The Daily Operations of Judith
- Hampton Law Firm ⚖️
- Jun 22
- 6 min read
There are people whose mornings begin with a peaceful alarm clock, a hot cup of coffee, a calm shower, and enough quiet time to gather their thoughts before the day begins.
That has never really been my ministry.
My day usually starts around four o’clock in the morning, when insomnia decides it has something important to discuss. By six o’clock, JB is awake and ready to begin his portion of the daily operations. Shortly after that, three children are waking up in various moods, and the house becomes a fast-moving shuffle of makeup, clothes, ponytails, socks, shoes, backpacks, and—of course—the snack.
There is always a snack.
It does not matter that breakfast has already happened, is currently happening, or is theoretically about to happen. Somebody needs a snack before we leave the house. Somebody needs a different snack than the one we have. Somebody cannot find the snack they packed themselves. By the time we make it out the door, I feel like I have coordinated a small evacuation with a snack budget.
Then we are off to the races.
Not literally, because I do enjoy keeping my driver’s license, but there is usually enough urgency in the car to make it feel like a NASCAR pit crew is headed toward school and daycare. Somebody is asking where their water bottle is after we are already halfway there. Somebody remembers a paper that needed to be signed. Somebody suddenly needs to use the bathroom at the exact moment we are about to arrive.
And somehow, we make it.
Maybe not early. Maybe not gracefully. But we make it.
By eight o’clock in the morning, I am generally at work and attempting to look like a reasonably composed attorney who has not already handled three wardrobe emergencies, two snack negotiations, one missing-shoe investigation, and a full-scale debate about why we cannot wear pajamas to school on a random Tuesday.
By then, the first little panic spiral of the day has usually arrived. Nothing dramatic. Just the normal realization that there are already twelve things demanding my attention, three people waiting for answers, at least one email that should have been answered yesterday, a phone that appears to know when I am trying to concentrate and about 15 different tabs open in my brain all competing for urgency.
By noon, I have probably dealt with my fifth emergency legal issue of the day, and they are almost never the same kind of emergency. One person has a title question. Somebody else has a succession problem. There may be a real estate issue, an appointment to schedule, a document that has to be fixed, a client who needs an answer immediately, and at least one situation where the only accurate response is, “Well, that is not how that was supposed to go.”
Somewhere in the middle of all that, my staff and I have probably pulled a good bit of our hair out.
But we have probably also burned a few calories laughing.
There is a certain kind of humor that develops when people work closely together in a busy office. It is the humor of looking at each other after the third unexpected problem of the morning and realizing there is nothing left to do but handle it—and possibly make a joke about it before the next phone call comes in.
We work hard. We care deeply. We take the work seriously. But we also laugh, because sometimes laughter is the only thing keeping a long day from becoming a very long day.
By three o’clock, I have usually spent part of the day at the detention facility in Lincoln Parish meeting with clients, and I have heard enough stories to last most people a month.
I may have listened to someone explain, with complete confidence, how a bag of grass somehow became somebody else’s marijuana problem. I may have heard a person facing extraordinarily serious charges speak hopefully about getting out on bond, as though optimism alone might move the process along.
And then there are the moments that are not funny at all.
By that point in the day, I have probably heard more than one heartbreaking family crisis. I have listened to people who are scared, overwhelmed, grieving, angry, or trying to figure out what happens next when life has taken a turn they never saw coming.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, there is a very good chance my phone has rung with a call from daycare that someone is sick, a school call that somebody is in trouble, or a message letting me know that a child needs something immediately that apparently could not wait until I finished handling actual legal emergencies.
That is the strange rhythm of my life. One minute, I am sitting across from someone whose entire future feels uncertain. The next, I am trying to figure out whether the child in question has a fever, threw up, got into an argument, or simply decided school was not the place for them that day.
Then, by four o’clock, I am back at the office trying to put out all the other fires that lit themselves while I was gone.
It is a glamorous system.
By six o’clock, the kids and I are back home. At this point, dinner may be a thoughtfully planned meal if the stars have aligned, everyone has cooperated, and I remembered to thaw something at a normal hour. (I need to be honest here - a good bit of the time this 6:00 statement doesn’t actually occur until 8-9pm because I may have a problem with being a workaholic. Luckily I have an amazing dad who fills in for me all of the time)
More often, it is McDonald’s bags, ramen noodles, ravioli, cereal, or a lasagna going into the oven at eight o’clock at night while I pray it cooks before everybody becomes emotionally unstable from hunger.
There is usually homework. There is usually somebody crying because somebody else looked at them wrong. There is always at least one child who has suddenly remembered something important that was due today, tomorrow, or possibly three weeks ago.
And somewhere in the middle of all of it, I am probably standing in the kitchen trying not to pull my hair out because somebody is not listening to me after I have said the same thing six times.
This is generally the moment when I announce that nobody appreciates what I go through around here.
I would like to say I handle all of this with peace, patience, and the gentle confidence of a woman who has her life beautifully organized.
That would be a lie.
Most days, I am moving fast, talking fast, complaining loudly, looking for things I just had in my hand, and wondering why everyone is standing there when there are clearly things that need to be done.
But the things get done.
The kids get where they need to be. The clients get called back. The emergencies get handled. The paperwork gets finished. Dinner appears, even if it is in a bag with a drive-thru receipt attached to it.
And no matter what kind of day it has been, there is a pretty good chance you will find me ending it on my couch with a glass of chocolate milk (or three).
That is where the day finally slows down enough for me to replay it all. The absurd parts. The stressful parts. The parts that hurt. The parts that made me want to pull my hair out. The things I should have handled better. The things I somehow handled at all.
And generally, no matter what mood I am in when I sit down, I can find something about the day to laugh about.
Maybe it was a child’s comment. Maybe it was something that happened at the office. Maybe it was the fact that I spent half the day trying to find something that was sitting directly in front of me. Maybe it was simply the sheer absurdity of trying to be a lawyer, a mother, an emergency contact, a chauffeur, a snack distributor, and a functioning adult all before bedtime.
The daily operations of Judith may not be calm, polished, or especially quiet.
But they are running.
And at the end of the day, when everybody is fed, mostly where they belong, and there is still something left to laugh about, I count that as a successful day.
Judith L. Hampton
Attorney-at-Law
Hampton Law Firm
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