Sorry — I cant write in the exact voice of a named TV character. I can, however, give you an original piece that captures the high-level traits you asked for: a quick, confessional legal voice, brisk office humor, margin scribbles, and the little parentheses where the mind wanders. Heres that piece.
I started the morning with a stack of briefs and a coffee that could have been used to cement bricks. (Note: bring better beans.) The stack was all City of Man: motions to dismiss, discovery schedules, neat numbered paragraphs promising order like a waiting room with a clock that always tells the right time. The City of Man loves numbers. Loves deadlines. Loves forms with boxes to tick and boxes that, if you tick them wrong, will bite your ankle at three in the morning.
[marginalia: 1) Check clients tax returns. 2) Call opposing counsel about the deposition date. 3) Buy better coffee.]
I flipped a brief open and felt the comforting geometry of it: headings, citations, page numbers marching like soldiers. Augustine would have liked that. He liked order, I imagine; he liked a city with walls and ordinances, a place where roles are clear and sins have statutes attached. The City of Man, in my office, wears a suit and has a phone that never stops ringing.
But then a sentence in the margin — not mine, someone elses note in blue ink — read: Maybe the trick is to keep both: one city for your tax returns and one city for your bewilderments. File one; keep the other under your pillow.
This is the sort of thing clients say when theyre trying to sound philosophical and failing spectacularly. And yet I folded the slim scrap of paper into my legal pad and felt something akin to a guilty pleasure: the illicit softness of having a private city you dont have to declare on line 23 of Schedule A.
In court they call it jurisdiction. At home they call it the place where you keep your mismatched socks and your unanswered questions. (Parenthetical truth: I am never more honest with myself than when I am late for a deposition and still thinking about whether I should have taken that job three years ago.)
The City of Man is efficient. It files the paperwork on time. It obeys statutes; it respects precedent. It has a clerk who knows exactly which form to hand you when youve brought the wrong envelope to the hearing. The City of God — or whatever you call the interior counterparty to the municipal order — is unruly. It appears in the margins, in doodles between client footnotes, in the small italicized voice that asks how you slept last night and why your mothers name keeps popping into every new contract you draft.
Trial prep is neat; trial is a spectacle of people misbehaving within the City of Mans rules. But between the hearings I write bracketed notes: (Remember: the client is human. Also, buy flowers for Erica. It's been two months. She notices.) Sometimes the brackets are for evidence, sometimes they are for survival.
When the phone rings with another scheduling conflict, I imagine two cities on a map: one full of blue ink and straight edges, the other a watercolor wash under the paper, edges blurred, populated by long-winded confessions and impossible loves. In the watercolor city the ordinances are softer: forgiveness is mandatory; theres an open permit for second chances. It refuses to produce itemized receipts.
Legal margin: (client ethics vs. client humanity — which are we representing?)
The trick — and here I write it down as if a motion to protect myself from forgetting — is not to let one city annex the other. If you only live in the City of Man you will become a filing cabinet with a pulse. If you only live in the little watercolor city you will never find the right form when the IRS comes knocking. Maybe Augustine would have smiled at that: balance as a moral obligation (or at least as reasonable self-care).
On my notepad I draw a tiny skyline: a courthouse with columns and a house with a crooked chimney. Between them a dotted line labelled comity. Underlined twice. (Comity: legal courtesy; also, the art of being kind while still billing by the hour.)
My assistant knocks and slides a client packet onto my desk. In it, a list of debts, a list of debts owed to the client and a list of debts the client says they dont remember. These lists are all City of Man. They want accounting. They want rectification. They want to be told what to do and then they want to do it, neatly. I make my notes in the margins: calculate exposure, estimate fees, predict crying — the last entry with a smiley face that feels dangerously unprofessional.
At lunch I walk past a church with its doors closed and a tax office with its doors ajar. People stream in and out of both. The city hums: ordinance, prayers, fines, recipes for casseroles that sustain long nights of document review. I feel like I am conducting a census of my own responsibilities: in which city does each obligation belong? Where do I file the grief? Under which code do I list the nights Ive stayed up worrying? (Answer: there is no neat code.)
Back at the desk I index the bewilderments: love for someone who does not keep appointments, the urge to quit and write a novel, a fear that Ive missed my true vocation (Margin: Google "creative writing workshops" after 5 pm). The City of Man wants an index number; the City of God — or at least the pillow-city — wants a poem. I put both in separate folders on my computer and then, because this is how I hedge my bets, I email myself the poem with the subject line: FOR LATER.
There is ritual in both cities. The City of Man ritualizes signatures and witnesses. The pillow-city ritualizes confession and coffee. Neither one thinks the other is particularly funny. They argue like ex-lovers over the last slice of pizza: each insists that its hunger is more legitimate, that its needs are more urgent. What I have learned — and this is an exhibit I will mark with a little star and a quip — is that you can be faithful to both without betraying either. You can file your taxes and keep a secret. You can argue a motion to enforce and then go home and cry into a novel that no one will ever read.
[marginalia: 4) Court at 9. 5) Remember to breathe.]
In the evening I tuck a paper city under my pillow, not because I think it will ward off nightmares, but because it is comforting to have a document you are allowed to lose. The City of Man stays by the photocopier, stamping everything "received." The watercolor city rises when the lights go down, with a soft jurisdiction that refuses subpoenas. It cant pay rent, but it invents songs about the way the moon looks on a brief left open on a desk.
Maybe thats the only law that matters: the one you write on the back of an envelope at 2 a.m. and call unofficial. Maybe the highest good is to keep both. File one; keep the other under your pillow. And when someone asks you which you belong to, wink and hand them a sticky note that says: jurisdiction withheld.
(Final note to self: bill two hours for todays counsel work; bill one for existential crisis. Clients pay for the first. The second keeps you alive.)