Daily Inspiration Quote by Fred F. Fielding

Nostalgia is doing a lot of quiet work here, but it is nostalgia with an argument. Fred F. Fielding isn’t just reminiscing about a smaller Morgan, Lewis; he’s staking a claim about how professional excellence is manufactured. The line flatters the listener’s curiosity about “those days” while sneaking in a thesis: scale changes the texture of learning. When the firm was “not quite as big,” an associate could still touch a broad slice of the practice, see consequences up close, and build judgment by repetition across different kinds of problems. “Good and varied assignments” is the tell. Variety is framed as opportunity, not chaos. The subtext is that bigness, for all its prestige, tends to narrow early careers into specialized lanes.

Fielding’s diction is lawyerly but strategically warm: “exciting,” “terrific training.” That’s recruitment language, the kind you use to sanctify long hours without admitting you’re selling endurance. Yet it’s also a snapshot of a particular professional era: mid-century Big Law expanding alongside regulatory growth and corporate consolidation, when firms were becoming institutions but hadn’t fully industrialized their talent pipelines. His point lands because it’s a critique disguised as praise. He doesn’t attack modern Morgan, Lewis; he elevates an earlier version as a place where apprenticeship felt real.

It’s also a subtle defense of hierarchy. “Terrific training” implies a system that worked because juniors were fed demanding work and seniors were close enough to teach. The memory is less about glamour than about proximity: to responsibility, to mentors, to the whole machine before it got too large to see.