A BRIEF HISTORY OF ME

Prologue

CatAs the youngest of 12 sons born to a family of nomadic, Ukrainian, goat herders, Jason was the first of his family to attend any formal schooling, let alone graduate from law school. But unfortunately for you, the real story is far less interesting. I was born and raised in the southwest suburbs of Chicago, the "baby" in a household that consisted (usually) of my mom, dad, older brother, and a dog or two. Before finding out I was deathly allergic, we also had a cat... someone, somewhere, is probably wearing a nice, fluffy, muff that used to be named "Jimmy."

Chapter 1:
The Volleyball Diaries

Halfway through my 6th grade year, the family moved further out from the city to a suburb which, at the time, felt like it was on the fringes of civilization. In  reality however, it was only about a 20 minute drive from where I grew up, and still located within Cook County. Orland Park was where I would spend my formative years, and luckily the group I fell in with upon my arrival were the "jocks." Aside from a disasterous stint as an outfielder in the local t-ball league when I was 5, and a slightly less disasterous turn as a defender on an indoor soccer team when I was in third grade, I had never really played any organized sport. Sure, I rode the hell out of my trusty Haro Sport, but aside from the t-ball and indoor soccer league, the only other sport I was aware of in my town was the football team my mother wouldn't let me join.

My new friends were mostly basketball players, but they all played a number of sports. Orland Park being a bit more affluent than Bridgeview, I guess the parents could afford to put their kids in a wider variety of leagues. Anyway, being 12 years old and already over six feet tall, basketball was an obvious decision. The next year, when I got to junior high, I made the basketball team and rode the bench the whole year. The next year I started all but the first game of the season, and the following year, as a freshman, I broke my arm halfway through the season when I fell, awkwardly, after hanging on the rim before practice.

Loyola VolleyballThe compound fracture, and the scorn of the coaches for horsing around when we weren't even supposed to be in the gym, effectively ended my basketball career and they cut me from the sophomore team the next year. After that, I decided to try my hand at volleyball. I had played both years on my junior high team, as something to do when it wasn't basketball season, but never took it very seriously (and I can't imagine I was any good). I tried out for the volleyball team my sophomore year and got cut. I attribute this to my joining the team as a "manager" while my arm was still in a cast the prior year, and then never showing up (hey, I was 14, I had better things to do than keep stats and fill water bottles). During that time though, I became good friends with a number of guys who were on the volleyball team and they convinced me to come out to a few open gyms before tryouts my junior year. I ended up making the team, which began my 4 years of year-round, non-stop, volleyball playing. The same guys convinced me to tryout for one of the club teams in the area the following summer, before my senior year, which I made. Then I made my high school team my senior year and started about half of the games, played the following summer at the Junior Olympics in Orlando, and then walked on to the NCAA-D1 team at Loyola Chicago, where I saw action in at least half of the games (I even have the distinction of recording the first match point ever in Loyola history... it's on video, there's proof!).
 
Finally, injuries and the fact that I was good, but not good enough, led to me relinquish my playing spot on the team. The cool thing was that I still got to travel with the team as as assistant coach. We were pretty hi-tech at Loyola, running not one but TWO laptops on the bench, flanking the head coach, to track offensive and defensive stats/patterns/etc. After I stopped playing, about halfway through my Sophomore year, I transitioned to running one of these laptops. This was also about the same time that I started coaching for the junior's club for which I used to play.

AltitudeThroughout the years, depending on where I've lived and my work schedule when back in Chicago, I've coached on and off for Altitude Volleyball Club, previously known as Synergy Volleyball Club, and before that, No Limit Volleyball Club (I played for both No Limit and Synergy... Altitude is the newest incarnation which, until about a year ago, strictly fielded girls' teams). My most recent stint with the club was when I moved back from California in 2009, and having no job lined up upon my return, I went back to coaching. I spent about a year at the helm of a 16-Under team, and had an absolute blast. Boys may be more fun to watch, because they have a bit more power than the girls, but the girls were by far way more fun to coach. 

Ultimately, I had to quit coaching again. Since I had played and coached for them previously, the club had relocated from the southwest suburbs to northwest Indiana. The drive down to the practice sites from Chicago was bad enough, but after moving out to Naperville, there was no way I could make that work twice a week. I still play though, and most Wednesday nights you can catch me playing a league at the Great Lakes Center in Aurora.
Chapter 2:
How I Didn't Make Millions From The Internet

In about 1984, while still living in Bridgeview, my family bought an IBM PC jr., a scaled down PC for the masses that would later prove to be a marketing flop for IBM. It was enough to get my brother and I hooked on computers. That interest waned a bit during the ensuing years... as computers were coming out with Windows and we were still kicking it on our DOS machine. It wasn't until about 1990 or 1991 that my brother purchased his own computer, a Leading Edge brand that came with Windows 3.1! This thing was awesome! You could change the color of the background, and even specify a sound to play when the computer started! Yessir, we were on our way to landing a man on Mars in no time!

This was also about the same time that AOL started its campaign to produce enough CDs, loaded with their dialer program, to stretch from the Earth to Mars. After hearing the hiss and bebong-bebongs of the modem connecting at a blistering 14.4kbs, there was no going back for me. Sure, back in the 80's my dad had a "bulletin board" account where he would dial into some computer somewhere, and 4 hours later we would have a brand new text-based adventure game or a poorly faked nude photo of a random early-80's celebrity, but that was all child's play compared to the glory of America On-Line!

When I got to college and found out that we had free Internet access, and also free storage space to create our own websites, there was no turning back. The first website I ever created was to be found at http://orion.it.luc.edu/~jpyrz/team.html. The amazing thing is, if you Google that URL, it returns a couple of sites that identified it as the Loyola Chicago Men's Volleyball website (even though it's been over a decade since that site died).

Neo-SceneAt the same time I was in college, majoring in Politcal Science and doing the "pre-law" track, I noticed that people were getting fabulously rich off of the Internet. Hoping to cash in on the Internet boom (we didn't yet know it was going to be a bubble), a couple of friends and my future wife decided to start a web design company and called it Neo-Scene, LLC. While Neo-Scene wasn't enough of a success to pay any of us a full-time salary, it gave us all some really good experience and let us make the common, youthful, mistakes on our own, rather than for someone else. In all, I think we ended up doing three or four sites. An auto insurance agency, a motivational speaker, a jewelry designer, and maybe one or two more. The real benefit to Neo-Scene though, was that it landed me my first job. In January of 2000, I was hired as the webmaster for a software standards organization in Boston, within a week of graduating from college (I had finished during the summer of 1999, but had to wait until the January 2000 ceremony... which was ok, because I got to shake Ted Koppel's hand as I crossed the stage). By the end of January, 2000, I had moved from the place I shared with my brother on the north side of Chicago, just off Loyola's campus, to my two bedroom apartment in Milford, MA. I spent the next 8 months working for the Object Management Group (which, until it recently sold it to Yahoo for $80k, held the coveted URL, www.omg.com... it still owns www.omg.org), in Needham, MA.

OMG MeetingAfter the guy who hired me left for General Motors, I decided I would start looking for a General of my own. In August of 2000 I was hired by General Electric to be a project manager in the ecommerce group of their medical imaging business (GE Medical Systems, now known as GE Healthcare). I spent a total of about two and a half years at GE, getting laid off once, brought back on in another business unit as a contractor, and then effectively laid off again at the end of my contract. Thankfully, before the second layoff, I had already started the gears turning on doing what it was I had been planning on doing all along. I was going to become a lawyer.
Chapter 3:
Law School, a.k.a., Institutional Masochism

My career aspirations have been fairly steady throughout my life, and I can pretty much recall each step in that evolution. When I was really little, I mean, crudely-drawn-pictures-on-the-fridge little, I wanted to be an astronaut. That lasted a year or two, until I got really into ocean exploration (the idea of it that is, as a third grader I wasn't actually hanging out with Jacques Cousteau (at this time it should be noted that I'm writing this without the aid of a spellchecker)). This stage in my life coincided with my family's first trip to Florida. For months leading up to our vacation I scoured all the books I could find that dealt with seashells, fish, and other sealife. I knew then that I would someday become an oceanographer. That lasted about two years, until it became apparent to this world-weary 10 year old, that I would never become rich this way.

So what was a mercenary little kid like me to do? Of course, I could become a doctor or a lawyer! Both were fairly respected occupations (I didn't really realize at the time how much most people disliked lawyers), and both paid fabulously well, right? I kept my options open until my freshman year at Carl Sandburg High School. That was when I was tapped to play one of the two defense attorneys at the trial of Napoleon's accused murderer (no way am I going to attempt to spell that guy's name without spellcheck... it probably wouldn't know what to do with it anyway). After my honors world history class voted him not guilty, and I received a glowing review from one of the parents who came to watch, I knew I was going to go to law school someday.

RomeI entered college as a political science major and never once changed from that course. I was dead set on taking the LSAT and going to law school, that is until I spent a couple of weeks in Rome with a bunch of law students during the summer between my sophomore and junior years. I was there taking an accellerated summer class, and they were there for some law school study-abroad program. I had always wanted to study at Loyola's Rome Center, but because of my volleyball schedule, I couldn't take a full semester off to live in Italy. When I had the chance to go just for a few weeks in the summer, I jumped at it.

It was hanging out with these law students that made me rethink my reasons for going to law school. It wasn't that I disliked the guys, on the contrary, for the most part they were more fun to hang around with than most of my undergrad classmates. It was what they had told me that turned me off. Tops among these nuggets of truth was "do not go to law school if you are only interested in making a lot of money, there are far easier ways to make money." Really? That's all I needed to hear. As a materialistic 20 year old, if there was an easier path to money, I was going to take it! This is, in part, what fueled my desire to try my hand at making my riches through the Internet. Neo-Scene would be created the next summer, both classmates (as well as my future wife) having all met in Rome during my second summer abroad.

 Have you ever wanted something for so long, that you've come to realize that you don't even really know why you want it? That was me at 20. I'd wanted to be a lawyer for so long, that I forgot why. All I was interested in at that point was becoming a highly paid guy in a suit with a nice office. What those law students gave me was a wake-up call, and a chance to mature a bit before finally going through with the law school thing. I'm glad I did, because I guarantee that if I had gone straight to law school without first taking those three years to grow in "the real world," I would most likely have dropped out after my first year.

First YearAfter realizing that this was actually something I really wanted, I set the plans in motion. I signed up for the LSAT, took an LSAT prep course, started getting information on schools, and preparing to sell the house if necessary. I aced the LSAT on my first attempt, which was good because my undergraduate GPA wasn't going to open any doors for me on its own. The next step was to get into a good school. Having spent so much time in California during my various volleyball travels (both at the club level and at Loyola), I fell in love with Southern California. Because of that, I decided that I would focus primarily on schools in LA and San Diego. When I got into Loyola Marymount, it was a no brainer, I was headed to another Loyola.

We moved out to California in a two-car convoy, my dad and my brother driving Sue's car, packed with most of the things we'd need to tide us over until the movers got out there (little did we know it would take them almost two months to get out there), and Sue and I driving my little Honda Insight hybrid with Bingley in the back. We pulled into California on August 5, 2003, and for the next three years I endured that which only another law student could appreciate.
Chapter 4:
Entering The Working World, Again.

For three days at the end of July, 2006, I spent my mornings and afternoons at table 1, chair 2, in the Ontario Convention Center in Ontario, CA... along with about three or four thousand of my closest friends. While I understood that the outcome of the bar exam would pretty much determine my future, I actually enjoyed the bar exam process (the studying, etc) far more than I enjoyed anything about law school. This is probably why I ended up passing with a high enough score to waive out of the second day of the Illinois exam when I took it the following February.

For the year prior to graduating and taking the bar exam, I was employed as a file clerk and sometimes law clerk in the Orange County office of Sedgwick, a San Francisco-based firm of about 400 attorneys. After taking the bar I returned as a full-time law clerk and worked primarily with the land use group. The partner in charge of that group had promised me a position as an associate as soon as I passed the bar exam. On Friday, November 17, 2006, at 5:00pm, I learned that I had passed the bar. The following Monday I asked the partner what we needed to do next.

The next few days were filled with closed-door meetings with everyone on the land use team, except me. I was sure they were discussing bringing me on board as an associate, so I was just the teeniest bit shocked when the managing partner called a meeting to let us know that the land use group was leaving for Bingham McCutchen. I decided NOT to raise my hand to ask if that included me. I didn't need to. Immediately after the meeting, the partner in charge of the land use group came into my office, with tears in his eyes at least, to let me know that he had lobbied to bring me with to Bingham, but that they would not hire a first year.

With my position on the land use team gone, and the firm scrambling to find work for the other attorneys left behind, I was obviously a low priority for them. Thankfully, the partner who had just left me high and dry soon set me up with an interview at the firm where one of his good friends was a partner. I started with Hart, King & Coldren about a month after I passed the bar and stayed there for a little over a year. I moved to my next firm, Assayag Mauss, in the spring of 2008, and I would still be there if I we had not decided to move back to Chicago. Assayag Mauss was the only firm where I actually enjoyed going into the office. Everyone, including the managing partners, felt more like family than co-workers and bosses. On July 1, 2008 though, the seed was planted (actually, it had been planted 9 months prior), with the birth of our daughter.

Elizabeth Darcy Pyrz was born a little past 1pm on July 1, 2008, and it soon became clear that if we kept her in California, thousands of miles from her nearest family members, we would be doing her a severe disservice. Soon after her first birthday, after watching her interact with her grandparents who had flown out for the event, we decided to move back to Chicago. On August 5, 2009 (six years, exactly, after we had arrived in California), I quit my job at Assayag Mauss and we began planning our move back to Chicago.

FamilyWe arrived back in Chicago at the end of September, 2009, and by the end of the year I was hired by Polsinelli Shughart, a Kansas City-based firm of roughly 600 attorneys (as of December 2011) to work in their Chicago office. This was definitely the largest gamble I have ever made, quitting a job in the middle of the worst economy in decades, but it definitely paid off.

 This is far from the end of the story, but it is probably further than you were planning on reading anyway. If you've made it this far, thank you for being interested enough in reading all of this. Someday, after the next, big, life event, I might update this page. Until then, pick one of the following:

1) Take care of yourselves, and each other;
2) Good night and good luck;
3) Keep on travellin'!; or
4) Stay classy, San Diego.