but each is a person who, at the end of your representation, can be in better shape when you’re done than when you started.  True, we’re not therapists, but if we see clients whose legal issues stem from other problems in their life, we can help them deal with reality and steer them down paths that will help even non-legal problems.  We can make their lives better.

Whatever path you take, have a goal for yourself.  If you should reach that goal, come up with a new goal.  There is always another goal, a higher level, ahead of you.  While you may do it for your clients, do it also for yourself.  You don’t want to live a life of quiet misery, performing mundane tasks on autopilot and waiting for the end of each day to come.  It’s a miserable existence. 

And as long as you have a goal ahead of you, you will always have the excitement of firsts.  Remember how good that feels?