The train home is weirdly empty: no grim-faced commuters. Home is weird, too. You’ve never before witnessed its weekday rhythm: the sounds of playtime from the primary school, the clink of bottles over the whine of the milkman’s electric float. You’re normally still in London this early in the day, of course, hunched over some papers, green ink ballpoint in hand, or negotiating with the other side’s lawyer over the phone.It only took an hour or so. You’d arrived at the office this morning, apprehensive but steeled to face the day. The guy had been sitting at your desk, where he had been for four weeks, dead man’s shoes, dancing on your grave. He’d been moved there from Private Client, he explained, so as to be closer to Litigation, the department next to yours, where he is ‘helping out’.

There’s a lot of this thanks to the recession, he said, conveyancers transformed into employment specialists, commercial property lawyers turning their hands to insolvency. Embarrassed, the guy left to re-discover his own desk.

Four weeks ago the doctor had signed you off with ‘anxiety and depression’ brought on by your imminent redundancy. You were now back at your desk, determined to work though the final month of your notice and remind ’em of what you’re really made of! Or that was the idea, except the best-laid plans of mice and lawyers (etc) now saw you exiled to garden leave ‘with immediate effect’ instead. Clear out your desk, was the message from on high, and then take a month’s paid leave. You can apply all your energies to securing your future, they said. Thanks for everything and good luck.

The firm’s partners were being kind and generous.

No, you don’t want a redundancy leaving party, thanks. Your office stuff fitted easily into your bag. You said ‘goodbye and let’s keep in touch’ to fewer people than you might have expected after five years with the firm. You left your security tag at the door (the photo was unflattering, anyway). And then you were out into the mid-morning, self-respect and composure intact, to mingle with the pensioners and mums and toddlers, who weren’t working either.

And so to garden leave and the ‘Project’, which now comes to dominate your waking hours (and haunt your sleeping ones, too). The ‘Project’ is your planned, systematic, mature and ineffably lawyer-like strategy to get yourself back into gainful employment. You trawl the web and scour the legal press for job ads. You complete application forms that ask you to describe how your brilliant legal mind and team player flair overcame a difficult situation in the office. And you talk to recruitment agents, contact former colleagues and network dementedly. A partner at Allen & Overy has just trousered £2.3m, you read. That’ll do you nicely.

But riches may never be yours, it seems, because a spur-of-the-moment decision you made three years ago comes home to roost (in the nicest way possible). You’d been in the pub back in 2006 when an elderly gent you knew said: ‘You’re a lawyer, aren’t you?’ That’s a question you’ve learnt to dread – people like to share their problems with lawyers, particularly in the boozer, and expect Solomon-like solutions before their next pint is drained. But on this occasion the gent simply told you that he volunteers for a community advice centre. A lawyer would be an asset, he said, if you could do Saturday mornings. No pay, of course, but…

Why not give it a try, you thought, advising little people with big problems. And three years on, it still makes a refreshing change from your usual institutional clients, none of whom ever roll up to your office looking ready to slit their wrists only to leave with a spring to their step, a smile on their lips and (you assume) a song in their heart.

And now that same charity says: ‘Come and work for us full-time as a paid employee.’

Dilemma: It’s a charity and pays charity rates, which will still be better than job seekers’ allowance, but temperamentally you see yourself as a fat cat lawyer. And what happens if that City firm you applied to yesterday, out of the hundreds of applications it received, decides you’re the right person for the outrageously well-paid job it is advertising? Yeah…

A job in the hand is worth two in Shepherds Bush, you reason, and you’ll pick up new skill sets and be in work, which future employers will respect. It’s fulfilling, too, and who cares if it pays around one-third (gulp) your previous salary: Hey, who needs caviar every day?

Or are you losing your nerve and jumping the good ship Private Practice too soon?

You pick up the telephone and dial the charity’s number. ‘It’s a kind offer,’ you say, then hesitate. ‘I’ve given it a lot of thought and decided…’

Watch this space for Diary of a redundancy (part three)

The lawyer in this piece is an amalgam of solicitors who have been made redundant and who shared their experiences with the writer. The firm is similarly made up of a number of practices.