thedrifter
06-16-07, 06:44 AM
Am Law 200 Lawyers Reflect on Life in the War Zone
Ben Hallman
The American Lawyer
06-18-2007
Javier Zamora is a 17-year veteran of the Illinois National Guard. In 2004 he was deployed to Iraq with the rest of his unit on a week's notice. He spent most of his yearlong tour in Baqubah, a town about 50 kilometers northeast of Baghdad. There he commanded an infantry company. He is now back home in Chicago, where he is an associate at Hinshaw & Culbertson.
When he had time in Iraq to think about his law career, Zamora felt anxious. "You can't continue building a practice when you are pulled away from your law firm and doing something completely different," he says. "I didn't even crack open a law book. I felt like I was falling behind." The anxiety didn't ease when he returned to work. "Panic set in," he says. Projects and assignments he had been working on were dusty memories. He also had to learn to cope with colleagues' reactions: "People don't understand what you just went through. They remember who you were before you left and expect you to step back into the same shoes. It was like I stepped out for a cup of coffee."
Zamora is one of more than 1 million Americans who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan since 2001, according to Pentagon numbers. He is not the only returning soldier who has struggled to fit back into his prewar life, but he is one of very few whose life included working as a lawyer at a big law firm. The American Lawyer interviewed Zamora and more than two dozen other lawyers with recent combat or war zone experience to discover what a grinding four-year war that has claimed more than 3,300 American lives has extracted from attorneys who work at the nation's biggest law firms. The interviews reveal that while the war has been largely unseen and unfelt in Am Law 200 offices, it is intensely personal for those who have worked or served in Iraq or Afghanistan. By serving, they pushed against an unspoken assumption among colleagues that wars are fought by someone other than lawyers.
Given the circumstances, it comes as no surprise that the lawyers we found are a remarkable group: Tally Parham, until last month a Venable associate, flew in the first sortie of Operation Iraqi Freedom and is one of the first American women to fly a fighter jet in combat. Charles "Rick" Johnston, a Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz partner, lived and worked in Iraq for more than a year, and has not given up on the country as a future magnet for Western business. Matthew Bogdanos, a former New York prosecutor, tracked down antiquities looted from the National Museum of Iraq. Adam Tiffen, a Porter Wright Morris & Arthur associate headed to Iraq for a second tour with his Army National Guard unit this summer, found time to record impressions of his first tour in an infantry platoon in a widely read blog. Joseph Fluet III, a Williams & Connolly associate, handpicked a group of Afghani helicopter pilots to form that country's first airborne counternarcotics squad. David Tafuri, a Patton Boggs partner, is in Baghdad working for the U.S. Department of State, trying to help the Iraqis build a fair justice system.
Last year, we surveyed The Am Law 200 to find out how many lawyers might have served or worked in Iraq or Afghanistan in the last five years. The result: Fewer than 50 out of the 100,529 lawyers at Am Law 200 firms. That number shouldn't come as much of a surprise. A tiny percentage of recruits come from top colleges and what can be considered the elite social and professional classes, says Kathryn Roth-Douquet, a former lawyer at Seltzer Caplan McMahon Vitek, a small firm in San Diego, and wife of a Marines officer. Roth-Douquet co-wrote "AWOL," a book that explores why military service has become anathema to the upper class. "We don't ask people on a certain level to serve anymore," she says. "If someone you know does join, it comes as a big surprise."
The National Guard and reserve branches have trouble recruiting professionals, but lawyers are one of the few classes for which there is a specific need. About 3,000 lawyers serve in the Army and Air Force National Guard and Reserves as judge advocate general (JAG) officers. But most of these positions, according to military officials, are held by government lawyers. The perception, say lawyers who have served in the military, is that government jobs are less demanding than law firm work, and that government employers are more understanding of guard or reserve duty.
With the JAG corps largely drawn from the public sector, those few big-firm lawyers with recent military experience tend to have enlisted before they joined their firms, often out of high school or while in college, and tend to serve in more traditional combat roles. "It's a relatively unique circumstance," says Reed Russell, of counsel at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, describing his commitment to both his firm and the Washington, D.C., Army National Guard, from which he recently retired. His firm accommodated him, but meeting both obligations was a challenge, he says. Parham says it was hard to log enough sorties to meet her obligations to the South Carolina National Guard while working at Venable, even though she did so on a not-quite full-time basis. Zamora, who continued to work and train with his National Guard unit between his first and second tours in Iraq, likens the experience to running a midsize corporation. As company commander, he coordinated annual training exercises, ran staff meetings with noncommisioned officers, and sacrificed most of his weekends to prep work. "It's like taking on a whole second career while filling the demanding role of a big-firm attorney," he says of his dual commitments. "I can't see anyone wanting to do that and being able to do it well."
The lawyer vets don't know how to reverse the trend, nor do they have much time to worry about it. In the next few weeks, Parham will travel from her home to an air base, where she will train new pilots. Tiffen will climb into a military transport plane for the long flight to Baghdad. As for Zamora, his time is done. He resigned his commission and has largely conquered the anxiety he felt about whether he'd be able to cope with his job. He is learning to be grateful for what his combat experience taught him about life and priorities. "I used to think [my law firm] was a stressful environment," he says. "I now have a different measure of stress."
Ellie
Ben Hallman
The American Lawyer
06-18-2007
Javier Zamora is a 17-year veteran of the Illinois National Guard. In 2004 he was deployed to Iraq with the rest of his unit on a week's notice. He spent most of his yearlong tour in Baqubah, a town about 50 kilometers northeast of Baghdad. There he commanded an infantry company. He is now back home in Chicago, where he is an associate at Hinshaw & Culbertson.
When he had time in Iraq to think about his law career, Zamora felt anxious. "You can't continue building a practice when you are pulled away from your law firm and doing something completely different," he says. "I didn't even crack open a law book. I felt like I was falling behind." The anxiety didn't ease when he returned to work. "Panic set in," he says. Projects and assignments he had been working on were dusty memories. He also had to learn to cope with colleagues' reactions: "People don't understand what you just went through. They remember who you were before you left and expect you to step back into the same shoes. It was like I stepped out for a cup of coffee."
Zamora is one of more than 1 million Americans who have served in Iraq or Afghanistan since 2001, according to Pentagon numbers. He is not the only returning soldier who has struggled to fit back into his prewar life, but he is one of very few whose life included working as a lawyer at a big law firm. The American Lawyer interviewed Zamora and more than two dozen other lawyers with recent combat or war zone experience to discover what a grinding four-year war that has claimed more than 3,300 American lives has extracted from attorneys who work at the nation's biggest law firms. The interviews reveal that while the war has been largely unseen and unfelt in Am Law 200 offices, it is intensely personal for those who have worked or served in Iraq or Afghanistan. By serving, they pushed against an unspoken assumption among colleagues that wars are fought by someone other than lawyers.
Given the circumstances, it comes as no surprise that the lawyers we found are a remarkable group: Tally Parham, until last month a Venable associate, flew in the first sortie of Operation Iraqi Freedom and is one of the first American women to fly a fighter jet in combat. Charles "Rick" Johnston, a Baker, Donelson, Bearman, Caldwell & Berkowitz partner, lived and worked in Iraq for more than a year, and has not given up on the country as a future magnet for Western business. Matthew Bogdanos, a former New York prosecutor, tracked down antiquities looted from the National Museum of Iraq. Adam Tiffen, a Porter Wright Morris & Arthur associate headed to Iraq for a second tour with his Army National Guard unit this summer, found time to record impressions of his first tour in an infantry platoon in a widely read blog. Joseph Fluet III, a Williams & Connolly associate, handpicked a group of Afghani helicopter pilots to form that country's first airborne counternarcotics squad. David Tafuri, a Patton Boggs partner, is in Baghdad working for the U.S. Department of State, trying to help the Iraqis build a fair justice system.
Last year, we surveyed The Am Law 200 to find out how many lawyers might have served or worked in Iraq or Afghanistan in the last five years. The result: Fewer than 50 out of the 100,529 lawyers at Am Law 200 firms. That number shouldn't come as much of a surprise. A tiny percentage of recruits come from top colleges and what can be considered the elite social and professional classes, says Kathryn Roth-Douquet, a former lawyer at Seltzer Caplan McMahon Vitek, a small firm in San Diego, and wife of a Marines officer. Roth-Douquet co-wrote "AWOL," a book that explores why military service has become anathema to the upper class. "We don't ask people on a certain level to serve anymore," she says. "If someone you know does join, it comes as a big surprise."
The National Guard and reserve branches have trouble recruiting professionals, but lawyers are one of the few classes for which there is a specific need. About 3,000 lawyers serve in the Army and Air Force National Guard and Reserves as judge advocate general (JAG) officers. But most of these positions, according to military officials, are held by government lawyers. The perception, say lawyers who have served in the military, is that government jobs are less demanding than law firm work, and that government employers are more understanding of guard or reserve duty.
With the JAG corps largely drawn from the public sector, those few big-firm lawyers with recent military experience tend to have enlisted before they joined their firms, often out of high school or while in college, and tend to serve in more traditional combat roles. "It's a relatively unique circumstance," says Reed Russell, of counsel at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, describing his commitment to both his firm and the Washington, D.C., Army National Guard, from which he recently retired. His firm accommodated him, but meeting both obligations was a challenge, he says. Parham says it was hard to log enough sorties to meet her obligations to the South Carolina National Guard while working at Venable, even though she did so on a not-quite full-time basis. Zamora, who continued to work and train with his National Guard unit between his first and second tours in Iraq, likens the experience to running a midsize corporation. As company commander, he coordinated annual training exercises, ran staff meetings with noncommisioned officers, and sacrificed most of his weekends to prep work. "It's like taking on a whole second career while filling the demanding role of a big-firm attorney," he says of his dual commitments. "I can't see anyone wanting to do that and being able to do it well."
The lawyer vets don't know how to reverse the trend, nor do they have much time to worry about it. In the next few weeks, Parham will travel from her home to an air base, where she will train new pilots. Tiffen will climb into a military transport plane for the long flight to Baghdad. As for Zamora, his time is done. He resigned his commission and has largely conquered the anxiety he felt about whether he'd be able to cope with his job. He is learning to be grateful for what his combat experience taught him about life and priorities. "I used to think [my law firm] was a stressful environment," he says. "I now have a different measure of stress."
Ellie