On 29 August this year I will have been an attorney for 21 years.  It does not seem long to me, because I know how quickly the time has flown by, but I am reminded that at the Annual General Meeting of the Law Society each year they give out certificates to attorneys who had been in practice for 25 years or more.  There are not that many attorneys who get those certificates, and while it is not something I aspire to at all – because really I think it is something you should get after 40 or 50 years – the very fact that they choose 25 years shows how few people last that long in the profession.  Many would leave for different fields altogether or become legal advisors and I think, similar to running Comrades, which I have done three times, it takes quite some mental endurance to handle the action of an attorney’s office for that long.  

I don’t think back on the early years that often, but when I do it is with some pride that there is nothing in the office that I did not do.  In fact, the only thing I did not do was to vacuum the offices twice a week, but apart from vacuuming the offices, I did everything else!  I used to have to close the offices, leave an answering machine on and go downstairs to Arnold at Prontaprint and do my photocopying there.  After about a year in practice I finally was earning enough to afford a secretary, as well as a filing lady.  For the filing position I hired a lady in the building, Joyce, who worked as a cleaner, and she is still with me some 20 years later. The firm today does not even remotely resemble what I started with, but much of the letters, the documents, etc are all the original or amended versions of the original documents that I personally typed up.  

I have always felt that to be good in business you have to be able to do it all, and I am proud to say I have done it all – whether it was standing at the fax machine, running up and down the steps and doing photocopying or typing my own letters and agreements.  If you want to get ahead, you have to be able to do things yourself and I can honestly say that I had far more pride in the layout and look of my letters with the correct justification, margins, consistent fonts, etc than most of today’s secretaries have.  There is a lot of truth in the saying that if you want something done properly, you do it yourself.