“There will be times when you feel absolutely overwhelmed. You’re going to doubt yourself. You’re going to wonder if you can do it. When that happens, just remember one thing: we have chosen you—and we are very good at what we do.”
The speaker was Terry Dempster. He was fifty-nine years old. I’d checked. His brown eyebrows bristled, and if he’d had any hair it probably would have too. He wore a rumpled suit in a very muted green-brown plaid that looked like he’d deliberately chosen it to contradict pinstriped stereotypes about the way Manhattan lawyers dress. Within the giant horseshoe formed by long, mahogany tables in the Whistler Conference Room, seventy-six stories above Park Avenue, he took measured, confident strides, effortlessly managing to meet each of the twenty-seven pairs of eyes that followed him as he addressed Calder & Bull’s Class of 2011.
Dempster was the sixth partner we heard from during our preorientation. The managing partner of the firm, the chair of the recruiting committee, and key players from major practice areas had each had their fifteen minutes with us. Also some lesser lights who’d told us how we’d be trained to use the phones and the computers and the security cards. Plus the head clerical assistant, my personal favorite, who told us to please not act like jerks with the secretaries because in most years, frankly, good secretaries were harder to come by than good associates. Dempster, though, was the one who commanded my attention. He chaired Calder & Bull’s Litigation Department. Once I started he would be the most important person in my professional life until I made partner or left—and I didn’t plan on leaving.
I was feeling warm and cozy. Buckets of cold rain pelted the outside of the building—almost Christmas, but it wasn’t quite cold enough in New York to snow. All you could hear in this room, though, were Dempster’s voice and the HVAC system’s polite hum. After almost three hours in this mahogany cocoon, I felt insulated from rain, cold, and every other vicissitude of the outside world.
I was about to get bravely over that.
“When you open those big brown envelopes they passed out while Linda Stange was introducing me,” Dempster went on, “you’ll each find your presumptive report dates.” WTF? I thought we were reporting February 1st! “We’re staggering report dates by department, to reflect workload trends. Securities/Mergers and Acquisitions attorneys report on one February; Commercial, Real Estate, and Labor on one June; Litigation on one September; and Regulatory and Tax on one December.”
So close I could taste it, and now my Big Apple billet had been snatched away again.
I jumped up, muttering stuff that wouldn’t be printed in the New York Times—or here. I ripped my big brown envelope in two, tearing expertly right through the middle of the adhesive label on the front that read Jakubek, Cynthia M. ’11. I threw the two pieces at Dempster and stalked out with immense dignity. I deliberately knocked my chair over on the way.
Nah, I didn’t do any of that stuff. I wanted to do it. I played out a lurid, three-second fantasy of doing it. But I didn’t do it. I didn’t clench my fists or stiffen my torso. I sat there with a polite, carefully neutral expression. I’m not against temper tantrums per se, but I’m a big girl and I pick my spots.
Dempster paused and gave us a knowing smile.
“I know.” A gravelly voice that had captured numerous juries and, on one notable occasion, six justices of the United States Supreme Court, rolled over us. “You’re pissed off. You have a right to be. You feel like we’re jerking you around. We are. I’m not happy about it. But we wouldn’t be doing you any favors if we had you show up before we’re ready to channel a coordinated work-flow to you. It costs this firm two hundred twenty-five thousand dollars for a new associate to sit down at a desk between the sixty-third and seventy-sixth floors in this building. That means we’ll be looking for each and every one of you to produce at an annual rate of twenty-one hundred billable hours. It won’t help either of us for you to sit here for three months or six months piddling around with six-point-two or seven-point-one billable hours per working day.”
I did not gulp at those numbers. I knew exactly what I was signing on for when I accepted Calder & Bull’s offer. Given all the time an associate has to invest in the job but can’t bill to anyone, an average of nine billable hours per working day meant lots of late nights and Saturdays. I knew that. I wasn’t afraid of working hard. But I was sick and tired of having rugs pulled out from under me—and I felt sick to my stomach when I thought about phoning Paul about this revolting development.
“Make no mistake,” Dempster said. “You’re not being deferred again, your report dates are being staggered. You have jobs here. You are going to work. For seniority and time-to-partnership purposes, your tenure will be measured from one February 2011 for each and every one of you.”
He paused. He was good. I felt a little tiny bit better. Then he went on.
“One of the things you’ll find in that envelope is a check in the amount of three thousand dollars for each month between February and your staggered report date. What’s that? Ladies and gentlemen, that’s a bribe. That’s our way of saying, ‘Please don’t bail on us. Please give us one more chance. Because we don’t want one of the hundreds of talented lawyers who’ve been sending outstanding résumés over our transom for the last two years. We want you.’”
From a purely professional standpoint, I had to admire his craft. He’d just told me I’d been screwed again, and yet I was ready to bust a gut working on a case with him. I knew that “staggered, not deferred” was bullshit, and I knew he knew it. That was like saying, “This isn’t a contract, it’s an agreement.” I knew his assurance that I had a job for sure come September wasn’t worth the powder it would take to blow it to hell. I knew Paul would read this as meaning that I’d never work at Calder & Bull and his New York state of mind was now officially brain-dead. And I still wanted to believe Dempster.
“Okay.” Dempster checked his watch. “You’ve got a break before the tour of our offices—and our means yours as well as mine—so you can spend the next fifteen minutes twittering about what an asshole I am. I’ll see you in September. And December. And June. And February.”
He made a confident, smiling exit. Two-thirds of the suck-ups sitting around those tables applauded him. I swear they actually applauded him. If I ever stoop that low, please shoot me.
I left the conference room and found a fairly secluded spot about halfway between it and the lobby where I could lean against a streaming window and phone Paul. He answered on the first ring, which meant that whatever he was doing, he wasn’t writing.
“Good news and bad news. I’m now supposed to show up for work on September first.”
“What’s the good news?”
“That is the good news. It’s also the bad news.”
I’ll spare you the outraged string of obscenities, profanities, and vulgarities that was Paul’s way of saying he felt my pain. Paul puts all his creativity into his fiction. When he swears he comes off like the average North Jersey seventh-grader. Blessedly, some static broke up the last three or four clauses.
“I hope you’re about due for an upgrade on the phone of yours, lover,” I said once I sensed that he’d run out of steam.
“It’s this goddamn storm! Whoever heard of torrential rain like this so close to Christmas? I might as well be in Miami!”
“Hang in there, tiger. Look on the bright side. Once you turn Henry Widget into a million-dollar advance, we can move to New York together on your dime instead of mine.”
Somewhere in the middle of the static, I heard him joking about how I’d just kicked him in the testicles, except he didn’t say “testicles.”
I still had nine minutes before the office tour started, which was plenty of time for call number two on my suddenly revised agenda. I had my thumb on the 4 that would speed-dial Stacy Tarrant when I sensed someone coming up behind me. Assuming it was one of my fel
low deferred/staggered/new-hires, I put a this-is-not-a-good-time look on my face and swiveled my head around. I saw Terry Dempster standing twenty-two inches from me.
“Excuse me, Ms. Jakubek. Do you have plans for lunch?”
“Uh, no, actually, I don’t.”
“I’d appreciate it very much if you’d join Hank Braun and me and a couple of other new associates in the McReynolds room.”
“Uh, sure. I mean, I’d be delighted, Mr. Dempster.”
“See you noonish. And please call me Terry.”
I couldn’t spend too much time trying to figure what that might mean if I was going to call Stacy before the tour, so as Dempster strode off I turned back toward the window and speed-dialed her. When she answered she spoke in a tone that was clipped and efficient without quite seeming hurried.
“This is Cindy. Now they’ve bumped me to September first.”
“Shit. That sucks. Lemme close my door.” I imagined her low-maintenance blonde helmet-cut swinging as she scooted from around her desk to swing her office door shut.
“It does suck, but….” I paused awkwardly, searching for a silver lining. It took me about five seconds to come up with one. “…but at least I got invited to lunch.”
“Well, that’s something. Invited by someone cute?”
“No. Someone powerful.”
“Even better than cute. That has to mean something.”
“Yeah. But this reading tea leaves and telling myself everything is going to be all right someday if I’ll just hold on crap is getting old.”
“I hear ya, babe. But what’s Plan B? Shopping your résumé around from scratch?”
“The thought has crossed my mind,” I said. “I’m going to think about it long and hard before I deposit the latest check.”
“I don’t know, Cin. That means kissing Calder & Bull goodbye for sure. C & B is a bird in the hand, even if it’s seven months farther off now.”
“That’s the question. If I’m patient, am I actually going to start my life in September, or am I just going to get another run-around six or seven months from now?”
“Yeah.” She paused. “You’re right. That is the question. Tell you what. Don’t do anything drastic for the rest of the day. Don’t get drunk and don’t tear up the check and don’t carve up any C & B partners with that rapier you have where most people keep their tongues. Let me ask around and see if anyone has heard anything more than rumors about Calder & Bull.”
“Correct as usual, Queen Friday. You’re incredible, Stace. But you knew that.”
“Yeah, I did. And listen, there is a bright side. It’s almost noon. I’m looking out my window at the JFK Parkway. I would love to spend my lunch hour taking a brisk, bracing two-mile walk from here to Ben Franklin’s statue, soaking up a little winter sun. But instead I’ll be sitting at my desk reviewing correspondence exchanged between our client and another firm’s client about a software implementation project that cratered. A seven-month hiatus before you dive into that Serbonian bog isn’t necessarily a horrible thing.”
“Noted, Stace. Later.”
I won’t bore you with a recap of the tour. A law firm is basically offices. There are corner offices for Dempster-class heavy-hitters, comfortable offices for regular partners, small offices for associates, cubicles for paralegals, and work stations for secretaries. They had a duplicating department that was pretty cool, a large windowless room with yellow walls, lots of machines, and a rich ink smell. That was the highlight. Now let’s cut to lunch in the McReynolds Room.
In the middle of the room was an oblong table covered with a white linen tablecloth and set with china and crystal worthy of Smith & Wolensky if not Lutece. Six well-cushioned chairs sat around it. Atop a long credenza on the near side of the room, bowls and warming trays presented salad, rolls, sliced tenderloin in a rich, brown sauce, and a luscious-looking pasta swimming in cream and basil. I assumed it was a buffet and got ready to grab a plate and dive at the pasta. Fortunately, though, I held off, waiting for a signal from the host.
Good move. It was not a buffet.
Dempster came in about the same time as my fellow new-hires and ushered us to the table. He introduced us to Braun, chair of the Securities/M&A Department, who was basically Clark Kent in a three-piece suit but without the glasses and after aging not particularly well into his fifties. Suddenly two—not one, two—waitresses in black dresses with organdy aprons appeared. They took orders from each of us and then filled our plates.
Dempster waited until we were served. Then he glanced up and, somehow, just by glancing up, instantly had the attention of everyone else at the table.
“There is a plan. We’re not just improvising and reacting and waiting for everything to be the way it used to be, like we were when we did the deferral. We’re no longer guessing and hoping. We have a plan, we’re implementing it, and the September report date is an integral part of that plan. That date is firm. It’s hard. It’s set in stone.”
I nodded politely. One of the other new hires was bolder. Flicking through my mental Rolodex, I came up with the name Ephraim Pence for him. He had come in business casual, which I thought was a pretty edgy move. Plus, the open-necked dress shirt he wore had French cuffs and his cufflinks were embossed with the rainbow-globe icon from the Obama campaign. That was even edgier.
“That doesn’t come as a surprise,” he said, “but the confirmation is welcome.”
Helll-O, Mr. Smooth. Sharing pizza with this guy at ten p.m. during a time-crunch document review promised to be a real barrel of laughs.
“So,” Braun said in a how-about-those-Mets tone, “how have you all been spending your time during your enforced hiatus?”
The other woman at the table, Melissa Drexler, jumped in to say she’d been interning with the Battered Women’s Clemency Project, and gave a little rundown on the effort to spring women who’d killed husbands or boyfriends who beat them. Dempster and Braun nodded in approval, as they damn well should have in my less-than-humble opinion.
I try not to do edgy before my first paycheck, so I didn’t mention helping out with a client in the middle of a murder investigation. I stuck with the pro bono stuff, mentioning my little Tyrell Washington commando raid. Braun met that with a challenging chuckle and a pointed comment.
“In other words, you got a dead drug dealer off on a technicality and pissed off an Assistant United States Attorney on the same day.”
Stacy’s admonition to watch my mouth with partners was still ringing in my ears, but then I remembered that Calder & Bull’s Litigation Department had a White Collar Crime practice group—and that Dempster, not Braun, was the one who mattered to me. So I gave Braun the smile I used to use to try to get out of detention and spoke in my best approximation of a ladylike voice.
“Any day I don’t piss off an Assistant United States Attorney is twenty-four wasted hours.”
“Amen to that,” Dempster said. “The difference between an Assistant United States Attorney and a terrorist is that it’s easier to negotiate with a terrorist.”
Braun turned toward Pence. “How about you, Ephraim?”
“I was lucky enough to catch a gig with Lawyers Without Borders.”
“Do you mean Doctors Without Borders, the French organization that got the Nobel Peace Prize awhile back?” Braun seemed genuinely puzzled.
“No. Lawyers Without Borders is inspired by Doctors Without Borders, but it has a legal mission instead of a medical one. Namely, to provide the benefits of American litigation technology and trial tactics to mass-tort victims in the Third World.”
Pence said this absolutely deadpan, in an anxious-to-please voice. For the first time since before my admission to Harvard Law I committed the sin of envy. At that moment, I wished I was Ephraim Pence. I wished I had enough guts to sit there and dump a load of unmitigated bulls
hit on these guys, and the flair to bring it off. The half-smile and the look I shot in his direction were intended to say, That was beautiful, buddy.
The fourth new-hire, Patrick Hoffman, was a little older than the rest of us, in his early thirties. He had a buzz cut and an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering, so he was tabbed for intellectual property litigation. I was smiling as I turned my head toward him, not to encourage him but because I’d just figured out what was going on here—what the real point of this impressive lunch was. We were auditioning for Braun. Securities/M&A was apparently coming up a little short in the new-hires who’d be showing up for it in February, and Braun was thinking of inviting one or two of us to switch from litigation to his shop.
No, thank you. This was not going to happen to Cindy Jakubek. I intended to practice the kind of law that leaves blood on your knuckles, not paper cuts on your pinkie.
“Well, I can’t top Eef,” Hoffman said, referring to Pence. “I just pitched in with the Greater Oakland Performing Arts Council. Highlight was negotiating special benefit-royalties for a two-week run of sketches based on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, the TV show.”
Boinng! I suddenly felt an eerie detachment from the group, as if I were floating above it, watching a nice woman with black hair pretending to listen to these other people. A bunch of disembodied data fell into place in a coherent pattern in my mind. All at once I knew where Walter Learned was. And I knew something else.
I realized that Braun was talking again. It took a mental snap-out-of-it-Cindy slap for me to refocus and pick up what he was saying. I checked back in halfway through a sentence.
“…a little thought exercise. Let’s say the firm wanted to establish a new office for a niche practice in an area where we’ve never operated geographically. You know…suggestive pause…penetrate a virgin territory. Say we have three talented partners under consideration to head this office up: a top-notch administrator, a proven business-getter, and a specialist in the practice area. Which one should we pick?”
But Remember Their Names Page 16
