As a highly introverted trial lawyer, one of the things I dread the most is . . .

the stream of post trial people that show up in my office the day after a trial.

People tell me that I'm good with a jury and that they react well to me.  They say the same thing about the witnesses. If that's true it's because I really don't think being a lawyer means all that much.  Contrary to what people think, it doesn't mean you are smart or even accomplished.  What it might mean is a topic for some other post.  Anyhow, being introverted doesn't mean that you can't address people or speak to them, it means something else.  For one thing, it means you are really private.

I don't like reliving trials.  Lawyers, it seems, like to tell "war stories", but they aren't war stories.  Every trial is a tragedy of some sort.  Revisiting tragedies in which I participated isn't really my thing, and lots of visitors in a single day coming back and asking "what happened in the trial?" is sort of an introverts nightmare.

Another oddity, really just mine, is that when you have a trial in town, you draw an audience from your own firm for closings.  I'm not shy about public speaking, but I hate a close in audience, by which I mean an audience of your friends, family, or coworkers.  It's too much like Monday Night Football and there you are, on the screen, and everyone else is in the audience judging which plays you should have made.  It does draw to mind, however, T.R.'s famous "Man in the Arena" speech.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

Anyhow, I'd prefer not to have an audience.

On that, however, I'm continually amazed by how the mind of the gregarious works.  There I am, without a closing even having been delivered, when a coworker who knows the party is stating to him "let's go get a Scotch after the trial".

What?

All I want to do is to go home.  I'm not keen on Scotch, but I'll take an Irish Whiskey, preferably with my long suffering spouse and the dog.