FROM JUDITH’S DESK - THE OFFICE CAME HOME WITH ME
- Hampton Law Firm ⚖️
- Aug 21
- 6 min read
FROM JUDITH’S DESK
August 21, 2026
A collection of thoughts that didn’t make it to the blog.
Most people come home on Friday and throw their purse down, drop their keys on the table, and mentally clock out. I came home and put an entire law office on my dining room table. That picture is not staged. Those are not decorative folders strategically scattered around for some cute little busy-lawyer photo. That is my weekend. Every one of those files represents something that has to be researched, reviewed, drafted, answered, fixed, filed, prepared, or figured out, and somehow all of it has to happen before or around a calendar next week that is already booked almost hour by hour with court and client appointments. So tonight, the dining room table is not really a dining room table. It is triage.
This week alone, I have intentionally pulled at least two all-nighters. Not because I accidentally stayed up too late answering emails or lost track of time. Intentional, as in there were not enough working hours available to do everything that had to be done, so sleep was the thing removed from the schedule. During the day, I was in court or appointments while the work I could not physically do at the same time continued accumulating. My office was also almost completely without staff this week. I had one person helping me for part of it, and the work did exactly what work does when nobody is there to make it disappear. It piled up. Then Monday brings another court date, while somewhere inside all of this I am also dealing with car insurance, looking at office space in Ruston, considering housing options, running a business, raising three children, and trying to make some fairly significant decisions about what the next version of my life and my practice are supposed to look like.
And on top of all of that, this week I am grieving my aunt, who died from colon cancer after living with the same disease I live with. We were not the kind of aunt and niece who talked every day, and maybe by somebody else’s measure that means I should not feel the loss as deeply as I do, but grief has never been particularly interested in anybody else’s measurements. She was part of my whole life, and now she is simply not here. At the same time, for one very brief stretch this week, maybe a day or two, I thought I had a friend back. I had someone to talk to again in a way that felt familiar enough that, for just a minute, something in my life felt almost normal. Then I came home from work and found more pieces of the life I knew gone while I was away working. So somewhere underneath the court dates, the files, the appointments, the unanswered messages, the all-nighters, and the constant decisions about what has to be handled next, there is also grief. There is loss. There is the strange experience of continuing to function at full speed while parts of your personal life keep disappearing in the background, and somehow you are still expected to sit down, open the next file, and keep going. But life does not stop just because you are grieving. So now I do what I always do. I pick myself up, I get to work, and I figure out the next right thing.
Meanwhile, the phone rings. The emails come. The texts come. The website messages come. New matters come in during the same appointments already taking up the hours that I would otherwise use to finish the old ones. And inevitably somebody wants to know why something is taking so long. Sometimes it has been two whole days. I understand it from the client’s perspective because their problem is enormously important to them, and it should be. When somebody hires me, I want them to believe their matter matters to me too, because it does. But there is a strange loneliness in working yourself past exhaustion for people who will never actually see the work. They do not see you at 2:47 in the morning reading one more case because something about the answer does not sit right with you. They do not see the research, the drafts you threw away, the court appearances for everyone else, the appointments before theirs and after theirs, or the constant decisions about whose emergency is the most urgent emergency. They only know their thing is not finished yet.
And sometimes, after working all night, walking into the office the next morning and immediately hearing complaints about how slowly you are working is unbelievably disheartening. It does not make me want to help people less. It does, however, reinforce something my dad and I were talking about tonight: something has to change. Not the law. I love what I do. Estate planning, successions, real estate, title work, complicated problems somebody else could not quite figure out, finding the argument buried three layers underneath the obvious one. That is my brain’s natural habitat. I have finally reached a point in my career where I can say, without minimizing it to make anybody else comfortable, that I am goddamn good at what I do. Not because I know every answer. I don’t. I am good because I will go find it.
I research. I question. I build. I rethink things. I look for the angle somebody missed. I create systems. I challenge bad systems. I write. I teach. I try things. I am constantly asking whether something can be done better. I have never really thought of myself as just a lawyer. The law is my profession, but creating, building, solving, and improving things are every bit as much a part of who I am. Maybe that is why this ridiculous pile of files on my dining room table feels both like a blessing and a warning. There are a lot of people in those folders who trusted me with something important. People call this office because somebody told them I could help. They send their families here. They come back. They bring another problem. They ask me to handle things that matter enormously to them. That is success. There was a time when I was trying to build exactly that, and I did. Maybe even better than I realized.
But success has a rather inconvenient design flaw: human beings still come with human limits. There are only twenty-four hours in a day. I only have two hands. There is still only one of me. No amount of ambition, caffeine, stubbornness, creativity, or sheer refusal to quit can manufacture another six hours between midnight and morning. That does not mean the dream failed. Quite the opposite. Sometimes the thing works so well that the way you originally built it can no longer hold it. And that is where I think I am. The work is not the problem. The life I have built around doing the work is.
So tonight I am going to sit at this dining room table and sort the files. I will make the priority lists. I will handle what has to be handled. I will probably drink an unreasonable amount of coffee. But I am also going to keep researching something bigger than anything contained in those folders: a better way to do this. Because loving your work does not require letting it consume every remaining inch of your life. Sometimes recognizing that the current method is unsustainable is not admitting defeat. Sometimes it is simply what comes next after succeeding.
Maybe that is the real story in this picture. I brought home an enormous stack of work on Friday. But for the first time in a long time, I am not only asking myself how I am going to get through the stack. I am asking how I am going to build a life where this is not what coming home has to look like.
JLH
THE NEXT RIGHT THING
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