Dragline: Why you got to go and say fifty eggs for? Why not thirty-five or thirty-nine?
Luke: I thought it was a nice round number.
- Cool Hand Luke (1967)
I pulled the foie gras from the top of my steak, hooked it on the end of my fork and flipped into the Koi pond. The fish were on it before the splash, trained by years of drunken honeymooners throwing bread crumbs into the water. Outfielders centering under a pop fly, they'd had it in their sights from the moment it left our table.
"Why did you do that? They won't eat that." Lisa was right. When it hit the water, the orange black and white fish scattered from it like a tear gas bomb.
"I don't know why they put that shit on steaks. It's organ meat, like scrapple." I pointed my fork at Lisa. "I never ate that shit in college when that crack whore cook tried to serve it to me and I'm not eating it now."
"You're confusing foie gras with pate."
"Same thing. One's ground up, one's not."
Lisa leaned in. "Talk a little lower. People are right next to us." I glanced to my right and caught a plump man in madras shorts and his wife - a dead ringer for "Amy" from "Bosom Buddies" - pretending to talk while peaking at us out of the corners of their eyes. As soon as they realized I was spying on them spying on me, they darted their gazes away. I leaned across our table and grabbed Lisa's champagne. "If it wasn't French, that dog food would be next to head cheese and pig's feet in the deli."
"Got it. Loud and clear." Lisa craned her neck to draw our waiter's attention.
"It's the Absolut Vodka of entrails... Pure marketing. They ruin the steak's taste just so they can say 'Here's a French delicacy'." I kept rolling.
"Which perfectly explains the bottle of imported mineral water you ordered."
I wasn't angry about foie gras. I was angry about a message I'd received from the office. I was angry because I realized that when I got back to work in a few days, I was facing a blinding shitrain. I wasn't just going to have to work, I was going to have work insanely hard, on a case as weak as it was massive. I'd played a nasty procedural card with an opponent in the desperate hope it would squeeze a settlement. The opponent hadn't come back with money. Instead, while I sat loaded in the sand on an island, the opponent filed a motion with the court - a motion to force my client to put his cards on the table. If they won, my client's bluff was called and our case was done. They'd try the case, and tear through our claims like Grant through Richmond.
A little background... Every lawyer is assigned, from time to time, a lead zeppelin of a case - an impossible patchwork of claims as Byzantine as they are weak. There are usually at least four or five of these cases floating around an office at any given time, often among the oldest cases in the firm's inventory. The client's dead, a drunk or a congenital liar. The evidence is spotty, the legal theories contradictory and the physical files a compost heap of yellowing paper, empty folders, busted binders and boxes of disorganized paper, categorized only with the black marker notations "September 1995" or "March 1998 Doc Review: Tampa." The last letter from an opponent, clerk or anyone who knew anything about the case is dated 10 months ago. A call to your opponent's firm elicits "He doesn't work here anymore. Can I direct you to someone else?" The thing's been passed around the office like a crack whore, facilitating tens of thousands of billable hours over the years for a dozen associates who've since left the firm. With each departure of an associate, it finds a new home, and every subsequent adoption's the same - a partner hands the festering mess to its new babysitter with tepid cheerleading about what a good case it would be "if it were just on the right track." "We'd like you to move this case forward. We need to get it resolved." Translation: "Maybe you're the alchemist who'll turn this septic run-off to diamonds. See if you can raise Lazarus."
Lazarus in this case was a leasing company we'll call "Office Data Systems." I won't explain its business in detail because it's dull. Suffice it to say, the company leased all sorts of electronic hardware to a Fortune 500 company we'll call "Great Big Co." under a multi-year contract, before a series of disputes with Great Big Co. culminating in Great Big Co.'s refusal to honor its contract drove Office Data Systems nearly out of business. ODS' owner was wild Greek fireplug named George. George never watched his outfit. Their offices were littered with boxes of old contracts, marketing and promotional posters. The warehouses were littered with racks of new equipment and computer parts mixed among old hardware obsolete half a decade. How they delivered equipment to or serviced any of their contracts I never figured out. The business ran crimson in every direction. My firm filed an action against GBC alleging its refusal to honor contractual obligations had destroyed ODS' business. The Complaint was glorious - tight, nasty and direct. If you didn't know George, it was scary. If you knew George, believing it required a WMD-In-Iraq suspension of disbelief.
The case had moved at the speed of tar recently because my predecessor on it, Paul, a trustafarian who'd gone to law school out of a combination boredom and pressure to keep up family appearances, and who'd been phoning his job in for months, demanded hundreds of thousands of documents from GBC. GBC ignored his requests. Eventually Paul came to his senses and quit practicing. The garbage scow of a file landed in my office, with the directive to follow up on his document requests. I did, and GBC answered, with 50 boxes of ancient paper. Just figuring out which boxes contained what information took me days. Between the other cases I had and what seemed a never ending merry-go-round of Red Bull, Stoli, mushrooms, skunk weed and coke weekends, I was fried past repair. Monday mornings I'd sit in my office, cold, clammy and nervous, staring at the computer screen - through the emails, through the drafts of briefs, through the letters and pop-up windows from porn sites and Yahoo's "News of the Obscure" page - right straight into the gleaming iridescent pixels. I'd stare at the grid of thousands of tiny fluorescent blocks and think of absolutely nothing. Ping! Ping! Ping! The emails were ceaseless. The sweats would come over me, five minutes or so of nausea a clip, then dissipate. Every now and again my secretary would drop a letter into an in box at the corner of my desk. I'd smile, say thanks and resume my meditation. Trying to organize a conference room of evidence for a monster case like ODS v. GBC was sadomasochistic toil for a teetotaler with a hard on for the job. For me it was inconceivable.
Worse than all that, George's case bored me and had the stink of doom about it. Nine out of ten of them bore you, and 40% are or ought to be losers. Even judged on that cynic's scale, the action was a real Titanic. I thought demanding depositions of GBC president and CFO, but I realized, if I asked for one, my opponent, a huge regional law firm, would wake up, realize they'd been sleeping on a revenue source and start drowning me with paper. Demanding a warehouse full of documents won't wake up a client the size of GBC or its lawyers, but demanding the highest ranking executives' testimony would. And if the other side deposed George - if they caught wind of our star witness - they'd never settle. We'd walk into a firing squad at trial. I'd have to really learn the case - weeks of knuckling down, reading, contemplating and organizing dry as dirt contracts, amendments to contracts, emails, letters and invoices... all to lose. I'd sooner put a pistol in my mouth.
The only way to win this case was surprise. We had to get the case set for trial in a posture where the other side had no idea of just how badly we were bluffing. This was a Gordian Knot. They only way I could get the case to trial was by deposing executives from GBC, and if I did that, GBC would in turn request depositions from ODS. There'd be no way for me to hide George. Luckily for me, the case was in a county where both sides could take as much time as they needed to get the case ready, the sort where the Court doesn't set the case for trial until the parties send a letter to the Judge asking for a trial date. Faced with these challenges, I did the only thing I could - let the file gather cobwebs and pretended it didn't exist. It was summer. I was getting married in October. If everything went right, I wouldn't even be a lawyer after the wedding. The garbage scow would get passed along to some other suit...
I actually believed I'd somehow be able to quit after the wedding. There was no plan, just this belief an event that life-altering would dislodge me from the fear of quitting... That a light I'd otherwise never see would shine a Way Out. I was in love. I had money. People were talking about a "new phase" in my life, chucking words like "wonderful" and "amazing" around. When you're getting hitched you're in a good place. When you're getting hitched and burning through your off hours in a haze of booze and drugs, life's the Champagne Room. I figured, in my corroded, deluded mind, that between the cash gifts from the wedding, which would give me a buffer, and the seismic mind-shift I'd feel after I said "I do," I'd walk away from law like there was no other option. It was sheer slacker fantasy.
But what option did I have? I didn't drive any of the circumstances around me my entire career. I cruised through school in a Walter Mitty fog, daydreaming about jamming my hands up the skirts around me, until something forced me to move. I spent most of grade school in the principal's office but when it came time to take the test for high school, I pulled off the numbers I needed. High school was the same, but I did enough on the SATs to get into a decent college. When circumstances forced work on me, I'd deal. Nothing special - just enough to get the "B" that always gets you to the next rung. Where exactly I was climbing I had no idea. Generally I knew, of course, but that concept scared me shaky. I remember watching specials about Nostradamus on HBO when I was maybe 10 or 11 - those vivid dramatizations of a nuclear war between some unnamed Persian dictator and the United States that would end society as we know it. They were supposed to be scary, but the date of the Apocalypse - sometime in the 1990s, seemed fine to me. That was when I'd be entering the work force. Living like Mad Max beat being a 9 to 5 swivel chair jockey.
Nostradamus was wrong; Revelations never came to pass. Orson Welles sold jug wine on television and was buried in a piano box a few years later. Mad Max made a half a billion dollars on a horror flick about Jesus. I plodded up the ladder of Whitebread Success, taking the next step as someone or something pushed me from behind... Reactive Management 101. Why not? What else was I going to do? You know a kid in his early 20s who can tell you what he wants to do with the rest of his life? Correction: You know a kid in his early 20s you'd like to have a drink with who knows exactly what he wants to do with the rest of his life? My father never minced words on the issue. "You're not likable enough for sales and you're no good at science. Law's about it for you."
Law seemed a proper fit at first. Nobody procrastinates like lawyers. I've seen attorneys stall the signing of settlement agreements for months just because they couldn't get to the painful task of reading, correcting and negotiating drafts of the thing. I've watched them reschedule depositions of important witnesses half a dozen times, often at the last second, because they couldn't bring themselves to read a box of oppressively dull documents and memos to prepare for it. I've personally asked for at least 40 extensions of court deadlines just because I could not stand to read through the other side's motion. I'd look at the first two or three pages and then, inexplicably, as though I'd blacked out for a moment and come to, find myself reading the Wall Street Journal under my desk.
Laziness becomes standard operating procedure. Every day a new mountain of gibberish - most of it angry, bloated missives from opponents - arrives on your desk. You have to respond to it all of it with letters aggressive enough to look like you care, 90% of them refusing to do something they want not because it could damage your client's case, but because it involves a lot of work. After a while, the "fuck it" and "ignore it" default switches in your head override that Protestant Work Ethic they beat into you as a kid. Things pile up and the backlog grows terminal. You stop pushing cases and start putting out fires. You can get away with it, knowing all the slippery little tricks that allow you to handle a bible sized motion from your opponent in a matter of hours. A file of minor missed deadlines - the sorts of things a green lawyer bucking for partner would never let slide - piles up in your head, weighing on your grey matter. You'll get to them tomorrow. It's the 29th and you've got to fill out 15 time sheets before the end of the month (while figuring out how to bill for the 10 hours you'll spend filling out those time sheets). And your buddy Mike just sent you a slide show of this impossible blonde... Silver dollar nipples and a coin slot pussy. Shit, it's 5:30 already?
I left George's case in the closet, paying it enough attention to keep it alive - showing busywork on the case to the partners, but not pushing it forward. Then suddenly, at an office meeting a couple months before my wedding, the managing partner, Evan, booms across the marble conference table - "What's the status on the ODS case? When do we get a trial date?"
"Well uh, there's lots of discovery to be done and--"
"Get it listed for trial. Get whatever discovery you still need finished now."
You didn't question Evan Miller. You did what you were told. Even was 6'2, an ex-college football player and one of the most objectively intimidating people I'd ever met. Evan didn't fire people; he pushed them into therapy. It was easy to understand why the average young lawyer would be scared silly by the man. Evan stomped the halls like a bull, head down, staring straight forward, processing one thing and one thing alone - how he was going to gore whatever lawyer was up against him. If you got in his face with a fluff question... If you forced him to raise his head and address some queer academic shit... You got the horns. If you couldn't judge the man's violent body language - the equivalent of the day glow neon strobe light pulsing "Leave Me Alone" over his head, you deserved it. And when you got it, you got it in public. Evan didn't close office doors before he ripped people. He'd do it in firm meetings. He'd do it on speakerphone. He'd do it in a crowded hallway, in front of anybody passing by. And he did it loud. Evan didn't know a whisper. He didn't bother with doublespeak or nuance in the office. His voice was a staccato baritone and it clipped out of his mouth like automatic rifle bursts. If you had shit for brains, it scared you to sweats and arrhythmia.
But if you knew Evan like I knew Evan, he wasn't intimidating at all. He was wildly volatile, but in no way the deranged madman portrayed by so many associates. In fact, he was saner than most lawyers. Evan was a true Personality, a larger than life P.T. Barnum of sorts. Evan probably should have been a salesman or business owner, but through some queer quirk, some terminal addiction to bare-knuckle competition left over from his college sports days, he landed in law school. The man clearly loved the stage. He loved to carry the room with a story and could bullshit endlessly, charmingly - warmly - for hours. I first met him on a Summer afternoon in 2002. I walked into his office, sat across from him in a pinstripe suit, playing the stiff young drone. He smiled shook my hand and laughed. "Find a seat." Boxes of papers littered the floor. His conference table was littered with food wrappers. When he pulled his feet out from behind it to face me, I noticed he wasn't wearing shoes.
Ten minutes in we were swearing back and forth. He asked me what I wanted. I told him I wanted juice - something wild, reckless and stimulating. I'd had my share of academicians and functionaries... I wanted to fight. Years later Evan told me he saw a lot of himself in me at that moment. The feeling was mutual. I understood him in seconds. Some would say Evan pushed the envelope. Some would say he walked the edge, taking on futile crusades and defending the hopeless. A few would call him infuriating, and an example of everything that makes the practice of law the ulcer inducing gauntlet it's become. Maybe they're right... None of that mattered to me. Evan's motives were pure. He wasn't in it for money.
Two of my close friends have taken LSD on airplanes; one on a trip from New York to London, one on a flight from Los Angeles to DC. On its face, the idea's so wrong, so flat out stupid and pointlessly risky that discussing it as anything but a wild academic hypothetical seems impossible. Trapped in a speeding tube, doing 400 miles per hour at 30,000 feet, there's no place throw a Frisbee, stare at the trees or chain smoke. You can't walk away from the group and find your Grip in a nearby field if things get too queer. You can't ask the stewardess to jam "Glad/Freedom Rider" over the PA. If the trip goes dark, you're literally riding it out, among two hundred people inn exactly the same physical circumstance as you, yet every bit as alone as you'd be trapped in solitary confinement. You might start thinking about the physics at work around you - the formulas that keep the behemoth aloft. The difference between you and John Lithgow's screaming lunatic from The Twilight Zone Movie could be as thin as the calming fingers of the quadruple Jim Beam you're demanding from the stewardess. "And two Coors as well... thank you..." There's no turning to the person next to you. He might be an Evangelical Pastor from the bowels of Missouri for all you know. He'd see the pulsing veins in your hands and the fish eye pupils. He'd register your wrongness in an instant. And what if you met his glance by accident, and in that ugly moment, you were forced to break the ice? What would you say? "Did you know those wings out there can bend so far the tips can touch above the plane? They'll never snap. Never." He'd slam on the Help button like a carnival Whack-A-Mole game... The stewardesses would be hovering over you in moments, the Jesus Junkie barking and clawing to jump over you into the aisle. "He's a terrrurrist... Talking about the wings spanning! The wings! Sweet Jesus!" You'd hear a click behind your right ear. "Air Marshall, sir. Please raise your hands." They'd have you in the back of the plane, in plastic zipper cuffs, in minutes.
My friends didn't face those concerns - they took the trips with their parents. One flew to DC with his father, the other to London with his mother. The experiences were near identical:
LA > DC:I went drink for drink with my father until he passed out, somewhere around Kansas. Then I shot the shit with the stewardesses. They told me I drank the First Class section out of Maker's Mark. I don't know if that's true, but I can tell you they were some real cool chicks. They fed me those little plastic bottles by the handful. I don't think they'd do that anymore. It's a goddamn shame what those crazy Muslims did...
NYC > London:
I got bored and ate the thing about an hour into the flight. I ordered bourbon and cokes all the way across the water. My mother kept giving me shit about drinking too much. It was kind of funny... I forgot the time difference thing. We landed in Heathrow and I was still tensed up from the strychnine. I demanded we go to a bar. She freaked out. I didn't realize it was morning there.
I spoke to my mother on acid once. It was awful. I was outside, standing in the sun with beer, throwing a disc and grooving to some Wilson Pickett disk. An asshole acquaintance walked up to me in a parking lot while I was hanging with some friends, watching Frisbees float around. He handed me a cordless phone with no comment.
"Hello? Hello? I've been trying to reach you all day." She sounded like a female Darth Vader, about to give me a Torquemada cross examination. "Where are you? You sound so--"
Scratching the microphone holes to feign interference, I pretended I couldn't make her out. "I can't, uh--(scratching) hear you..." I gave some choppy responses and cut things off before she had a chance to reply. "I'll call... you... back... later. Phone... broken... go... now."
I walked to my car, placed the handset inside, locked the door and threw my keys in the grass. Talking to a parent in those straits was disturbing; sitting next to one in an inescapable cylinder for the length of a workday is unfathomable.
When I heard their stories, I had the same response for both... "Why?"
International Flier: "It just seemed like a good idea. Nine hours is a long time. Gives the mind something to do. I wouldn't do it again. You get free drinks up front, and it's pleasant, but not being able to smoke is awful."
Domestic Flier: "Free drinks, brother. I wanted to make sure I got my money's worth."
For some people - probably most people - First Class is reward enough on its own. It's a pricey ticket, the rarest air in commercial travel. People hock years of frequent flier miles, piled up on arduous business trips all over the country, to park their ample asses in those beefy leather chairs for second honeymoons to the Bahamas. Lawyers chew their pens and fiddle with their Blackberries, watching the cattle who don't have clients paying $1,200.00 to get them from Philadelphia to Phoenix pass to the coach section. Well heeled upper management types - the guys wearing a blazer, button down and loafers without socks as comfort clothes for a long flight - stuff their noses in Business Weeks, Forbes or office reports, dreaming they could afford a NetJets account. Still, even for those guys, First Class is comfort, and for the sort of person who keeps score, it's a sign you're ahead of a lot of Joneses.
Then there are those who want to really get Their Money's Worth. No matter how cushy the surroundings, no matter how much success, whatever they're doing can always be better, bigger or have more risk to it, if for no other reason than to wring some emotional upheaval - a tactile reminder you're alive - out of the haze of routine. If you're not content with as many movies as you can watch and free drinks as you can shovel in your face, brought to you by a wait staff never more than 30 seconds away, chances are you'll never be satisfied with anything. Evan wouldn't chomp acid on a Cross-Continental flight, but he was on that continuum of thought. Being the most feared partner in the firm, having the six-figure car, the imperial offices and the fawning frightened associates kissing has ass like a Roman governor weren't enough. He wanted to be ringmaster in his own professional circus. A simple paying case was good; he was a businessman like any other lawyer... But where he really got his rocks off was trying knife-fights - brutal cases where both sides deserved to lose... The sort where trials were silly formalities because nobody was going to pay anybody anyway, no matter what some fucking judge said. Philadelphia's littered with these cases - shady start-ups stealing investors' money, scam artists doctoring books to swindle banks, lawyers pushing their partners out to steal their fees... the wages of a shriveling economy in a union town hemorrhaging business. Evan lived for them.
To be continued...
Posted by PhilaLawyer at 1:03 PM