In the process of cutting, another approach might have been to separate the past from the future, recognizing the forward-looking purpose of the effort and reweighting accordingly. Cutting down to exactly 1,000 words rather than building up from 500 was the crucial decision.

In imagining a future practice, you are envisioning an expensive and carefully-constructed array of people and moving parts in which as a new lawyer you could hold a position, tentatively. In what sense is this your practice? Assuming it wasn't merely assumed into existence, how did you plan its creation?

Making such a thing is a vastly complicated and risky undertaking when all it has to do is make a living, long before one gets to the enmity of the government and its national security laws. Imagining in the big leagues is not just a wave of the wand: your magic brush must actually produce architectural drawings that can be built by mere mortals, such as you.

Let's try at least to be explicit about the issues. That makes some of our thinking reusable in the event that the particular magic refuses to put itself at our disposal.