I recently lost Dakota, my five-year-old German Shepherd, to chronic renal failure. I took her to the vet a few weeks ago because she was limping and seemed in pain. They asked if they could do blood tests, and I got a call a day later saying she needed to be hospitalized immediately. I took her in right away, and she stayed at the vet for a full week.

Vets aren’t open outside of my normal work hours. Taking her in took time away from my work schedule. Visiting her took time away from my work schedule. I didn’t sleep very well. She had issues with elevated creatinine levels in the past, but her other blood values suggested her kidneys were fine. Had I done something wrong? Was it somehow my fault? Should I have done something earlier? I spent an enormous amount of time worrying about her. I felt a lot of guilt.

After a week at the vet, her levels got a little better, but the prognosis was bad. She didn’t have long; likely just a few months, a year at best. She began removing her catheter, which she hadn’t done before, and the vet took that as a sign that she didn’t want to be there anymore. I was excited by the prospect of having her home, though I knew her time was limited.

A month ago, I had a happy, healthy, middle-aged dog. The dog I took home from the vet was neither happy nor healthy. She stumbled instead of walking, and the sad face she used to give me to get treats or attention revealed genuine pain.

I let the pendulum of work-life balance swing heavily in favor of life for the better part of a week. I worked from home while I monitored the dog. I fed her a special diet by hand and gave her numerous medications throughout the day. She required daily fluid therapy, which the vet taught me how to administer. I didn’t give up work altogether, but I wasn’t as productive as I ordinarily would have been. I definitely wasn’t operating at one hundred percent.

Being able to move around my schedule to be home was priceless. I didn’t have to ask anyone if I could take time off. I didn’t have to use any sick days or vacation time. Anyone who knows me in even the slightest personal capacity knows how much I love that dog. Personally caring for her in the comfort of her own home for the last days of her life was incredibly important to me. I don’t know if any firm would have given me that much flexibility to care for a pet.

Work decreased, but it never stopped altogether. I had filings to draft, interviews to conduct, and a jury trial the following week. The only things I more or less abandoned altogether were blogging and Twitter. For the first time in over a year, I had to cut my own hours on cases I billed hourly. I know how much time I usually spend drafting different types of motions, and I was consistently coming in too high for me to be comfortable charging my regular hourly rate. It was good stuff, maybe some of the best writing of my career, but my efficiency was way down.

My efforts with Dakota, unfortunately, were in vain. She quit eating, and her body stopped responding to the fluid therapy. No matter how much I did, she just didn’t get better. The plan shifted from trying to make her better to ensuring her final days were comfortable. Those days were heartbreaking, but I got in a lot of quality time with her.

After she passed, I had very little time to deal with the feelings I was experiencing. I had to jump head-first into a fourteen-hour day of hearings and client meetings, then I began a jury trial the following day. The client was facing a mandatory minimum of 75.5 years if convicted at trial of all counts, and the judge could have given him as much as 240 years.

When the trial ended, I was pleased with the verdict, to say the least, but that was overshadowed by sadness. The reality of losing Dakota finally sunk in last Thursday, the day after trial. Putting all of myself into work only suppressed my feelings. It didn’t eliminate them.

I swung the pendulum of work-life balance all the way to the life side, then it reacted by going all the way to the work side. I expect it’ll still take a few more small swings to each side before it finally settles down. I’m going to be coping with the loss for a while, but my workload is back to normal. I have more time to spend with people who matter to me.

These past few weeks made me appreciate the fact I’m self-employed. They also made me appreciate the fact I’m in a line of work where I don’t have to be someplace in particular from 9 to 5 every single day. Those facts enabled me to do something I felt was very important, but they didn’t absolve me of the duty I owe to my clients. I never expected they would.

When people talk about work-life balance, it always comes across to me as if they’re claiming you can have all you want out of both if you follow their advice. I don’t think that’s possible.

You can always take from one to favor the other, but you’re going to have to pay it back sooner or later. That’s a bitter pill to swallow if you’ve been convinced you can have it both ways, but if you accept that reality, it’s very comforting just knowing you have the choice. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Admittedly, I had to look up what Generation Y means. Surprisingly, that didn’t give me the clear answer I wanted. I’m pretty sure I’m part of “Gen Y.” I did look to Wikipedia for the definition of Gen Y, didn’t I? Isn’t being tech savvy part of it? Anyway, without a clear answer about what Gen Y is, I’m just going to assume I’m part of it. I’m also going to assume that it encompasses all lawyers under 35.

That said, I think a large number of Gen Y lawyers do possess the “all about me” mindset and sense of entitlement Scott Greenfield discusses. Even though some Gen Y lawyers are different, I’m not going to bother to waste time discussing that here. In my experience, a post like that gets a certain type of response. Instead, what’s really interesting to me is that I rarely see that same kind of “all about me” mindset or sense of entitlement in my under-35 clients.

I should begin by making it clear that many criminal defendants do have a certain “all about me” mindset and sense of entitlement. I’ve had clients who feel entitled to other people’s money, cars, and even girlfriends. You name it, they deserve it. However, they almost always seem to understand that they are working outside of the rules of civil society. They are basing their life decisions on a sense of self-importance and entitlement that most if not all of them realize is contrary to the law or at the very least common courtesy. They feel like they’re entitled to something and that they’re the only people who matter, but they usually know they’re likely to get in big trouble following those instincts.

I find myself more worried about the “all about me” mindset and sense of entitlement I see in Gen Y lawyers. Unlike criminal defendants, they may soon be in charge of legal profession. They feel entitled to a certain lifestyle without providing anything of value to their clients, but they also think society should condone it. I’ve interviewed law students for clerk positions who have tried to dictate to me the terms of their employment. Some of them insisted on discussing raises, benefits, and working around their schedule before they ever told me a single thing that would make me think they’re competent. I had to ask myself: are they serious? Based on what little I know about the job market these days, I’m pretty sure they should be happy to get a job interview in the first place. Don’t they realize people are willing to do the job for free? Some might even pay me to hire them. Don’t they realize they have no marketable skills? What happened to getting good at something first?

I’m definitely not worried about society suddenly tolerating or encouraging the attitudes that lead people to commit burglaries or robberies. There will always be people who selfishly break the rules, and a large number of them will always get in trouble for what they do. On the other hand, no one seems to be stopping Gen Y lawyers from pushing their worldview on the legal profession. What’s going to happen when everyone starts thinking they’re entitled to be paid for doing nothing of value? I’m concerned there’s going to be a flood of lawyers taking people’s money intending to do nothing, but I’m even more concerned that I’m going to have to practice in a profession run by people who think that’s okay.

Adrian and I went into solo (or is it duet?) practice straight out of law school. Throughout law school, I intended to do criminal defense and nothing else. I wanted to fight the big, bad government. My goal, which I made clear to everyone around me, was to immediately hang out a shingle upon receipt of my bar number. I set aside time to watch court. I did a public defender clinic, attended public defender new hire training, spoke with a number of judges, and met as many good criminal lawyers as I could. I bombarded every criminal lawyer and paralegal I encountered with questions and did about two years of work as a clerk and research assistant for a prominent criminal defense attorney who had his own solo practice. He led me through a number of his cases from start to finish, showing me exactly what he did and why he did it. Adrian took a fairly similar path. All but a handful of people at ASU discouraged us, but we were undeterred.

When we first started the firm, we did very little advertising (we still don’t do very much, but that’s beside the point). The attorneys we knew referred to us those clients who couldn’t afford their fees. Judges and lawyers helped us get indigent defense contracts. I never felt like I was doing anything completely on my own because there were so many highly qualified people willing to help us when we needed it. After about a month of being out on my own, one of the state’s best criminal lawyers was generous enough to sit down with me and spend over an hour discussing everything he would do if he was handling each of my cases. Experience like that was invaluable.

In the beginning, we charged next to nothing, and almost every case was a flat fee. If a client insisted on being billed hourly, we did it at a ridiculously low rate and cut out the time we spent learning things more experienced lawyers would have known already. We devoted an incredible amount of time to each of our cases. When I added up my time on some of my first misdemeanor flat fee cases, each was over a hundred hours. I was terribly inefficient, but I made sure clients never had to subsidize my learning curve. Neither of us had to lie to clients. We were completely honest about our experience, and although some clients probably didn’t hire us because of that, I doubt we would’ve been a good fit anyway.

One of the reasons we went out on our own was because we thought it would actually give us better training than any other route. I think it did. If we had worked as a prosecutor or public defender, we wouldn’t have had as much choice (if any at all) over who taught us. Instead, we went to the best lawyers we could find, the ones judges and other criminal defense lawyers recommended. They were almost always happy to help. We also wanted to control our caseload. That worked too, as we’ve never had to take more cases than we felt comfortable handling.

Most importantly, aside from occasionally covering for other defense attorneys, we only appear in court on behalf of our clients. To me, that’s a big deal. We know everything possible about them and their cases, as we represent them from beginning to end. I have the utmost respect for public defenders, but if I had gone that route, I would have likely spent a lot of time sitting in court doing coverage. I wanted clients. I wanted cases. I wanted to avoid appearing in court on behalf of people who weren’t my responsibility.

If we’d gone to work for the public defender’s office, we still would’ve represented clients more or less immediately. To some extent, we would have still had people’s lives in our hands, and they would’ve received representation from inexperienced lawyers. They aren’t any less entitled to competent representation than someone who pays. I wouldn’t have viewed theirs as training cases any more than I viewed my private clients’ cases as training cases. Every lawyer has first clients. Ours just happened to pay us.

In his post, Scott Greenfield says he expects new criminal defense lawyers to inform him that he’s wrong by insisting that they’re great. I might be a new lawyer by his standards, but I’m not going to claim I’m great or make any other self-aggrandizing, unverifiable claims. That would be meaningless, as anyone on the internet can make themselves look like Gerry Spence. I hope this post doesn’t come across as bragging or self-promoting. What I want to get across is that going straight into solo practice can provide as much training and supervision as a more traditional career path. The drawbacks Adrian and I encountered, like more liability, more expenses, more risk, longer hours, and less-than-steady pay at the outset, were things that affected us personally. They weren’t to the detriment of our clients.

Grudging soon-to-be solos who do it straight out of school because they have no other options may indeed need advice to minimize the harm when they’re unleashed on the public. However, the people who are prepared and choose to do it for good reasons are just as deserving of sage advice and support. If you make competence top priority and lay the proper groundwork, there’s no reason not to go right into solo practice criminal defense.