Irreparable Harm (A Legal Thriller)
Page 8
Chapter 7
The offices of Prescott & Talbott
Sasha crossed Prescott’s gleaming lobby, her heels clicking against the polished marble floor. Her mind still on the knife attack she’d successfully warded off in class, she smiled hello at Anne, the silk-voiced receptionist who’d been greeting visitors to the firm since Sasha was in diapers. Anne nodded back, her headset bobbing; she was already busy fielding calls.
Sasha ignored the bank of internal elevators across from the reception desk and headed up the curved staircase, taking the four flights as quickly as her heels would permit. On four, instead of going straight to her office, Sasha detoured down a long corridor and poked her head into one of the interior offices. All attorneys, except for the contract attorneys, had offices along the exterior walls of the building; each office had at least one window. The legal assistants and document clerks had windowless offices along the interior wall. The contract attorneys were relegated to crowded, charmless, communal work rooms lined with computers and devoid of privacy.
“Hey,” Sasha said, startling the slight African-American woman whose back was to the door. Naya Andrews’ head swiveled at the sound of Sasha’s voice.
“Mac,” the older woman said, smiling. “Where’ve you been hiding?”
Naya and Sasha had spent most of the summer working on a trade secrets case that had settled on the morning the trial was scheduled to start. During the trial preparation, Sasha had been nicknamed Mac, and, at least as far as Naya and Peterson were concerned, it had stuck.
“I’ve been locked away working on an appellate brief. How’s your mom doing?”
Naya’s smile faded. “About the same. Some days she knows who I am, some days she doesn’t.”
Naya’s mother had Alzheimer’s, and Naya was doing her damnedest to keep her in her home. She’d declined to the point where she needed round-the-clock care, though. Naya’s brothers and sister either couldn’t or wouldn’t help with the costs of full-time in-home care, so she was shouldering the expense herself. For now, at least. Naya had pared her own expenses to the bare minimum and was pouring almost everything she earned into paying for her mother’s care. Sasha wondered how much longer she could afford it.
“I’m really sorry, Naya.”
Naya pasted her smile back on, all business. “So, what brings you down this hallway?”
Sasha nodded, indicating the Post-Gazette’s website open on Naya’s desktop. Not surprisingly, news of the crash was front and center on the local paper’s website, as well as in the print edition. Sasha had scanned the headlines in the lobby coffee shop; the crash took up the entire front page. Naya followed Sasha’s gaze to the monitor and looked back at her.
“Metz called Peterson last night,” Sasha told her. “The team’s already in place, except for a legal assistant. You want in?”
“Hell yeah!”
Naya’s eagerness was partly professional and partly pragmatic. The case would involve high stakes and interesting work, as well as lots of overtime. Unlike the attorneys, legal assistants at Prescott were eligible for overtime pay. A senior legal assistant who worked a lot of overtime would bring home more than the contract attorneys and most of the junior staff attorneys. Naya had never shied away from long hours, but now with her mother’s condition worsening, she was more willing than ever to volunteer for extra work.
Sasha knew Naya would jump at the chance to get on the team, but she also knew she didn’t have the juice to get Naya pulled off her other matters. Legal assistants also differed from most junior lawyers at Prescott in that the partners didn’t view them as fungible. The smart partners realized good legal assistants were irreplaceable assets and protected them accordingly.
Whether the associates Sasha had tapped for her team realized it or not, there would be little to no pushback about her pulling them from their document review assignments. As an honest, if tactless, partner had once noted, junior associates were like goldfish: if you lost one, you flushed it and replaced it with another one just like it.
Sasha asked, “Are you sure you can swing it?”
Naya inventoried her brutal workload in her head. “Yes,” she said simply.
Sasha smiled. “Team meeting at eight thirty. Mellon Conference Room.”
Naya called after her, “Thanks for thinking of me, Mac.”
Sasha drained her coffee as she rounded the corner by the kitchenette. Each of Prescott’s eight floors had its own coffee and tea station. Prescott provided free drinks for its employees. Whether out of generosity or the belief that caffeine-wired lawyers billed longer hours, Sasha neither knew nor cared. She tossed the takeout cup into the recycling bin and poured a fresh cup into a navy blue and cream mug emblazoned with the firm logo.
A hostess was assigned to staff each kitchenette during business hours, charged with brewing fresh coffee; restocking milk, sugar, and cream; cutting lemons for the tea drinkers; running the Prescott & Talbott mugs through the dishwasher; and keeping the area spotless. Most of the hostesses were older women—widows whose pension and social security payments weren’t quite enough to get by on—and a few were young women, very young, Asian immigrants.
Sasha’s personal ranking system put the coffee hostesses somewhere below a good legal assistant but well above the first-year associates. She smiled at Mai, the hostess—who had retreated to the supply closet when Sasha had approached—and raised her mug in a salute on her way out.
Sasha was well aware that she, too, had once been a hapless first-year associate, and she knew that, just as she had, some of the current crop would blossom into real attorneys. Her cynicism stemmed from the knowledge that most of them would be long gone before she could tell whether they had what it took to be lawyers.
The reality of being handed a six-figure position with no real-world experience and no meaningful guidance tended to cause one of two reactions: One, the new lawyer was paralyzed with fear and refused to make any judgment calls or take any proactive steps. Or, two, he or she swung to the complete opposite end of the spectrum and became a self-important twit, abusing secretaries and barking out bizarre and wrong-headed orders to anyone in earshot. Both styles were a recipe for failure. The deer-in-the-headlights types generally faded away after a few years, and the Napoleons usually flamed out in spectacular, scandalous fashion.
Every crop of associates had just a handful of survivors. Some were those who had gone to law school as nontraditional students. They were older and had been in the workforce—many even kept working while in law school. Maybe they even had kids already. To them, the stakes were higher, the prize of the high-paying job sweeter.
Others were the golden children. They were the offspring of lawyers and judges and had grown up knowing they were destined for the corner office. Whether it was nature or nurture, they were programmed to succeed, whether they wanted to or not.
Sasha had gone to law school straight from college, but she sometimes thought of herself as part of the nontraditional student group. She was nontraditional for Prescott & Talbott, at least, because she’d grown up poor. Not poor poor, to be sure, but working class poor.
Sasha approached the rarified world of Prescott & Talbott and everything it signified differently than her colleagues who’d grown up with maids, vacation homes, and country club memberships. She worked as hard as she could, saved as much of her salary as she could, and took care to dress and speak like one of them, but she never pretended to be anything other than what she was: a half-Russian, half-Irish working-class kid with no pedigree to speak of.