When I started practicing law in 2002, the message was clear: keep work and life in separate boxes.
At home, you scolded yourself for thinking about a brief. At work, for missing a birthday. Constantly jerking the leash.
One of my law professors had us read Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. I still have my beat-up copy on my bookshelf. The main character is a butler, struggling to balance being extraordinary at his job with his human desires for love and friendship. Because, as Sartre told us, no one can really be a butler—or a waiter, or a lawyer—100 percent of the time.1
We don’t need to debate whether that “separate boxes” model ever worked. It’s dead. It started with BlackBerries, then iPhones. Laptops. Citrix. VPNs. Each one eroded the boundary. Then COVID erased it completely.
This presents an opportunity. We used to be told to put on different hats—lawyer hat, weekend hat. But we don’t have to live like that anymore. What we can be, 24/7, is a person who: is a lawyer, shows up for family, craves ocean air and miles on foot, and still lights up at a summer ice cream cone. The same you at the client meeting and on the couch. At the firm and on the beach. Fully invested means no more masks.
Here’s the magic: what strengthens our hearts, minds, and relationships also sharpens our lawyering. Strong glutes protect your knees. Healthy knees keep you moving. Movement fuels your brain—and your presence in the courtroom, at the table, or with a friend in need.
This framework change has practical impact:
The art of the quick switch
Common advice to set aside uninterrupted hours so you can avoid switching between tasks is nostalgic. It doesn’t work well—especially when clients and teammates are in different time zones. The key is being able to shift quickly between work and non-work tasks, while staying present in each.
One of my best days was on a work-cation in Morocco. My friends and I got up early to run on a windy beach, with camels, horses, and kite-surfers leaping off the water—an extraordinary experience. Then I walked back to our riad to prepare for a client call. In the old days, I would have felt the need to “keep my head in the game” all morning beforehand—but that extra “worrying time” didn’t help me prepare in an effective way.
The rise of the work-cation
The goal is no longer to protect two sacred weeks of vacation time each year. That is not really possible anymore. Instead, I got great at the “work-cation.” Still available 24/7, still putting in long days when needed, still willing to drop everything for an emergency—but doing it all from a beautiful, inspiring place.
I experienced more of the world, for longer stretches. And I experienced it differently: more time in local coffee shops and parks with my laptop, less time in tourist lines. Arguably, this gave me a more authentic experience.
Fully invested means richer relationships
Once I gave myself the freedom to engage with clients as myself—not as a simulacrum of what I thought they expected their lawyer to be—everything got better. I felt less anxious. My client relationships became richer. I became more important to my clients. The work became more productive.
This was the best change to come from this new framework. It kept me in the job long after my finances would have allowed me to walk away.
The Fully Invested Lawyer is aspirational. No one achieves this all the time—goodness knows I didn’t. But when things are going well, you can step back and marvel at how full, robust, and rich your life is.
The Heart and Health sections of this blog describe the skills I learned about how to be a fully invested lawyer. In many ways, this is a love letter to my full, rich life in the law, which I left when I retired at age 47. But even now, being a lawyer is part of who I am. The skills, relationships, and energy I developed in that role continue to sustain me.
Because when we are living as fully integrated people, we can imagine moving on. Not escaping, but reaching a point where what we’re doing today no longer serves.
To be truly present in the reality of the human condition is to know that nothing is forever. There may come a time when we do not want to—or can’t—continue on the same path.
The Freedom section of this blog is about gaining the financial freedom to let it go.
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Footnotes
¹ Sartre wrote about mistaking your role for your life in Being and Nothingness. It’s worth a full quote:
“Let us consider the waiter in the cafe. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes towards the patrons with a step a little too quick; he bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer… All his behavior seems to us a game. He is playing at being a waiter in a cafe.” ↩
The Fully Invested Lawyer 
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