It Was A Beautiful Morning For Bad News
We all have those moments we can remember exactly where we were, what we were doing, what we were wearing, how the day smelled, the way the sunlight fell, when we found out….something terrible. I experienced one of those mornings in February of 2024. It was warm, humid, and the morning light in the Dominican Republic was golden. I had just finished taking Poppet for her morning stroll through the mangrove swamp, and I had returned to Sonrisa’s cockpit to flip open my laptop from the comfort of my beanbag. The air smelled like mosquito coil smoke and coffee. Andrew had just finished boiling water and brought the French Press outside to steep.
At the time, I could see my “ideal year" for sailing, blog writing, and legal practice in my cross-hairs. Our sailing route would take us one small hop at a time through the gorgeous cruising grounds of the Bahamas. Then, we were to sail the US East Coast - close enough for family and friends to come for a visit and unfamiliar enough to feel exotic to us. Neither Andrew nor I had spent much time on the East Coast in our prior lives.
At work, we had just made an offer to a brief writer, and she would take a solid portion of my workload away. This would finally allow me to get back into a more balanced schedule. I could get back to writing the blog again! Indeed, that particular morning, I was tapping away at a story about our return to the Dominican Republic when I looked down at my phone and saw a text message from my boss.
“Call me when you can, it’s serious.”
News To End My Best Intentions
Now, one must recall that in the Dominican Republic, I am three hours ahead of my Las Vegas Team. If my boss is texting me this message at 8:00 a.m. in the Dominican Republic, it’s 5 a.m. in Las Vegas. A stone dropped into my stomach.
”I can talk now.”
In those milliseconds between seeing the text and arranging the call, my mind flipped through the rolodex of possible “serious matters” we needed to talk about at 5:30 a.m. PST. I really didn’t know what it could be. The news he delivered never made my list of possibilities: our 49-year-old colleague who had been running half of the firm’s case list and one of our two litigation teams passed away that morning of a sudden heart attack.
An Impactful Loss
The unfairness of her loss stings all these months later. While this blog is about my experience, my loss is the least of all concerns. She was a mother raising two young sons. She left behind her own mother and siblings. She was a mentor, leader, and friend to many people in the Las Vegas legal community. But, in the context of my role at the law firm and my relationship with her, it is the professional loss I had to tackle.
I haven’t written much about what I’m up to at work, but my current role is Litigation Operations lead. My objective is to design, train upon, and then lead systems that run complex civil litigation and trial work using a team-based format. It’s a big project! I also play the role of responsibility overflow in any practice area where we get capacity strained or we are still looking to hire. We already had more work than the team my lost colleague handled, and so I had been working those cases on top of my system design work.
The day we found out, triage efforts kicked into high gear. A litigator’s case list is always subject to deadlines that come at us one after another. Her loss wouldn’t automatically stop those deadlines, so we had to figure out what cases had upcoming deadlines, what those deadlines were, and whether we could get an extension. Luckily, we had already developed a firm-wide case tracking process so while there was some work to do, we had a pre-built plan to solve our immediate issues. Together with another work-buddy who specializes in project management tracking, we reviewed the full case list. By the end of the first day we knew exactly how many immediate problems we had on our hands. We sorted the ones we could seek extensions on from the ones that needed to be pushed through.
Humans cope with loss in different and equally important ways. Some of us find comfort in action. We had a handful of people who wanted to dig into these action items we couldn’t ignore. Another set needed to push pause and find quiet time to mourn. Both are equally valid, and as a leadership team we had to find a way to accommodate both. My bosses are genius thought leaders on litigation firm management, and they turned their attention to figuring out how to speak gently about this experience and juggle the team’s humanity in such a difficult time. Some of these people had worked closely with our lost colleague for more than a decade. This was not an easy thing to juggle. We have a professional responsibility to our clients. We have leadership responsibility to our team. As hard as it might be, we had to succeed at covering both in this scenario.
We activated the people who found action cathartic and we expressed our grief through the people who needed time and space.
Speaking The Emotion Aloud
There are so many emotions that come when we lose a person so integral to our day-to-day lives. For me, emotion came in waves. It started with heartache for her sons and family and sadness that I would never see her again. My colleague was a kind, funny, interesting person that we miss having around just for the intrinsic value of who she was. From a professional, firm-building perspective I felt anger. It felt like the universe had ripped the carpet out from under us when we had come so far. I felt resentment and that this was such a deeply unfair loss. This isn’t even the first death dealt to our little firm! We lost another brilliant colleague and one of my good friends to cancer at the age of 38. Even now, all these months later, I am enraged about it.
And, then there is the fear. I’ve always felt fairly comfortable with the reality that we all die, but lately I’ve been harboring more existential dread about it. Our colleague's death threw that feeling into overdrive and I wake up in the middle of the night sometimes panicked about losing others in my life. Then I feel the self-judgment: “She is not yours to mourn. Think about her mother and her sons.” And when I think about them, I get enraged all over again.
Keep Calm - Lawyer On
We know we need to hire carefully. Our colleague was an inspiring leader to her team and they trusted her. That is not an easy quality to replace, especially when some of the people on the team had worked with her for more than a decade in various other firms and capacities. We also need someone with the skill to lead a complex litigation case team, lead client communication, and handle complex trials. We knew re-hire would take months if not a full year to accomplish. We also knew that the brief deadline reprieve we had carved out with extensions would be short-lived.
This meant my next job was to figure out how to lead two case teams and a full firm’s case list without her role filled for the intermediate term. The only answer I came up with was to compress a two-team structure into one set of case-leaders with two teams worth of area specialists. We didn’t want to take the firm visionary/trial counsel completely away from envisioning things and preparing for trials, so a lot of that work got compressed into my space. (No more blog writing until we hire someone new, people.)
Keep Calm - Sail On
It is within this work context that somehow, we still managed to sail from the Dominican Republic through Bristol, Rhode Island over the course of 2024. We hosted our friends' second son aboard for part of the route, enjoyed visitors in Washington DC and Rhode Island, I am ever so close to publishing the second Oddgodfrey children's book if I could just focus and fix the dumbest InDesign glitch on the cover, and we continue to train Poppet Peabody (the Ship Cat) in all manner of unlikely cat tricks. She is currently working on hoop-jumping and army crawling. But this is all I have time for. After staring at a computer screen for a full-time+ workload, I struggle to want to stare at a computer screen even longer to choose and edit photographs or write. This is especially true when the Bahamas or fall leaves in New England are just outside my companionway.
Pause The Blog
While trying to write this post, I realized that it is difficult to separate the stories I tell about sailing from my remote work legal practice and it gives me writers’ block to try to do so. Some professions absorb a person’s identity. When someone asks “what do you do?” We say “I am a lawyer.” When I first took on this role in the limited capacity I imagined way back in the Seychelles, I thought I could be immune from that factor. I planned to live two separate lives at once - sailing and a part-time practice of law - and only write about the sailing bit. But, the longer I live this life, the more certain I become that one cannot be separated from the other and alas - I don’t just practice law. I am an Inveterate (At)- Sea Lawyer. This blog is now about the life of an Inveterate (At)- Sea Lawyer, including the inevitable start-and-stop personal life that naturally comes when professional responsibilities call. My professional raison d’etre (indeed that of our whole firm) is to develop systems to halt the unhealthy intrusion of the law into aspects of personal lives that should be non-negotiable: our health, our time with family, one or two meaningful personal endeavors like sailing around the word.
I’m sure we will eventually succeed, and the blog will never go silent again.
In the meantime, I do post every now and then on the @Oddgodfrey Instagram and Facebook pages. You are welcome to follow there if you are looking for some little snippet of sailing travel while you wait for me to catch up a binge-worthy, novel-sized set of blog posts. There are social media icons with links in the top, left-hand corner of the blog page and they will take you right where you want to go.