Jay Kuperstein had a good job. He worked in New York for the NBA, editing basketball videos. Then he got tired of sitting in front of a video monitor for 15 hours a day and decided to go to law school.

Kuperstein, who is 30 years old,
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And so this new lawyer found himself sitting in front of a computer for 15 hours a day, working as a temp document reviewer, one of a growing species of big city lawyer that sifts through electronic documents to determine whether they are relevant to pending court cases and investigations.

Kuperstein does not do research, and he does not write; he does not go to court, and he does not meet with clients. The clients whose cases he works on do not know his name. There is no room for promotion in this job,
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But there is the potential of a six figure salary and also very little stress except for the stress of knowing that the job may end any minute now, without warning.

Though it’s not what he expected, Kuperstein is happy with his work. His job exists to support big firm lawyers,
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For more and more law school graduates, this is the legal life: On a given day, they may plow through a few hundred documents e mails, PowerPoint presentations,
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This isn’t anyone’s dream job, but more and more lawyers in big cities around the country are finding that seven years of higher education, crushing student loans, and an unfriendly job market have brought them to windowless rooms around the city, where they do well paid work that sometimes seems to require no more than a law degree, the use of a single index finger, and the ability to sit still for 15 hours a day. Is this being a lawyer? It is now.

When you are a temp document reviewer, you live for e mails that have some spark of humanity in them, even if they are banal and about people who are being investigated by the Department of Justice, because those e mails are not spreadsheets; they are not brochures or policy statements.

They are also not relevant. A relevant document would be a lot more boring, for the most part, and would not conjure up fantasies of Camembert sandwiches in the park. You know, or something. Move the mouse so the cursor is over the "not relevant" button. Click the "not relevant" button. Click the "next" button. It’s another e mail Marie turning Frank down for dinner, saying that she is going to be in Croatia that week. With her boyfriend.

Again, not relevant. At least not to the big city lawyer. Frank no doubt feels differently. (If there were a real Frank, that is; this e mail is similar to a real e mail I’ve seen but is not the exact e mail,
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This is all by way of saying that I have also been a temp document reviewer and probably will be again. I graduated from law school more than seven years ago,
Hot Sale Air Jordan 6 Black Infrared 2014, with $150,000 in loans. After paying around $1,
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But I thought of my friends as anomalies. this last summer and found myself talking with lawyer after lawyer who was doing or had done this work.

Some of these people included a cousin of mine who couldn’t understand why I wouldn’t do the work, especially since I kept asking her to pay for lunch. I resisted at first, because when I was a new lawyer, working as an associate at a big law firm in New York, I had done some document reviewing as part of my job on the firm’s litigation team. Box upon box of paper documents were my territory. The boxes were dusty and aggravated my allergies; the paper was sharp and cut my delicate fingers. I took naps on my office floor when I couldn’t bear to look at more documents. It felt like exquisite torture, spending all those weeks in all those boxes. A friend who was also reviewing documents at his law firm back then said to me he thought he was getting the same box of documents to review, over and over and over, as part of some psychology experiment.

But bills being bills, before long I’d signed up with five or seven of the 60 odd lawyer temp agencies around the city and was put to work.

My first "project,
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From there we were taken to our work station: a windowless room filled with computers. We each had a computer; we were trained on the particular computer program we’d be using, then got clicking. Relevant. Not relevant. Not relevant. Not relevant. Two staff attorneys full time lawyers hired by the law firm to oversee the temp document reviewers sat at a table in the front of the room,
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"We notice that some of you are listening to music too loud on your personal stereos." And,
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The passive aggressive e mails? Not relevant. My music was quiet, and my nails are short. The staff attorney meant those missives for a couple of the other temps.

The rhythm of the day, for me, was that in the morning, I’d arrive and get coffee and then sit happily enough at the computer reviewing documents and surfing the Internet, on and off, for three or four hours. Most of the documents were fairly dull spreadsheets, brochures, e mails talking about financial stuff. Every once in a while I’d get a good e mail, not as good as the e mails the other people said they’d sometimes seen things about people getting divorces and arguing about their child visitation rights, arranging secret rendezvous, and downloading porn but things like: "Hey dude, I’m in Hawaii with my wife. She sure likes to spend money. Nice hotel. How’s the XYZ deal going? Paul"

Oh,
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The documents we reviewed had some chronological order, so after I read about Hawaii, I read e mails between Paul and the dude about Paul’s return from Hawaii, about how both Paul and the dude hated some other co worker who had undermined Paul’s efforts to put together a certain deal, about the dude’s attempts (foiled!) to buy a house,
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The document review room was nearly silent except for the sounds of computer clicking,
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But we temp lawyers got to talking around the coffee machine or in the bathroom. The other temp lawyers seemed to come from every walk of lawyerly life one had left an associate job at another firm, another was trying to make it in the hip hop world. A third was looking for a job as a patent lawyer, maybe,
Here Is Our Online Air Jordan 9 Olive 2012, or maybe he’d just do document review and travel between projects. A woman told me that usually she did document reviews in foreign languages she speaks Dutch, she said and makes more money doing that. An older man told me he’d recently retired from the federal government. It seemed as if people fell into one of three camps: people who only wanted temp jobs because they liked the freedom; people who were between regular jobs; and people who were stuck doing document review forever not between jobs, because there were no jobs to be between.

For lunch, I’d go to the firm cafeteria for a tomato and mozzarella sandwich, which I’d eat in front of the computer so as not to waste time. And with lunch eaten, I’d sit at the computer for another few hours and despair this is what I was doing with myself? With my fancy law degree? My friends were becoming well known, they were making a lot of money,
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Then I’d spend a surreptitious hour looking for other jobs, hoping the staff attorneys wouldn’t notice, hoping they wouldn’t send me an e mail saying, "We notice that some of you are looking to get fired" I never got this e mail.

After that, I’d settle back into my life and review documents for another couple of hours and feel OK about it. The day was almost over, I’d go for a nice walk after work, see a movie, or get some drinks, and I’d have earned enough money over the course of the day to keep myself fed and housed, and then some.