PWT - Practicing (Law) while tired

With all the talk about drunk driving, I thought today's experience is an interesting reflection. Our 11-month old has not been sleeping well. Last night was particularly bad, and I ended up with about 2 hours sleep. But I had an early conference with our area's most feared judge (he was pleasant today), so I had to go to work.

The conference went well, but it was very difficult to get work done when I got back to the office. When you're that tired, it's just hard to get focused. I did get going in the late afternoon, but then I was needed at home.

The reality of practicing law when you have two young kids is that you have times when you're tired and it's just hard to get things done. Then your desk starts to pile up. Hopefully you catch up on the weekend. In this particular case, I had 2 trials recently and that kept me away from the office for 3 solid days, plus I had 1 or 2 other days away from the office. It gets tough.

I've been thinking about hiring some help (or getting my wife - a lawyer - to spend some time in the office). Today I got an e-mail from some paralegal service in India. Hmm. Maybe I'll outsource some work to India. We'll see. So far I'm actually impressed. It's just very hard to find good people, and my experience so far with people from India - either here or there - is that they're hungry so they do good work.

Maybe the real reason for all the outsourcing we see is that Americans are just getting too soft. It's so easy to be an American. We have no appreciation for how difficult life is in other countries. Our poor people have 100 channels of cable TV, clean water, and access to great medical care. The bottom 10% in the US have it better than 98% of the rest of the world (not including Europe, Japan, and a few other spots.

Anyway, my rambling point (I really am tired) is that practicing law while tired is a little similar to driving while intoxicated. You don't do your best. But usually the lawyer thing is not so dangerous. It would be worse if I was handling a trial while tired. But even then I think we do okay.

Maybe I should do a post about BWT -- blogging while tired.

Good night.