In August, I did something I’d never done before in my career as a journalist: I went completely off the grid.

For five days, while I backpacked through the Tetons, I was completely unreachable. With zero bars on my phone, I couldn’t have stayed plugged in to the news cycle if I wanted to. During that time, as far as I was concerned, Luigi Mangione was still planning to go to trial in federal court, and Hayden Panettiere was alive and well. If every courthouse in Delaware simultaneously burned to the ground, I’d have had no way of knowing.

It made me wonder how many litigators have ever gotten to go offline like that. It turns out, if you ask litigators if they ever get the chance to unplug, most will say they do. But their version of unplugging often seems to come with the caveat that they must be on call to plug back in as soon as they’re needed. And if they’re preparing for or actively in trial? No way.

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