Five days after my Call to the Bar, I found myself in a law firm’s interior office, devoid of windows, staring at a blank notepad and wondering whether anyone could see how utterly lost I felt.
They assigned me to commercial real estate, a field I barely knew aside from a few articles I read for the Bar and one title search with an associate at the local Land Registry Office.
I was starting to get settled in when one of the firm's founding partners entered my office. He welcomed me warmly, told me that I would be reporting directly to him, and gave me my first job. A large commercial client had recently purchased a large piece of land—a former air base—and discovered that local zoning regulations were involved. He had barely signed the contract when he decided it was the right case for me to handle. And though I tried to explain how inexperienced I was in this domain, he smiled, congratulated me, and promised to be there for me if I encountered any "major" problems. Sleep did not come to me that evening.