1. Wake up at 4 a.m.; listen to soothing classical music while showering.
2. Get on the road by 5 a.m.; beat traffic into office.
3. Chair early morning meeting with the seven law students who write How Appealing; go over tips for speed-reading online newspapers and news feeds; end meeting with reminder to “be careful out there”; laugh loudly at your good joke as you exit the room.
4. Sit down at office desk; yell to your secretary to fetch coffee; remember that you just left Buchanan Ingersoll and don’t have a secretary yet; look around you and realize you hardly recognize this place; quickly close eyes for a brief moment of panic.
5. Go get own coffee; remind yourself to stay in an upbeat mood when you discover the coffee maker hasn’t been delivered yet.
6. Sit down at desk and boot up computer; open Internet browser to home page How Appealing.
7. Admire tagline of How Appealing: “Web’s first blog devoted to appellate litigation.”
8. Consider tinkering with tagline just a bit; briefly consider a change to “web’s first blog”; scratch idea when you realize someone would discover this exaggeration, which could damage your credibility and make people question your other lesser exaggerations about your blog.
9. Think some more about term “appellate litigation” in your tagline; remind yourself again as you do every day that appellate litigation is very important--in fact, it’s how new law is made.
10. Fondly recall night at bar when the cute law student and star-struck fan of How Appealing told you she thought appellate lawyers were sexy.
11. Push out of mind the way cute law student quickly added, “I mean trial lawyers”; grumble at realization that even after success of How Appealing, it’s still the trial lawyers who have all the fun.
12. Resolve to start hanging around more often with trial lawyers; imagine how you will break the ice with them by joking that you’re always having to “clean up their messes.”
13. Shake yourself back to reality; remind yourself there is work to do.
14. Head over to Lexis on the computer; do a search to find out if How Appealing has been cited in any court decisions since yesterday afternoon.
15. Conduct same search on Westlaw.
16. Call close friend Denise Howell on phone; chat about good fortune of being featured in the ABA magazine last year; trade anecdotes about new babies.
17. Hang up; surf back to How Appealing; look critically at design.
18. Express momentary annoyance that your blog is still hosted by blogger.com; resolve to switch to a new, more expensive hosting service now that you’re finally free of your old partners and their constant talk of “budgets.”
19. Review short list of other hosting alternatives; review cost of each alternative; scratch idea about switching hosting services now that you’re paying the overhead.
20. Make short list of predictions about what might happen in legal news during the next week; prepare these predictions for posting to How Appealing; scan list of predictions from last week to see if any of those things have happened; if not, allow predictions to scroll off the page where your readers probably won’t remember them.
21. Open Microsoft Outlook; review inbox full of e-mails from judges wishing to be considered for next round of “Twenty Questions for the Appellate Judge”; delete all e-mails from state court judges; delete e-mails from all federal judges except those who might be on one of your upcoming appellate panels.
22. Take a quick break to eat a Power Bar for lunch.
23. While eating, do legal work for paying clients.
24. Return to computer; review all recent appellate decisions for errors that can be posted to How Appealing before anyone else notices them; after actually spotting an error, cry out “Eureka!”; alert minions down the hall to post error at once; wait for judges to call and credit you with finding error; tell minions to keep lines open for New York Times, which may also be calling about your discovery of error.
25. When phone doesn’t ring, wait for excitement to wear off; read a few old articles about yourself as a reminder of how smart and powerful you are; assure yourself that you perform a useful service not available anywhere else; assure yourself you are more than just a “news aggregator”; tell yourself you don’t even know what that means.
26. Start a list of ten to twenty online newspapers that your minions have not been regularly aggregating; briefly consider aggregating the legal news from foreign countries, at least the small to medium-sized ones.
27. Look at the clock; notice it’s almost 4 p.m.; wonder where the day went.
28. Leave the office early; beat the traffic home.
29. Eat a quick snack for dinner; sit down at computer.
30. Try not to panic at thought that while you were driving home, more news happened.
31. Spend the evening scanning newspapers for stories your minions may have missed; pay careful attention to the Midwest, which is frequently overlooked by minions; tell yourself it doesn’t matter if stories from the Midwest show up a day late, since Midwesterners are already a few days behind everyone else anyway.
32. Continue scanning.
33. Continue posting.
34. Continue scanning and posting.
35. Sometime after midnight, fall asleep with head on keyboard; sleep comfortably because you are close to your computer; while sleeping, dream about your new law firm’s instant and stunning success, which in the usual pattern of your dream-logic, leads directly to your appointment as the next Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.
Wow. This will be fun.
Posted by: TPB, Esq. | March 09, 2004 at 09:44 AM
Re: item #14 - all that time on the Net and he hasn't constructed a proper Eclipse yet??? Phone number for you: 800-543-6862.
Posted by: LexRepWA | February 07, 2005 at 04:13 PM