The Structure of Retirement
Every stage of life has some degree of structure for most of us. Some of us prefer as little structure as possible and some of us need more structure to keep us on track. We are not only all different, but we are different differently at different times of our lives. I find that a certain amount of structure to my life and even to my day is preferable to fully free-forming it. I remember at one point in my life I was crossing off days on the calendar and someone pointed out to me that that was not such a positive way to approach life. I thought about it for a moment and had to agree, so I stopped doing it. I try never to cross off days as though to say, thank God that’s over and done with. I would rather embrace the good and bad of life as it comes to me and get whatever there is to be gotten out of it with eagerness and a “give me more” attitude, no matter what it is. That said, there are still days that are good days and days that are less good and that tends to get reflected in our anxiousness to get through the less good so we can get onto the good.
With the general flexibility that exists with retirement, there should be much less need for structure and many fewer instances of the less good of life, acknowledging that even retired people encounter problems. I find myself very willingly in the never-never land of being retired but still engaged in structured activities. I will not count my gardening and property projects in that array since I do have as much optionality and flexibility as I want in those things unless there is some sort of gardening emergency. But both of my paid-for activities, teaching and expert witness work, have a schedule to them and that schedule translates into a degree of structure.
The good news about teaching is that it represents a structure around sixteen week semesters, so a total of 32 weeks of a normal year (assuming you skip the summer session). Right now I am on a schedule of teaching one course in the Spring and two in the Fall. I have no idea how long that will likely be their interest for me to teach and, perhaps more importantly, I have no idea how long I will want to keep teaching those courses. It is possible that I could be asked to teach other courses, but I tend to doubt it. My interactions with the other faculty and administration are not so involved that I feel there is logical push to extend my involvement. In the mean time, I tend to organize my seasons and my weeks on the class schedules. I teach in the evenings on either Tuesday or Wednesday during September, October, November, February, March and April. That all makes for what I would call structure-light, just enough to mildly get in my way, but also just enough to give me something to organize my week or my season around.
When it comes to Expert Witness work, the schedule is far less set in stone. To begin with, every case is different and its needs are equally unique. These cases have their own pacing based on the way the litigators choose to work and then based on the twists and turns of the case process itself. The process is usually the same more or less in that it starts with reading in on the case (anywhere from 500 – 5,000 pages of documents), analyzing the circumstances to formulate opinions against the array of claims and counter-claims. Sometimes that is all left for self-determination and sometimes the litigators give specific direction in the form of an opinions outline. That is where the expert is left to formulate the opinions and write the report. The reports I have been asked to write have ranged from 30 – 150 pages with the norm being 50-60 pages. That is generally followed by getting a rebuttal and then responding in one form or another to that. There is then most often a deposition followed by testimony. Needless to say, the process can stop at any point due to settlement, but otherwise, the process takes its own specific path. Some cases emphasize the report process, others the deposition or testimony. Right now I am deeply involved in deposition preparation that has exceeded the time taken to write the report.
Some cases drag on in one stage or another based on the specific court procedure or the emphasis of the litigators and there is no telling in advance where that drag is likely to occur. I had one case that was an arbitration that had to be repeated weekly Oliver eighteen months. In that case I did the testimony and cross-examination a few times and then they used a videotape of that and just had me on standby to answer litigator questions as needed. In another case, I was to fly to London to meet with the other opposing expert per the court mandate. That one settled before COVID allowed that meeting to take place. The point is that while the case schedule is not formulaic by any means, there is a typical flow that allows an expert to estimate the schedule for when he is needed. Things like depositions, hearings and trials get scheduled well in advance and much of the necessary work can be done at any time of the day or night.
While during COVID I would be assigned to one or two cases at a time, that seems to have changed as the backlog of litigation has burst open as COVID has receded. I am currently on five cases. Three of them are active now and one is dormant and scheduled to reactivate in a few months (I wrote the report for that one last year). The fifth case is committed to, but has yet to begin. The subject matter of the cases are mostly different though two involve similar situations. The real point is that when you overlap cases like this, the schedule and work structure is far more complicated and unpredictable.
I have spent a goodly number of hours this week preparing for what will be a full week of depositions next week. I suspect that once that deposition is over, there will be a hiatus until it is time to move to the trial portion of the case. That said, it is very hard to determine with any precision what the other cases are likely to yield in terms of time needs and exactly when those needs will reflect themselves in my schedule.
All of this manifests itself in the structure of my retirement in the foreseeable future, but I have no way of knowing at this point how long either teaching or expert witness work will be in my future. I can make a decent case for being able to do both quite well for quite a while, but I can equally see both of them fading away as I get farther and farther away from my active work life on Wall Street (since that is the basis for the demand for my time and involvement with both of the situations). I’m not even sure I really know whether I hope the two remain available to me or if I would rather just see them fade into the sunset. What all of that has told me is that the best structure of retirement is probably to accept whatever structure lands itself at my feet.