Corporate Lawyer/Part Time Nun

After two years of wondering when and if I would ever be blessed enough that my clients would harass me on evenings, weekends and vacation, I suddenly realize I am, once again, the chosen.

At nights my blackberry is no longer just a search engine to help me while away lonely evenings on Google or Facebook. The blinking red light elicits all the promise that the shining green light of East Egg once held for Gatsby.* I see the red light and I know a client needs me. An adrenaline rush ripples throughout me and I am ready to serve. This must be my calling. I am a born again lawyer. Or a nun, with a more secular focus.

I had forgotten how uplifting it can be to analyze and draft for 10 hours straight. The mental stimulation stirs me. I no longer need an alarm clock. I check messages at 4am, nap and am up at 7am. It's an opportunity to become mentally stronger and physically sturdier (because lawyering in NYC is as much, if not more, a physical sport as a mental or professional endeavor).

I am now drawn to my clients and their documents more than food or sleep. I want to perfect the art of responsiveness—the articulate and thoughtful email that arrives on a holiday weekend only minutes after a client's panicked and disheveled query.

It's not just the satisfaction of providing top notch service to a demanding client. There is a sense of strength that comes from denial. While I serve, I strengthen myself. I deny myself social and physical indulgence, whether it be conversation or sleep. I insist this does not make me servile but better at serving. The more I serve the more I benefit and the more my clients must benefit. I am struck by the parallels between my life and that of a nun’s.

A corporate lawyer and a nun?! An incongruous pairing of greed and aggression with purity and denial? Not really. Nuns and corporate lawyers are far more similar than you might suspect. Female corporate lawyers and catholic nuns even more so.

Of course, there are many superficial distinctions to be made between the female corporate lawyer and the catholic nun, most notably:


· Dress Code—There’s no denying that dress codes for nuns are generally stricter than for corporate lawyers. Although I know of no top law firm that officially sanctions Ally McBeal-style way-above-the-knee skirts (although management committees at most of these firms secretly fantasize about them), Sister McBeal is loathe to flaunt even her ankles.
· Wine Consumption—After 5pm Ally McBeal could often be found in a local watering hole downing white wine. Even after vespers are over, Sister McBeal will never be found openly sipping a pinot grigio, although she might tuck a mini Jack Daniels into her habit or the folds of her robes to savor in her room later on.

Otherwise their lifestyles are more aligned than their wardrobes and drinking habits might suggest. Female corporate lawyers deny themselves many creature comforts, including family (either existing families or potential families), because otherwise they would not be taken as seriously. Or they deny themselves their own style as they indoctrinate themselves with the style of those, mostly men, who have preceded and negotiated before them.

It’s true that there are far more female leaders in the legal profession than female leaders in the catholic church. However, that's hardly surprising when you consider that nuns are not allowed to serve as "leaders" in the catholic church.

Fourteenth century nuns convinced themselves they were getting closer to God by denying themselves food.* They got closer to the neurochemical distortion that results from prolonged bouts of anorexia nervosa, but, given their current rank in the church, they may not have gotten closer to God (then again, I could be wrong and the meek (skinny and hungry) may still inherit the earth). On the other hand, all the denial that female corporate lawyers have embraced may not have advanced the ball that far either (but may have advanced other balls).*

Sometimes the process interferes and competes with the purpose. In A Nun’s Story, the 1959 film about a proud nun torn between her devotion to God and her professional aspirations as a nurse, Sister Luke (Audrey Hepburn) rises at dawn for morning prayer, a model of discipline and devotion. She eventually leaves the convent, resigning herself to the realization that she was driven less by a love of God and more by a love of the nursing process and her superiority in this discipline to all other nuns in the convent.

Not to put Sister Luke to shame, but the female corporate lawyer retrains herself to rise well before dawn—preferably waking every 2-3 hours to check on her wayward corporate souls in need of securities law advice. The process becomes addictive and appeals to the perfectionist instinct. Ultimately though she may become torn between the vows she took as an officer of the court to represent her client zealously and her personal aspiration to advance within the corporate Egg structure, the latter often being at direct odds with the former.

Notes
*Nick Carraway, the narrator or F. Scott Fitzgerald’s classic The Great Gatsby, spends a summer in West Egg, a guise for the post-WWI new money community of Great Neck, L.I., while becoming fascinated with his second cousin’s lifestyle and residence in East Egg, a thinly-disguised Manhasset, L.I.

*"The Plight of the Female Partner, By the Numbers,” April 29, 2010; “Women Lawyers Struggle to Attain and Keep Partner Positions,” Forbes Blog, April 30, 2010; “Female Partners: What the Law Firms Are Hiding,” David Yas, Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, March 8, 2010.

*Catherine of Siena (1347-1380) is one of the most famous of the fasting saints and throughout the medieval period extreme fasting was critical to the concept of female holiness. Fasting Girls: The History of Anorexia, Joan Jacobs Brumberg (1988).