Why I’m Letting You See More of Me

I almost didn’t send this one.

For two months, Vibes & Verdicts has been a Sunday thing. One email a week. Legal tech, vibe coding, Batesly war stories. Tight scope. Clean category.

And every single week, I’ve sat down to write it and had to cut things out.

Not because they weren’t interesting. Because they weren’t on topic.

The time my kid climbed onto my lap mid-demo and asked “why are the robots sad?” while I was showing an AI-generated contract review to a prospect — cut.

The morning I shipped a feature at 6:14 AM and immediately cried on the kitchen floor because I’d been awake since 3:40 AM and I still had to get the kids ready for school — cut.

The meeting where a male founder, who had never practiced law a day in his life, “explained” contract law to me. I am an attorney. This happened. Cut.

The ADHD-brain moment where I forgot I had a board call and was discovered in a store dressing room, making decisions about a five-figure annual contract on my phone while my kid tried on a Bluey dress. Extremely cut.

I kept cutting because I thought you signed up for legal tech opinions and AI takes, and I didn’t want to waste your inbox on the rest of it.

But the rest of it is the whole thing.

WHY “THE MARGINS”?

In law school, we read everything with a pen in our hand. The good students — the ones who ended up in Biglaw with six-figure clerkships — underlined things in the main body. The great students wrote in the margins.

The margins were where the real analysis happened. The “wait, this doesn’t hold up” moments. The “this conflicts with the case from three weeks ago” connections. The professor’s actual thinking, before it got sanitized into a casebook footnote.

That’s what Wednesday is.

• The Workshop (Sundays) is still the main body. Tactical. On-topic. Built for you to forward to your CTO when you want to argue that vibe coding is real.

• The Margins (Wednesdays) is the pen work. The connective tissue. The part where I tell you what it actually looks like to run a law practice while building a startup while raising kids while having an ADHD brain that treats deadlines like polite suggestions.

You don’t have to read both. You can mute Wednesdays in your settings. I won’t know, I won’t be offended, and the Sunday edition stays exactly the way it was.

But if you want the rest of it — the part I’ve been cutting — it’s here now.

Subscribe now

What it won’t be

It won’t be a mommy blog. I don’t have the patience to write those, and you don’t have the patience to read one from me.

It won’t be polished. I’ll probably send a few I regret. I’ll definitely send one with a typo. I’m writing these on Tuesday nights after the kids go down, and you’ll be able to tell.

But it’ll be honest. That’s the only commitment I’m making.

What I’m actually hoping for

I want the women in this list to stop feeling like they’re the only ones whose “work-life balance” is actually “barely holding it together while pretending to be a professional.” Fuck that.

I want the parents to know that building a company and raising humans at the same time is genuinely insane, and that insanity is a feature, not a bug.

I want the ADHD brains to stop apologizing for the way they work.

I want the people who’ve been told they can’t — by an industry, by a mentor, by a board member, by their own internal monologue — to see what “doing it anyway” actually looks like from the inside.

Mostly I want to stop cutting things.

What’s on your mind?

Hit reply. Tell me something. This column works better if it’s a two-way street, so here’s the first question:

What’s the thing you’ve been cutting out of your own professional brand?

Not the version you put on LinkedIn. The version you’d tell a friend over drinks but would never put in an email blast. The thing that doesn’t fit.

I read every reply. I’ll write about some of them — anonymously, and only with permission.

— Rachel