Unbillable Hours: A True Story

by Ian Graham

  The interviews at Latham that day were crisp, and the day went by quickly. Compared to some attorneys I had met at other firms, those at Latham all seemed like surprisingly normal people. They were pleasant and upbeat. The partners all expressed pride in the firm. “This is the big leagues,” one of them said. “I would never practice anywhere else.” They emphasized that Latham gave young attorneys training and responsibility early in their careers and that every associate had a chance to make partner. “You’re not going to get stuck reviewing documents for two years here,” they told me.

  “Latham,” each and every one of them said, “is the big firm that doesn’t act like a big firm.”

  The associates were also friendly and positive about the firm. They acknowledged that they were busy and that there were occasional periods of long hours, but they said the work “ebbed and flowed.” They emphasized that associates got meaningful work and hands-on experience early in their careers. The requirement of 1,900 billable hours a year wasn’t so bad, they said, and they raved about Latham’s summer program, saying it was by far the most fun and lavish in LA and a great way to get to know the city and the firm.

  At the end of the day, Jim Arnold, a partner on Latham’s Recruiting Committee, met me in the lobby with a big smile. He shook my hand and offered me a summer associate job on the spot. Actually, he said the firm would be “honored if you would join us next summer.” I thought the interviews had gone well, but most firms took weeks or months after callback interviews to extend offers. I tried to play it cool and muttered something about being flattered but still having other firms to visit. But before I could finish, he slapped me on the back and introduced me to two senior associates he said were taking me to dinner at Spago in Beverly Hills to celebrate.

  I tried to hold out. I did have more interviews scheduled. But the associates with me at Spago were a lot of fun and very persuasive. For three hours, as we made our way through four courses and three bottles of wine, we talked about life at Latham. They told me they loved working at Latham and couldn’t imagine going anywhere else. And they said the Latham summer program was by far the best of any firm. “Dude, you’ll have a blast out here. Guaranteed. Just say yes, and we order the Dom Pérignon.”

  The offer was hard to resist, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to. A little over a year earlier, I’d been in a crowded cubicle answering phone calls from angry taxpayers, clueless about what to do next. In Austin, I lived in a small studio apartment with an inflatable couch. Now I was being wined and dined by senior associates from one of the most prestigious law firms in the country and having my arm twisted to accept $2,500 a week to be recruited during a pleasant summer. At the end of the evening, I accepted Latham’s offer to be a summer associate at the end of my second year of law school.

  And so I found myself, on a Friday evening in the fall of my second year in law school, on a sidewalk outside one of Beverly Hills’s finest restaurants, my head pleasantly buzzing with wine, and a summer job and possible career at Latham & Watkins in my pocket.

  I tried to keep some perspective. “We’ll see,” I told myself. “Maybe I’ll like it, maybe I won’t.” Either way, I was going to be spending a well-paid summer in LA.

  IF THERE EVER was a job I was suited for, it was big-firm summer associate.

  Shortly before leaving Austin for LA, I received an unexpected $2,500 check for “relocation expenses.” The envelope also held a facebook of my fellow “summers.” It appeared I was in good company: twenty-eight men and seventeen women from law schools such as Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Chicago, UCLA, Berkeley, and Michigan, all looking bright and eager.

  The first morning of the summer, Jim Arnold greeted us in the fortieth-floor reception area. He knew all forty-five of us by name and was smooth and funny as he told us what to expect. He said with a smile that we should try to bill a few hours a day and, at some point over the next twelve weeks, produce at least one piece of written work that the Recruiting Committee could evaluate. But it was clear that this was pretty much a formality. We would come to understand that work was only a small part of the summer experience. Getting to know the attorneys and fellow summers through social events was at least equally important. We would be taken to lunch almost every day by associates and partners, there would be dinners out or other events two or three times a week, and we would be invited to private homes for dinners and cocktail parties. (The dinners, which were usually held at the elegant homes of senior partners, were known to associates as TCBY, or “This Could Be Yours,” events.) Latham’s luxury box at Dodger Stadium was ours to use as we pleased. There would be two weekend trips, one to a resort in San Diego over the coming weekend and the other for white-water rafting near the end of the summer. Arnold closed by telling us we were to leave at two o’clock that afternoon to attend a taping of The Tonight Show with Jay Leno at NBC studios in Burbank. With that, we were shown to our offices, where our names were inscribed on big silver plates beside our doors, and introduced to our secretaries.

  I got to know the other summers quickly. Mostly, it was a great group, with the expected range of backgrounds and personalities. Some were serious and bookish, some loud and funny, some a little too overtly competitive — “There’s an A-team and a B-team here. You wanna get with the A-team,” one of the summers told me during the first week. But unlike in law school, we weren’t competing against one another: Latham had made it clear that it hoped to give all of us offers at the end of the summer. At one or two meetings we were basically told, “Welcome to Latham. Have a good time!”

  And we did. On the first weekend we gathered at a four-star resort in San Diego, along with the summers from all of Latham’s U.S. offices, for Latham’s “Summer Academy.” There were beach volleyball and water polo games against the other offices, decadent dinners, a Las Vegas–themed casino party, and a hospitality suite stocked with booze that turned into a nerdy version of Animal House every night. As I entered the suite on Friday night, Brian Gordon, up to this point a quiet kid from Harvard Law, was in the corner singing Elvis songs at the top of his lungs as he alternated swigs from the bottle of red wine in his right hand and bottle of white in his left. Chris Lee, from Boalt (UC Berkeley), had just finished a beer bong and was throwing up into a potted plant. On the patio other summers were chugging beers and tossing the empty bottles over their heads without looking, where they smashed onto the concrete pool deck close to terrified hotel guests. And it wasn’t just summers. Associates and partners were in there, too, getting drunk and high-fiving summer associates. Jim Arnold did a beer bong. I held it for him.

  I became good friends with three summers in particular: Matt Barnes, a hedonist from Harvard Law who spent almost every night of the summer at the bars and clubs in Hollywood, lugging with him a beer bong with la rules printed on the side; Trevor Wilson, a quick-witted local from UCLA Law whose office was next to mine on the forty-second floor; and Mike Wilke, a former pro baseball catcher, now at Georgetown Law, who was built like a tank and spoke with a Long Island accent. We went out almost every night and even took a few trips to Las Vegas to put our fancy paychecks to work.

  The work that summer was easy, or “about as challenging as getting to the bottom of a waterslide,” as Trevor put it. Mostly I accompanied partners to meetings with clients and to hearings in court. Now and then I was asked to analyze a few cases and write a memo, but there were never tight deadlines, and the partners and associates were always approachable for questions.

  At one point, when a few of us had been asked to do some research that kept us at the office late one night, the partner in charge of the case came by the next morning, apologized profusely, and offered to take us to lunch.

  At the end of the summer, despite numerous displays of drunken inappropriateness and little attention to work, forty-four of the forty-five summer associates in Latham’s LA office, including Matt, Trevor, Mike, and me, received offers to join Latham as associate attorneys after our third year of law school.
<
br />   I took a few months to make up my mind about the offer, but there was never really any question. I knew the past summer had been mostly about recruiting and that real law practice would be very different. Latham had tried to hide it, but I had noticed a few associates walking around with their eyes bloodshot and dressed in the same clothes they had on the day before. I knew I would be working long hours. But it was hard to get that summer out of my head and to conjure up a realistic sense of how different real law practice would be.

  I looked for alternatives, but not very hard. I interviewed with a few sports agencies and with a sports media company in New York. They all required new hires to start in the mail room for eight dollars an hour, even if they had law degrees. Latham was offering a base salary of $125,000 a year plus a bonus, based on billable hours, of up to $50,000. For that amount, their requirement of 1,900 billable hours a year didn’t seem bad. Besides, I had made friends at Latham and had had a great time over the summer. Latham just seemed like my kind of place.

  Shortly before Thanksgiving, I accepted Latham’s offer.

  At a wedding that fall of one of my good high-school friends, some of the parents who were lawyers congratulated me with an undertone of surprise: “Ian, I always knew you had it in you.” Bridesmaids’ mothers tried to set me up with their daughters. In the world where I had grown up, a job at Latham was a stamp of validation, a sign, as my friend’s new bride put it when she thought I wasn’t listening, that “Ian finally has his shit together.”

  If I’d had a little more will power, I might have stepped back and asked why one the biggest and best law firms in the world had to recruit so hard. I would have asked how a firm that hires some fifty new law school graduates for its LA office, but makes only one or two of them partners eight or more years later, could expect incoming associates to believe that all new hires had a shot at partnership. I would have thought carefully about the rumors around law school that all big firms, no matter what they say, are sweatshops for young associates. I would have thought about the fact that I’d seen only the well-crafted glimpse of the firm that Latham had wanted me to see.

  CHAPTER 3

  Welcome Back

  RESTON, VIRGINIA, OCTOBER 2001

  STANDING IN a grassy field in Virginia trying to coax a large Russian man to hold my hand is not how I’d expected to start my career as an associate at Latham.

  According to his name tag, he is Igor from the Moscow office. He is built like a heavyweight Greco-Roman wrestler, and judging from the look on his face, he would rather pull my arm off and beat me to death with it than hold my hand. I’m not thrilled about it, either, but the entire class of worldwide incoming Latham associates — more than 250 — is standing in a “friendship circle” already holding hands. Igor and I are the only break in the chain.

  I extend my hand and try to entice him: “C’mon, big fella, paws up.” No reaction. I try humor: “Hey, at least it can’t get any more awkward than this!” Igor doesn’t budge. Others in the circle are starting to whisper, or at least I think they are. After a few tense moments, from somewhere in our circle I hear a woman’s voice bark something in Russian. And finally, with a look of disdain and humiliation on his face, Igor grabs my wrist, and our Latham friendship circle is complete.

  The friendship circle was the final activity of a weekend-long orientation at what the firm called Latham & Watkins University, or LWU. All of Latham’s incoming associates were called “stubs” because, after spending the summer studying for and then taking the bar exam (at Latham’s expense), we were starting late in the year and only had a stub of a billable year left. We would become fully fledged first-year associates on January 1.

  For the orientation, we were sequestered in a Marriott in Reston, Virginia, a lifeless corporate town near Dulles Airport, to learn how the firm operated, where we fit in, and what was expected of us. The day after LWU weekend, I would start my legal career in earnest.

  From the beginning of the weekend, it was painfully clear that recruiting was over. LWU was the coyote morning to the weekend boondoggle at the four-star retreat in San Diego that had kicked off the previous summer. At LWU there was no beach volleyball or water polo, no Latham T-shirts or coffee mugs, no partners high-fiving associates, and no hospitality suite with free booze flowing all night. It was three days of tightly scheduled seminars with mandatory attendance and monitored sign-in sheets.

  Already, the buzz at LWU was not good: layoffs. It had been more than a year since my summer at Latham, and in the intervening time a lot had happened to put law firms and the country on edge. The tech boom that had sprouted dot-com companies out of every garage in Silicon Valley — and created armies of paper millionaires in need of legal advice — had faltered, causing the national economy to slide into a recession and an entire market for legal services to almost vanish. Law firms like Latham that had hired large numbers of associates to meet the work demands of the dot-com boom were now overstaffed and reeling. The hottest law firm in the country in recent years — Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison, of San Francisco and Silicon Valley — had collapsed over the summer, putting hundreds of that firm’s high-powered partners and associates on the stagnant California job market. Rumors were swirling that more big California law firms, including Latham, would be cutting back soon.

  September 11 — that 9/11 — had happened a month earlier. The stock market had lost more than $3 trillion in value and an economy already in recession had tanked. No one knew what would happen next.

  The first evening of LWU, we eagerly filled every seat of the hotel’s largest ballroom to hear Tom Baylor, Latham’s managing partner, reassure us in his welcome-to-the-firm address that our paychecks were safe. But Baylor spent most of his talk enthusiastically telling us about the recent opening of Latham’s Hamburg office, “our third office in Germany!” I wasn’t sure why he thought anyone cared about this, until I spotted a clutch of twenty or so German lawyers sitting near the front of the room beaming with pride at their recognition. Finally, Baylor segued to how Latham’s aggressive growth, expansion, and diversification had positioned the firm not only to survive the tough economic times, but to thrive. Our size and breadth of expertise enabled us to handle the most complex local, national, and international business deals and litigation, and to do it faster, better, and more efficiently than our competitors. These huge, geographically far-flung, multiple-moving-part deals and litigations — requiring the specialized expertise of dozens of partners, each billing between $500 and $1,000 per hour, backstopped by hundreds of associates billing from $200 to $400 an hour and working round the clock for years on end — were Latham’s bread and butter.

  Our clients were brand-name companies and others who, though Baylor didn’t say it this way, could afford our rates. We didn’t represent the little guy. We were a legal behemoth, that, like a menacing bodyguard, could protect you against harm or inflict pain on your enemies if so ordered.

  Baylor closed like a coach at halftime. “The firm’s ability to function at such a high level depends on the talent and diligence of its associates. You are the engine that keeps the firm running!”

  The Germans and a few others erupted in a burst of excited applause. What most of the rest of us had in common was that we had not found something to be excited about. By default, we’d chosen big law firm practice primarily because it paid well, not because we were excited about drafting complex discovery motions in multi-jurisdictional litigation for the next thirty years. We were at Latham because, if we were going to be associates in a big firm, the previous summer had convinced us that Latham was the best place to do it.

  The next day, we sat through hour-long presentations from each of the firm’s practice departments: Corporate, Land Use, Litigation, Real Estate, and Tax. Jim Arnold, our friendly, beer-bonging recruiting partner from our summer at Latham, gave the Corporate Department presentation. As he strode through the crowd toward the stage, the LA office stubs hooted and hollered. “A-R-N-O-L-D,” som
eone called out in a low voice. Others flashed LA office gang signs. Really. But Arnold ignored his fans and kept his head focused on the floor. The humor and engaging tone of the previous summer were gone. He seemed stressed out and tired, and he barely looked up as he rushed through a presentation called “Anatomy of a Merger,” which after five minutes had most of the room struggling to stay awake. When he finished, he packed up and quickly made a beeline for the door.

  The litigation presentation, “Anatomy of a Lawsuit,” was at least more animated. A litigation partner from the New York office paced up and down the aisles among us, enthusiastic, eyes fixed wide and unblinking, shouting through the various stages of legal conflict. “Conflict law is real law practice!” he yelled into the face of a recoiling stub from the Chicago office.

  There was too much ground being covered too quickly for us to absorb many details. Each presentation was an entire semester of law school in one hour. But that, I figured, wasn’t the point. There were themes and buzzwords in each presentation that we were meant to internalize. As junior associates, we were supposed to work “efficiently” and “diligently,” with “attention to detail” on every task, no matter how tedious or mundane it may seem to us. We were to think through even the smallest details, forward and backward. We were to proofread everything twice and triple-check every citation. “Nothing goes out the door here without being analyzed from every angle. We think ten steps ahead of our enemies.”

  At this point, most of us were bored stiff. People began to wander off for extended “bathroom breaks” that involved watching football or napping in their rooms. A group of us planned to skip the last two presentations, on tax and pro bono, to watch the USC football game in the lobby bar. The Tax Department was generally considered the most boring of the practice groups, made up of nerdy back-office people who couldn’t bring in their own clients and who fed off the need for tax advice in corporate deals. And how much trouble could I get into for skipping out on the pro bono program? Pro bono work — unpaid legal assistance to low-income clients — was something I figured law firms only claimed to care about to enhance their public image. Besides, if I had wanted to be a public-interest lawyer, I wouldn’t have come to Latham.