After about six months articling at a large downtown firm my hands went numb. Well, first my hands, then my arms up to the elbow. It was frightening. What was happening to me? I’d been averaging 14-hour days, six days a week, leaving no time to have done anything to cause such an injury. I consulted a doctor-friend who lived in my apartment building. I told him I’d heard that big firm corporate law slowly kills you. Maybe this was it: I was dying, starting with my hands. He was doubtful.
In the end, it was my typing. Apparently, during those 14-hour days, six days a week, I would type while resting my elbows on the armrests of my chair, putting pressure on some nerve that in turn caused my hands to go numb. No big concern — just bad posture and an inept typing style.
Without a doubt, this was by far the most exciting thing that happened to me in an entire year of articling.
I went on to leave the practice of law and create my own television series about lawyers — Billable Hours. It’s about the inane activities of bored young corporate lawyers who’ll do anything to entertain themselves in the office. Lots of outrageous characters and wacky storylines. Very little law.
But the show didn’t start out that way. The first incarnation was called Big Law, and was an hour-long dramedy accurately (I think) depicting the trials and tribulations of being a young lawyer in a big firm. And though every non-lawyer who read it was fascinated, I got the same response from networks and producers, time and again. How could an entire series be based on exhausted, overworked young people doing, for the most part, mind-numbing work? “Who wants to see that? And if it’s so bad, why don’t these people get another job?” they asked. I wasn’t sure. I had left almost immediately. Within two years of call, so did half of my articling class. I started to think that TV execs should speak to the graduating bar ads class each year.
All of us know that 90-plus percent of law isn’t litigation, but from Perry Mason to Ally McBeal, lawyer shows have glamourized courtroom drama. Big Law was to be the first accurate big firm law show ever produced. But the executives were right. I couldn’t even begin to think of an interesting story dealing with big firm corporate law as experienced by a junior. Not office politics. Not neo-leisure shenanigans. Actual corporate law.
I used to trade stories with the doctor-friend who diagnosed my hand paralysis. He told me about a construction worker who sat in the ER for four hours with a 10-inch nail driven through his hand, letting backaches and nose-bleeds go ahead of him. A tale of valour and honour, funny but with heart. I told him about the time my hands went numb and I thought I was dying. He’d already heard that one.
In the new Dennis Leary series, Rescue Me, when they go into a fire, it isn’t a wild scene of bright flames and colours. It’s completely dark, just like real life. That sort of professional accuracy is interesting. A show where young lawyers sit in a data room speaking quietly into dictaphones 14 hours a day, I’d venture to say, isn’t.
The truth is, the day-to-day of big firm lawyers is often so excruciatingly boring no network would ever dare attack it with a series. It’s no one’s fault — it’s just the nature of the job. But there’s a reason we get paid so much to do it: no one else wants to. There is valour in being a lawyer. Unfortunately, no one in their right mind would want to see it on TV.
Adam Till is supervising producer for Billable Hours, a half-hour comedy he co-created with series star and writing partner Fabrizio Filippo. Billable Hours airs Tuesdays at 9:30 p.m. on Showcase. (Photo: Fabrizio Filippo, Brandon Firla, and Jennifer Baxter, stars of Billable Hours.)