Gunners
Everybody who's been to law school knows these people...
Kevin was what law students call a "gunner," meaning he ran his mouth off like a machine gun through every class. Law schools still attempt to emulate the Socratic Method used in The Paper Chase. The professor stands before the class, selecting students at random to provide "outlines" of lengthy, incredibly dull cases the student was supposed to read the night before. The student, in turn, is supposed to recite the legal issues in the case while the professor peppers him with questions designed to trip him up.
That's how it's supposed to work, in theory. In reality, most students bring laptops with outlines on them, or casebook Cliff's Notes published by a company called Emmanuel's. If they're unfortunate enough to be called on by the professor - ripped from out of a daydream or a hangover - they pitch back a clumsy recitation of the crib notes on the case. It's not much different than standing in open court, making a real argument, where most lawyers don't half the answers to the questions the judge is asking. But if the process is supposed to train a student to "prepare, prepare, prepare," well, it's pretty much a farce. The average semi-intelligent student sleeps through class, crams at the end of the semester and only really shows up for exams.
In the vacuum of class participation are the gunners, a subset of student who came to the law looking for purpose. The gunner reads the actual cases. He reads a treatise on the cases. He reads biographies of the judges who wrote the opinions and analyzes every issue, from every angle. Armed with endless niggling observations and more interpretations of any given case than have been cast on Shakespeare, he raises his hand in response to every question the professor asks, debating his every point, finishing his sentences and volleying back his every closing comment with "Yes, professor, but what if...?"
This was Kevin. He couldn't help his obnoxiousness. It was unconscious. He'd thrown himself into the gunner's world - a black hole of endless dicta-parsing and mind-numbing midnight arguments with his fellow Trekkies about obscure Supreme Court dissents and the legislative intent behind constitutional amendments. He must have thought knowing everything, throwing every fiber of his being into the concept of law studentry and soaking up every irrelevant detail of every case we studied would render him the world's greatest legal mind. Maybe he assumed the brain was as simple as a bicep - more curls, more strength. My guess is he just wanted to have something to be, other than what he was.
The Perils of Waking and Baking
No, it's not a good idea.
Of all the "office highs," "waking and baking" is the worst. My buddies Les and Martin had been ardent fans of the therapy, and when either of them saw me out, guzzling bourbons and bitching about how much I hated being in the office, it was always the same proselytizing... "You're way too stressed. You need to bake before you go in. It makes the mundane shit interesting. The work becomes a game." To me it seemed a horrible idea and terrible waste of dope. I couldn't blast Traffic or Zeppelin in my office or swap favorite scenes from Trainspotting with my secretary. And what if a partner roped me into some awful meeting? "Hey, __________, can you sit in on a strategy meeting in the Rocco's Industrial Meats case? You know... The one where the guy claims he lost an ear due to an improperly designed conveyor belt. We need a new set of eyes on it." The cost/benefit ratio was terrible. Yes, the "wake and bake" did work, and yes, it could make the morning amusing. But when it failed, it made an already annoying situation fifty times worse.
"Hey, can you do me a favor and write a reply to this motion?" Angela, a partner from down the hall appeared in my doorway a little after 9:30. "I'm getting ready for an arbitration and it needs to be done a.s.a.p."
"Huh?" I'd just been settling in, flipping through the newspaper and reading emails. I wasn't Cheech and Chong stoned or anything, just comfortable, happy - in that placid zone where the idea of even getting up to take a piss seemed like too much work to bother. Oh, please, please, let this be a joke. I almost cried when I saw her shuffling legal papers in her hands.
"It's self explanatory." She laid the papers on my desk. "Thanks. I really appreciate this."
I read the words on the pages, but none of it made sense. The text was just a pile of geometric black designs on a white background. I processed the prose but the meaning didn't register. Why now? Why does every day here have to be torture?
Staring at the motion, I immediately flashed back to Business Law 101, a college course I'd taken years before. For one reason or another, a friend and I decided to smoke a spliff before writing a presentation we were to deliver the next morning. I remembered how typing the damned thing seemed to take forever, and how awful the text had been. How I stood in the front of the auditorium the next morning, struggling to deliver it to the class, stumbling through all the typos, run-on sentences and pointless, incomplete phrases, looking at the professor's frown and thinking, Shit, I'm going to have to beg this fucker for the 'Gentleman's C.'1
Some people can write just fine when they're baked, some better than they can sober. These are people who've smoked enough that they can do just about anything in that condition, from taking LSATs to skeet shooting to giving a best man's speech at a wedding. A roommate of mine in college used to rip bong hits before exams, explaining that he needed "to be in [his] natural state to do well." Normally, I'd say these people are mad, but dope's different, unlike any other drug. Nobody admits it, but there are people who can all but perform surgery stoned. For some it just seems to regulate the mind, like a sort of black market Prozac.
I am not one of these people. There was no way I could punch through a legal argument with a stitch of clarity in that condition. Still, as a matter of general decency, I couldn't leave Angela with nothing when she needed a hand. Of all the lawyers on the floor, she was the nicest and most decent of the bunch. I chugged a couple coffees and whipped together the best argument I could. It might have been coherent, or it might have been gibberish. It might have been both or none or a lot of other things but I'll never know because I didn't stick around to find out. As soon as it was done I got the hell out of the building, to avoid having to run into Angela again. And she never followed up with me, which I took as a Gentleman's C.
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1 It was a well known fact that some professors would convert a 'D' or 'F,' to 'C' if you groveled hard enough and promised it would never happen again. You usually had to be a senior and demonstrate anything under a 'C' would imperil your chances of graduation, but I'd heard of it working for sophomores and juniors.
Posted by PhilaLawyer at 8:23 AM