Monday Madness: overwhelm at Christmas

At Lawyers Life we welcome contributions from our readers.

Here, a colleague, let’s call her Holly, to fit the season lets off steam about judicial demands.

Holly’s tale:

Twas the week before xmas and all through the house, not a creature was stirring… save for the mouse hiding in my daughter’s shoe from a cat intent on toying with it.  Oh, and me, drafting closing submissions on a 4 day case that was now going into day 6, having been directed to do so on Friday at 4pm, to be sent to the judge by Monday.  Notwithstanding that I was already playing catch-up, having gone into a day set aside for drafting a schedule of findings, and possibly, just possibly doing some Christmas present wrapping before the children broke up for the holidays.  

Well-being at the bar is an important goal, but I have found it even harder during lockdown, than ever before, to achieve some kind of work/life balance. My children complain I am always working, as does my husband.

I am grateful, every day, for being able to do a job I enjoy, and to have a job at all when many don’t during the covid crisis. 

But I must confess, I find that Judges, whilst stressed and under pressures like never before, seem to be passing these pressures onto the bar, in a way that I feel they would find unconscionable to do to the court staff. Perhaps I am alone in feeling like the mouse, wanting to curl up in my daughter’s shoe and hide away from the world at the moment, but I am in desperate need of a break, and that is perhaps my own failing, trying to manage it all, put a brave face on it, pretend that government hasn’t just introduced another tier to spoil Christmas. But I am finding little to find comfort in at the current time…