The Costanza Method - Part 4 - February 16, 2007

"An emperor confides his trust in National Soldiers, not in mercenaries."

- Napoleon Bonaparte

"What else?" Margaret made a note on a pad in her lap.

"I'm dead if I stay here. I'm a litigator. I can't go in house and I don't think this firm will last. It's running after regional clients and this city's dead. It's economically done. I see a bunch of partners siphoning the profits off the top and waiting out retirement."

"What do you mean?"

"What I said. There's no future here."

"In what regard?"

"Other than the Big Two, all the firms here are scratching and clawing for whatever they can from the regional market, and it's slim pickins.¹ There are one, maybe two hundred or so lawyers in this town with all the business. Everybody else kills themselves to make $200k a year when they're 45. You'd do better on a dollar per hour and quality of life basis as a plumber. Staying a lawyer here makes no economic sense."

"Wait a minute," Margaret stood and walked to the door. "I want you to talk to someone." Twenty minutes later a partner named Terrance was sitting across from me. Terrance was the head of some important committee in the firm. He was a 50ish business and employment litigator known for directness. He didn't "lawyer" anything; you knew exactly what he thought. I had no idea why he was meeting with me. In fact, I had no idea why any of them were meeting with me. I was leaving - what was the point?

"Can you tell Terry what you told me?" Margaret asked. "All of it?" I could feel sweat saturating into armpit stains. I gave him a half-assed capsule summary of my rant. "There will always be a place in the market for good lawyers." Terry deadpanned back. "A good lawyer is a lawyer with business. Service Partners are indentured servants, and the clients get more savvy every day. The rates are going up, but the realization is going down. Clients are shopping by price; it's an actuarial game. We're going to be like accountants in 15 years."

"That's a tad cynical, isn't it?" Terrance quipped.

It was cynical. Law is a cynical business. The process of building, hiring, feeding and wringing profits out of young lawyers is among the most craven systems ever invented. First you seek people who behave like computers. You want talent, but you want it in a limited form. A single 150 IQ with an endless reservoir of Protestant Work Ethic beats a half dozen courtroom prodigies every day. You want a hungry, bright Believer who'll work like a dog and consciously avoid asking all the questions that would drive a seer to leave... Drones with the Oedipus gene bred out of them - the sort who'd never have the balls to steal clients and start their own firm. You need kids who know nothing about the business of law and don't see past what looks like the biggest salary anyone under 30 could have.

If you manage this human capital the right way, over their eight year career at your firm, you get 16,000 billable hours out of an associate. At an average rate of $300.00 per hour, that's enough to buy the biggest ego a swell beach house. These kids will bill nights and weekends and lose their minds when you give them that $15,000.00 Christmas bonus. If they want prestige, you can give them a title like "Member" or "Non-Equity Partner." This will stall a few from asking about being made an actual partner for a few years. "Partner" is for closers, and closers have business. The ones that don't like being capped in the "non-equity" or "member" pools will leave. They'll join boutique firms, but you don't have to worry about them stealing business. If you've kept them in the office enough over the years, they won't have that skill.

For every lawyer that leaves, a cheaper replacement tumbles out of law school and fills the void in the chain. This is how it goes, one year to the next - an assembly line of naive overeducated cattle coming in the front door while their cash-fattened predecessors get fed to the killing floor. The offal find themselves closing in on 40, married, two kids in private school, mortgage in the burbs and no marketable skill set other than a headful of procedural arguments and obscure research.

"Cynical? I've volunteered for court work since I've been here because I assumed I'd be out on my ass someday and need skills. I learned the business model in about five months." I stopped to catch my breath. Terry flashed a Dick Cheney grin. "How is your new firm going to be so much better?"

I didn't have a clever answer and my energy was fading. "It's not. It'll just be different. There's no thought to changing anything here. Just bill, bill, bill. Nobody stops to think about anything because everybody's trying to bill every second of every day. And I'm not even getting into the unethical shit. When I leave, I'll have two weeks of doing nothing to recharge my brain (I almost laughed saying this, considering the "recharge" I had in mind was a detox). Then I'll get two months to learn the ropes at the new place, which will be like another vacation. I don't know where I'll end up ultimately, but I have to get out of here."

Switching jobs is really wonderful. It's one of the few perks of being a young lawyer these days. Nobody takes you to task for job jumping anymore. Save the congenitally disturbed, it's universally understood no one enjoys the practice and we're all mercenaries. I don't find law dehumanizing or evil like so many of my colleagues. I find it equal parts tedious and dull, and nothing else. Which would be fine, if the people made the job tolerable. Litigation draws assholes like a mosquito lamp - hordes who make their lives splicing minutiae and bickering over parliamentary procedure. They eat, sleep, breath it and brag about how much they work at it.

In a society as technologically advanced as ours, in a Capitalist system where the ostensible goal is working smart, what can you call a person who runs around bragging about the endless hours he works and records in a tablet for his money? Does anyone think Mark Cuban lies awake at night, racked with guilt?

Practicing law for anything less than the Boy Band Money a few top rainmakers and the class action pirates pull down is irrational. I've ridden the morning train into Philadelphia. I've seen the 60ish partner hunched over in his beige raincoat, reading over deposition transcripts and correcting legal memoranda, squeezing every last billable moment out of his day. I've watched him park the BMW, trudge through the puddles, the cuffs on the pants of his blue Brooks Brothers suit soaked in October rain, seeking out a fellow traveler waiting on the platform.

"Hey Bob. How's that case you have with Phil Pressler going?"

"Good. Good. Judge gave us a favorable ruling on the motions to keep out some of their damages expert's testimony."

"Good. Good. That's Judge Schanker, right?"

"Yep. Yep. Schanker."

"Good Judge. Good Judge."

"What's in the briefcase today?"

"Time sheets. Lotsa time sheets."

"Oh, yeh. End of the month again. Good luck with that."

Repeat every 24 hours, five days a week... For 40 years.

The old bastard probably convinced himself long ago that he actually enjoyed pushing paper. Maybe that's the only way to live through the deadening repetition. I envy the ability to make the inhuman palatable. I wonder if the skill's innate or learned. I also wonder if it really holds through life, or if it works like a some tax deferment strategy... If as the man on the train lays dying, looking back on a life's legacy of inane arguments and debates, miles of revisions of procedural motions and warehouses full of drafts and redrafts of agreements and mountains of time sheets, the reality of thousands of wasted hours slaps him in the face?

Terrance fiddled with his glasses, then stared me in the eye. "How would you like to work in the ________ department? We have a need for someone like you. I'll give you a $______ package." Terry's comment didn't register for a few seconds. I'd been concentrating on a searing pain in my stomach and calculating how quickly I could bolt to the store off the lobby to get a Ginger Ale. Then the figures crystallized. A twenty grand raise - more than my new job paid - all for telling a partner his firm had no future.

I felt like Morgan Freeman at the end of "The Shawshank Redemption," where, after 20 years of polite requests followed with rejections, he tells off the parole board and is promptly granted parole. I'd worked my ass off for two and a half years for menial bonuses. I'd smiled and worked harder every time I'd gotten a baseless criticism. I'd taken the just-above-cost-of-living raises without complaint. I did exactly what I was supposed to do. But it wasn't until I let them know I understood The Game that they respected me.

The problem with the counteroffer was, it was too late. Once you've looked behind the curtain, you're ruined for the institution.

On my way out, a cute little girl in thick black glasses came running up to me. "Excuse me, excuse me... This is yours," she smiled, handing me an envelope. The elevator opened. I slipped between two paralegals, to the back of the car, and leaned against the wall. "Are you wearing Obsession?" one turned to the other. "What?" The friend snapped back.

I ripped open the envelope. Inside, folded in piece of stationary, was a check for $3,000.00. The memo line read "Unused Vacation." I smiled at one of the paralegals as I exited the elevator. "It's Chanel... Old school."

I went straight to the bank and deposited the check. The sooner the funds cleared, the better. If the firm audited my cases, they'd sue me for fraud and unjust enrichment.

I stepped outside with a fistful of fresh bills. I had two weeks to kill, months of phoning in busywork at a new firm after that, a nice chunk of mad money, and everybody seemed to want to pay me more than I had any business receiving.

...And I smelled so fucking sexy.

----------
¹ The Big Two being Dechert and Morgan Lewis.

Posted by PhilaLawyer at 12:00 PM

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Comments

So true its frightening, especially the part about how, on an hourly/quality of life basis, you're better off as a plumber. It seems a shame, especially because if one goes back 30-40 years (before the baby boom generation took over), the practice seemed enjoyable, even honorable.

Posted by: ths at February 16, 2007 12:59 PM

Nice....good concluding story...right on my birthday.

Cheers mate

Posted by: Luke Five Oh at February 16, 2007 04:12 PM

"Repeat every 24 hours, five days a week... For 40 years." That sounds about right. In hindsight, I can almost see my boss's raging boner when I walked in on my first day, fresh out of college and optimistic, ready to work 60 hours a week for the promise of making good money sometime in the distant future. Keep it up PL.

Posted by: twistfunk at February 17, 2007 12:02 AM

Been reading since philalawyer.blogspot.com days.

I thought the original version was great, but the way you ended this edited version is more than fantastic.

awesome.

looking forward to the book.

Posted by: long time reader at February 17, 2007 04:42 PM

Thanks

Posted by: Rohan at February 17, 2007 05:07 PM

damn it feels good to be a gangsta

Posted by: degan at February 17, 2007 08:11 PM

i wanna be a lawyer and smell sexy toooo

Posted by: Nikita at February 18, 2007 11:56 AM

The word 'kayfabe' fits in nicely here...

Posted by: Ian at February 18, 2007 01:56 PM

On the note of ignorance and illogical zeal, I have this to say:

I have one thing to tell you, read my lips:

North Korea is the reason China exists.

If it was not for the North Korean bureaucracy

And its savage ideocracy,

There would be no oppression,

No famine, no depression,

Just a unified state of justice and life

Without the Earth-shattering nukes and civil strife.

No deathly speakers in each and every room,

No looming cataclysmic doom,

Just a unified, thriving state.

No debate.

So each and every time we try to appeal

To both murderious regimes and their fanatic zeal,

Remember this:

North Korea is the reason China is a nation on planet Earth.

-Andrew

Posted by: Andy at February 20, 2007 12:20 AM

What happened to the piece on legal hoodwinking? I really enjoyed it. is it going to be put back up, or will it be added to and reposted later?

Posted by: John at February 20, 2007 07:27 AM

This rings true of any business that is fundamentally based upon billing hours. I like to call it 'white-collar janitorial labor'.

Posted by: brian at February 20, 2007 12:53 PM

I work in the IT industry, and despite the fact that most of us don't work the billable hour, I can see a lot of similarities between IT and law. This is especially true within my peers. I'm a recent college drop-out, but so many of the people I went to school with were the types of drones who will no doubt be putting in 60-hour weeks for a meager $45k/year. This is partly due to incompetence, but largely due to naievity. They think that by throwing away their social life so that they can put in more hours at work, the company is going to do better, and their going to be well on their way to management. They don't realize that they're simply lining upper management's pockets with better dividends while they work themselves ragged for little to no recognition, and the same $45k/year they would be making if they only worked 40 hours/week.

There is no joy left for me in this industry. Killed entirely before I've even reached 25.

Hopefully I'll find something more rewarding to do before I end up here for 40 years.

Posted by: Andy at February 21, 2007 10:19 AM

fabulous entry, quite possibly my favorite ever. Brilliant ending paragraph and sentence.

Posted by: Derek at February 21, 2007 10:45 AM

fuck i can't wait for this book

Posted by: alison at February 21, 2007 03:52 PM

Thank you.

Posted by: Wayland at February 22, 2007 05:35 PM

Excellent summary of the trials and tribulations of the young lawyer in this business.

Posted by: Stephen at February 26, 2007 02:26 PM

The Costanza Method is probably my favourite of all your stories I've read so far, but just one minor point, and forgive me if my memory of the original version is a bit hazy but I remember a passage about the look on Margaret's face when Terry offered the promotion with a raise. Can't remember the exact details but the implication was that Terry "got it" and people like Margaret never would. I can just imagine the filmed version with a quick shot back to Margaret whose jaw is involuntarily dropping as she looks at you and then Terry.
...anyway, fantastic as always, keep it up

Posted by: 40%ABV at February 27, 2007 06:02 PM