Going the Distance

By Susan E. Davis
     
There are attorneys who travel a lot-and then there are attorneys who travel a whole lot. Those are the ones who fly 50,000 to 100,000 miles per year, who are on the road as often as they are off it, whose client relationships (never mind family ones) are mediated as much by 21st-century technology as by the time-honored modes of touch and sight.
      If you already travel a lot, you may wonder how anyone who travels more than you do handles the load-the stress, that is, plus the jet lag, loneliness, and excess of bad food. At California Lawyer we were wondering the same thing. So we interviewed five attorneys who are some of the top travelers in an admittedly well-traveled field ... and found the surprising secrets to their successful travel strategies.
     
      ONE-DAY TRIP TO CHINA
      As a partner with Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati in Palo Alto and leader of the firm's China practice, Carmen Chang says she's in China "probably 40 percent of the time." Typically she goes for two weeks at a time, but she admits to squeezing in one-day trips with fair regularity too. "Because I also have a practice in California, I basically have to be in two different places at the same time," she says.
      Curious about the logistics? To pull off a one-day trip to Asia, you leave California at 1 a.m. PST, on, say, a Monday, which allows you to hit Hong Kong at 6 a.m. Tuesday local time, which is actually 2 p.m. Monday PST. (Chang says that to make her life easier, she'll sometimes take a shower, massage, and nap at the airport-such services are available in China, while we can't even get our nails done in U.S. airports-or use a colleague's hotel room to freshen up.) Then you're off to a meeting at 8 a.m. (that is, 4 p.m. PST), which typically lasts until 5 p.m. (we're now at midnight Tuesday, heading into the wee hours of a Wednesday morning). Take in a quick dinner somewhere, then go back to the airport to catch a 9:55 p.m. return flight to the States, which gets you in at, um, 7 p.m. Tuesday night. Got it?
      "I survive because I can sleep anywhere, anytime," Chang explains. "My body is so conditioned to sleeping on a plane that as soon as I hit the seat, I'm ready to nap. Besides, a one-day trip is easy because my body never adjusts to Chinese time. If I take a two-week trip, I'm jet-lagged five days in each direction."
      The food situation, though, is not so easy. "I gained a lot of weight traveling," she admits. "And 18 months ago I realized that I needed to lose about 25 pounds. I did lose it-in part by flying on United Airlines, where the food is so awful I don't eat it. If you fly Singapore Airlines, you get Chinese comfort food. Very fattening."
     
      LONELINESS OF THE LONG-DISTANCE LAWYER
      When Sean Carter was the West Coast regional diversity manager at DLA Piper US in San Francisco, he oversaw diversity initiatives in the firm's offices in Austin, Chicago, Dallas, East Palo Alto, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Phoenix, Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco, and Seattle-with occasional jaunts to New York and Washington, D.C. As a result, he says, he traveled 110,000 miles in his first 16 months on the job-and none of that was overseas.
      "I traveled so much that the people in other Piper offices knew me better than people in my home office," he jokes.
      Carter began the job in August 2006 and left the firm in February. As of this writing, he is in the process of taking a similar position at another San Francisco firm. He admits that being alone on the road gets to him. "Once I'm done with work, I can sometimes have dinner with a colleague," he says. "Then it's time to go back to the hotel, where, sure, I can read or catch up on email. But that's kind of it."
      To sustain himself physically, Carter brings a suitcase full of supplements and whey protein and always tries to find someplace to work out. "You have to be careful, though," he warns. "Sometimes a hotel advertises a 'fitness center,' but then you walk in and it's tiny and the machines are so close together, you're like, 'God forbid' if there's another person there."
      Racking up frequent-flyer miles is one reward for the hard work, but at this point Carter's are so spread out among different programs he can't keep track of them. "Keeping up on my miles and my points would be like another job," he laughs. "I'd rather just pay. I have no time and no patience for remembering where my reward points are." Even so, he did use some of his miles last year to fly two contractors in from Colorado and put them up in a hotel while they worked on his house. "It took something like 80,000 American Express points," he says, "but it was worth it. They were old family friends, and I had worked with them before."
     
      BEHIND EVERY SUCCESSFUL ATTORNEY...
      Steve Jensen, an intellectual-property partner in the Orange County office of Knobbe, Martens, Olson & Bear, is on the road (or rather, in the air) at least two weeks of every month, sometimes more, traveling to Germany, France, and England, as well as Chicago, Dearborn, Washington, D.C., and other domestic cities.
      Jensen tries to make his trips as short as possible; for instance, he frequently flies to the East Coast and back in one day. "It's exhausting, but I'd rather be home than in transit," he says. How does he handle the stress of constant travel? "Well, that's the $64,000 question," he says. "I can't sleep on planes, and I can't sleep the first night in a hotel. So I don't sleep much. Luckily, I have a lot of energy."
      Jensen and his wife, Teri, have five children, ages 9 to 16. "She's a saint and then some," he says. "She has never complained about my travel in the 17 years I've been doing it. She's the home corporation manager." Jensen says he tries to call home at least once on every trip, and he'll sometimes send an email to a child who's had a "good accomplishment." But, alas, the family hasn't been able to use many of his frequent-flyer miles for vacations in exotic places. "This is much to my wife's chagrin," he admits. "By the time vacations come around, I want to fly as little as possible. In fact, my ideal family vacation is just to stay home. Once a year we go to Midway, Utah, but we always drive."
     
      MAKING IT JUST RIGHT
      Jill Dessalines travels almost every two weeks for her job as assistant general counsel at health care services giant McKesson Corp. in San Francisco. "I'm responsible for litigation, she says, "so I go wherever the case is."
      And because she has to fly on so many different carriers, it's hard to accumulate frequent-flyer miles. But once she does collect a ticket's worth, she generally donates it to family or to charities, including the San Francisco Bar Association's program for college-bound minority students to visit college campuses around the country. "The restrictions that are put on those free tickets make them almost impossible [for me] to use," she explains. "There's just no sufficient flexibility."
      An experienced traveler, Dessalines takes precautions by following "the same safety rules I follow when I'm navigating daily life," she says. "I just bump it up a notch." She won't stay in ground-floor lodging, for instance, unless it's a resort. She won't stay in a room near an elevator, and she loves having GPS in a rental car. "There's nothing worse than being lost in the dark in a strange city," she explains. "And I always make sure that someone knows where and when I'm going, and that any colleagues I'm visiting have my cell-phone number."
      Unlike many attorneys, Dessalines prefers to make her own travel arrangements. "I have kind of quirky preferences," she explains. "I need to have a window seat or be in an exit row on the plane. I refuse to go through O'Hare in the winter, and any connection I make in Atlanta, DFW [Dallas/Fort Worth], Omaha, or O'Hare has to give me an at least an hour layover. By the time I'd get through giving someone else all those directions, I can get it done myself online."
     
      GETTING AWAY FROM IT ALL - MOSTLY
      Roxanne Christ, a partner with Latham & Watkins in Los Angeles and a member of their corporate department, actually admitted that she doesn't mind traveling. With a practice that focuses on intellectual property and media transactions, she estimates that she flies about 40,000 miles per year, mostly in the United States but with occasional jaunts to Asia.
      "I especially enjoy the Asia trips, as along as they're not too frequent," she says. "Being on a plane that long allows me to be out of touch with everyone and everything. It's really kind of relaxing, because it's one of the few times that I can thoroughly take myself out of circulation."
      But only for the duration of her flight. Christ's family, which consists of two high-school age boys and her retired attorney husband, prefer being able to reach her when she touches down.
      To maintain a connection to home, Christ calls her family every day and always makes sure her cell phone is working so she can be reached in case of an emergency. "The same goes for my clients and colleagues," she says. "It would be much more difficult to travel if not for this technology, which makes my absence far less transparent. My BlackBerry is critical for maintaining communications."
      As for frequent-flyer miles, she says, "I accumulate them and watch them drop in value. I find the process of cashing them in [for flights] incredibly time-intensive and annoying. So I just save them for hotel stays during vacations. And I charge a lot to American Express, so I don't have to worry about which airlines I can use."
     
      Susan E. Davis is a contributing writer based in Alameda.
     

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