Unbillable Hours: A True Story

by Ian Graham

  The senior associate on the deal was Adam Greene, a fifth-year associate who was marching toward partnership by keeping his foot on the necks of us younger associates. Greene routinely kept us at work all night to proofread temporary edits in soporifically tedious side agreements that, if the deal actually went through, might find their way into the back pages of a 150-page document that no one — literally, not a single soul — would ever read in its entirety. Greene would flare up at the slightest error or if something took longer than he thought it should. At one point, Jon Davies, who had recently had spinal surgery and had to pop Vicodin every six hours for the pain, accidentally transposed two numbers after working three straight all-nighters to input Greene’s edits into an offering memorandum. Greene went ballistic and stormed out of the conference room screaming, “Fucking Christ! No more goddamn transposed numbers!”

  To be fair, Greene was working harder than the rest of us. He seemed in constant fear — perhaps justifiably — that any mistake by him or us would get him fired, or at least wreck his chances of making partner. He stayed at the office for four-day stretches, wearing the same clothes and occasionally napping on a beanbag in his office. He lost weight, and his skin would break out when things got really tense.

  This was what I had to look forward to.

  I spent the first four months of my legal career this way, numbly looking at documents I did not understand, on subjects and for deals I knew little about, with almost no thought required. I felt like Yossarian, the antihero of Catch 22, idly censoring all adjectives out of soldiers’ letters home. I hadn’t expected to be coddled, and I knew I would be working hard. I just didn’t know the work was going to be so seemingly meaningless and boring. I wasn’t like a medical intern who works long hours but sees patients and the tangible results of his or her work. I had almost no sense of the client, of what was at stake, of the bigger picture or the strategies of any of the cases or deals I was working on. I wasn’t dealing with people but with paper, endless pages of corporate fine print. There was no legal theory and hardly any legal analysis involved in any of it. I had no idea whether anything I did had helped in any way, and if it had, whether it had contributed anything I could feel good about. As a junior associate, the only skill required seemed to be a very high tolerance for boredom.

  I didn’t learn much about being a lawyer during those first months, but I began to absorb the real law firm culture, not the sugarcoated summer associate version. When I left the office each night, many of the senior associates were still at their desks. The twenty-four-hour document support center was humming with activity, and associates were dropping off documents to be proofed or edited overnight. The collegial atmosphere of the previous summer was long gone. Partners and associates who had stopped by to introduce themselves, invited us to lunch, or made small talk in the hallways were different people now. They had dropped the façade of recruiting, and their faces were tired and solemn. A few of the associates I had known the previous summer were still friendly, but many of them barely acknowledged my presence. The next spring, I would learn that before the summer associates arrive, the firm holds a meeting at which all attorneys are reminded to be friendly to them, to take them to lunch or dinner, and not to talk about the billable hours, the drudgery, or the intensity.

  By the end of my fourth month at Latham, two first-years had quit and another had left the firm under murky circumstances. The rest of us began to fall into categories. A handful of first-years were already interviewing with smaller firms or were planning to leave the profession entirely. A bigger group, about half of my first-year class, didn’t love the work but planned to stick around for one or two years to make some money and maybe pay off debts before finding something more fulfilling. And a small group — the gunners, they were called — appeared unfazed by the grunt work and had tunnel vision set on partnership.

  I wasn’t exactly sure where I fit in at this point. After my summer at Latham, I had built such high hopes for a career and life at the firm that it was hard to imagine leaving the prestige of the job and the security of the paycheck so soon. Life and work at other law firms were not likely to be any different; my friends from law school who were at other firms were having the same experiences, and in many cases worse. And they weren’t making the money I was. Maybe, I thought, the first months or years at a firm were just a boot-camp-like shock, designed to separate those who really wanted it from those who didn’t. Maybe, after a while, you just get used to having no life outside of work and pulling all-nighters doing work so tedious and mindless that it makes you want to jump out a window.

  But, the thing was, I didn’t want to get used to it. I didn’t want to turn into a robotic, sadistic, or stress-crazed senior associate, or even into a partner who measured his years in terms of billable hours and bonuses or his life by the size of his swimming pool and his status at the firm. There has got to be another way, I thought.

  In desperation to escape from the document reviews and due diligence, and to get some substantive legal experience, I decided to volunteer for one of the firm’s pro bono cases. Late one evening, I emailed the head of Latham’s Pro Bono Department and asked if there were any cases that needed staffing. The next morning, one of the firm’s couriers wheeled two large, battered cardboard boxes into my office. On top of one of them was a note: “Ian, please read these and call me. Bob Long.”

  On the side of one of the boxes, in faded black Magic Marker, was written, THE PEOPLE V. MARIO ROCHA.

  CHAPTER 6

  Murder in the Barrio

  I HAD A LONG day of proofreading and shuffling papers for Adam Greene’s IPO ahead of me and little interest in the newly delivered boxes. I’d never heard of Bob Long, which wasn’t altogether surprising. Having spent most of my first six weeks in San Diego, I didn’t even know the attorneys on the other side of my floor, much less all 300 of them spread out over the other eleven floors. I pulled up Long’s profile on the firm’s website, expecting to see a mid-level or perhaps senior associate along with the standard associate Web profile: one or two sentences listing his department and law school. When Long’s profile came up, I stared at the screen for a moment, rubbed my eyes, and then nearly fell out of my chair.

  “Robert A. Long is a senior litigation partner and a member of the firm since 1971. Mr. Long is the former Managing Partner of the Los Angeles office, with a practice focused on complex business litigation and trial practice, with a range of experience that includes state and federal court trials and arbitrations…”

  The profile listed a dozen or so cases on which Long had been lead counsel for big name companies in high-stakes litigation. He had been elected a fellow of the American College of Trial Lawyers and had served on the Board of Governors of the Association of Business Trial Lawyers and the boards of prestigious companies and charitable organizations. Accompanying the profile was a head shot of an elegant man wearing a finely tailored dark suit with a perfectly knotted bow tie, with a dignified and serious expression on his face. He had a full head of salt-and-pepper hair and looked like the Hollywood image of a big-firm senior partner.

  What the hell is this guy doing on a pro bono case? I wondered.

  I called a third-year associate I was friendly with to get the scoop on Long. “Wow!” he said when I told him about the boxes and the note. “Congrats! Bob’s a big-time powerful partner, but also a good guy. I haven’t worked with him, but I’ve heard he’s good to work for and actually kind of cool. Must be a big case. Good luck.”

  Big case? I thought this was pro bono.

  Now I was curious. I decided Greene could wait an hour while I skimmed through the boxes to get an idea of what Long’s case was about. I lifted the first box onto my desk and opened the lid. Inside were eight volumes of transcripts from a 1997 criminal trial. I picked out the first volume and started reading.

  Six hours later, I had hardly moved.

  HIGHLAND PARK, EAST LOS ANGELES, 1996

  ON A FRIDAY afternoo
n in February 1996, sixteen-year-old Mario Rocha left the East LA Skills Center shortly after 3:30. He headed to the bus stop, where he caught the number 81 bus toward his mother’s house on San Pasqual Avenue in the East LA neighborhood of Highland Park. The afternoon was warm and sunny, and ordinarily Mario would have lingered outside, talking to friends and making plans for the weekend. But he already had plans for the coming evening, and he wanted to get home to see his mother before she left for the weekend to visit her sisters in San Diego.

  Mario had grown up in Highland Park, in a neighborhood considered the territory of the Highland Park gang. His father, an airplane mechanic at Northrop Corp., lost his job when the factory shut down in the early 1980s and, after getting hit by a car and injuring his back, struggled with drug and alcohol addiction. He separated from Mario’s mother when Mario was thirteen, leaving Mario’s mother, Virginia, who spoke little English and worked as a school custodian, to raise her three boys by herself. Mario’s brother, Danny, four years older than Mario, had joined the Highland Park gang at sixteen and had been an active member until recently, when his girlfriend became pregnant and he chose to focus on work.

  At sixteen, Mario wasn’t an angel, either. Although he had been placed in accelerated classes, he had dropped out of high school after his sixteenth birthday, preferring to smoke weed and hang around with his friends on the block. At fifteen, Mario was put on probation for being a passenger in a car that had been stolen by one of his friends. That was enough, along with his family history, to put him on the Northeast LAPD precinct’s list of suspected Highland Park gang members.

  But Mario was not a follower, and he had resisted gang life. He was repelled by the violence and gang mentality that he had seen firsthand. “Once you join a gang, you lose control of your life and your decisions,” he told me later. “You always have a beef with somebody, and somebody always has a beef with you. I didn’t want to spend my life looking over my shoulder.”

  Until recently, the Highland Park gang had been just one of the more than a hundred Latino street gangs packed into a ten-mile radius of East LA. Although considered “one of the most organized, most profitable, and most dangerous gangs in Los Angeles” by the Los Angeles city attorney’s office, they were much smaller than LA’s largest and most ruthless Latino gang, The Avenues.

  Named for the avenues that slice across Figueroa Street, Northeast LA’s bustling main drag, by the mid-1990s The Avenues had more than eight hundred members spread among cliques that claimed almost of all of Northeast LA, including Highland Park, as their territory. Police blamed The Avenues alone for over half of the more than two hundred murders in these areas in the early nineties. Beyond their numbers and violent reputation, The Avenues bolstered their power in the neighborhoods by their affiliation with Eme, the Mexican mafia. Although Eme had only a few hundred members in the mid-1990s, most of whom were incarcerated in California, they controlled most of Southern California’s eighty thousand Latino gang members by controlling the prisons, offering protection for incarcerated gang members who had cooperated with them on the streets, and certain death to inmates who crossed them. The Avenues were Eme’s tax men, collecting money from local gangs and drug dealers and passing it on to Eme.

  In the mid-1990s, The Avenues overstepped, attracting the attention of federal law enforcement after a series of unprovoked killings of African Americans in an effort to drive blacks from their East LA neighborhoods. Their most notorious murder happened on September 17, 1995, when three-year-old Stephanie Kuhen and five of her family members were returning from a birthday party in the Northeast Los Angeles neighborhood of Cypress Park. Unfamiliar with the area and distracted by a car full of young kids, Stephanie’s stepfather made a wrong turn off of Figueroa Street and onto Isabel Avenue — into an area the police called “Assassins Alley.” As her stepfather tried to turn the car around, a group of The Avenues surrounded the car and opened fire, killing Stephanie instantly and seriously wounding her stepfather and younger brother.

  In the days following the Kuhen murder, The Avenues made national headlines, as President Clinton publicly denounced the gang and pledged federal money to help Los Angeles curb its epidemic of gang violence. The FBI and LAPD declared a “war on gangs” and cooperated to create specialized, aggressive anti-gang police units to patrol East LA neighborhoods. Within weeks, dozens of The Avenues’ leaders were arrested and charged with racketeering, hate crimes, and scores of murders, including the shooting of a fifteen-year-old boy on a bicycle; the murders of three advisors to Edward James Olmos’s 1992 film, American Me, about the Mexican mafia; and the Kuhen killing.

  Although the arrests decapitated The Avenues’ leadership, the result on the street was an increase in violence. Twelve members of The Avenues were killed in the first two months following the crackdown, as younger gang members fought to fill vacant leadership positions. Smaller local gangs, emboldened by the decimation of The Avenues, began to fight for control of the drug trade in their neighborhoods and for the opportunity to replace The Avenues as Eme’s tax collectors. One of those rivals was the Highland Park gang.

  MARIO AND HIS MOTHER had clashed over many things, especially his decision to drop out of school, but they also shared a strong bond. Virginia Rocha was thankful Mario had not followed his brother into the gang, and she secretly enjoyed having him home to keep her company. She taught him to draw and paint, which he did well. He enjoyed hearing her stories about coming to California in the late 1960s, “barefoot and bell-bottomed,” as Mario would later write, from her home in Juarez, Mexico.

  Virginia had tried to get Mario to go with her to San Diego that February weekend. But Mario declined, telling his mother he had been invited to a party that night by some friends from Cathedral High School, an all-boys Catholic school near downtown LA, and teasing her that he was going to meet a nice girl from Sacred Heart, Cathedral’s sister school. Reluctantly, Virginia consented to let Mario stay home with his brothers.

  It was almost four thirty by the time Mario’s bus got to the bottom of San Pasqual. Virginia had waited for Mario as long as she could, but the rush-hour traffic that gridlocks miles of the 405 freeway to San Diego can easily turn a two-hour drive into a five-hour nightmare. Virginia left at four, still worried.

  Shortly after nine thirty that night, Gabriel Ramirez and his brother Anthony pulled up in front of Mario’s house in their 1991 Ford Explorer and honked the horn. The Ramirez brothers and Mario had been friends since they played Pee Wee football together as ten-year-olds. Like Mario, Gabriel and Anthony had grown up in Highland Park and had friends who were gang members, but had chosen not to join a gang themselves. Mario had been invited to the party earlier that day by his friend Damien Sanchez, a student at Cathedral High, and in turn, had invited the Ramirez brothers. Dressed casually in dark baggy jeans and a black T-shirt under a dark blue windbreaker, Mario bolted out the door and climbed into the backseat, and the three friends headed to the party on Ebby Avenue.

  They could hear the music in the backyard as they walked up the driveway beside the house. A blue tarp was strung across the rear of the driveway, forming a gate to the party in back. Matthew Padilla, from Cathedral High, and Damien Sanchez stood on the street side of the tarp charging a two-dollar entry fee to help cover the cost of the keg and liquor. Mario paid for himself and his friends with the money Virginia had left him, and they entered the party.

  About fifty people were already in the backyard. A deejay was set up inside the kitchen. Speakers just outside the kitchen windows blared loud hip-hop music. On one side of the yard, a large beer keg was set up next to a big cooler of vodka punch called “jungle juice.” The faint scent of marijuana drifted over the yard as Cathedral boys and Sacred Heart girls bobbed their heads and danced. Mario, Gabriel, and Anthony filled plastic cups at the keg and made their way to an open space at the rear of the yard to survey the party.

  On the dance floor, Martin Aceves, a leader among the Cathedral boys, had a special reas
on to celebrate. An honor student at Cathedral, Aceves had recently been accepted to Cal State Northridge. With his friends Lauro Mendoza and Arturo Torres and their girlfriends, Aceves danced shirtless, having the time of his life.

  For more than an hour, Mario stood talking to the Ramirez brothers and a few others at the rear of the yard. Around eleven, spotting an attractive girl standing near the keg, he decided to make his move. Despite a slight pudginess to his 190-pound frame, Mario was handsome. And he was confident. Seeing that the girl’s cup was almost empty, Mario offered to refill it, grabbing the nozzle of the keg. She accepted, and they struck up a conversation.

  Minutes later, Mario noticed a group enter the party, one of them wearing a baseball cap with the letters HLP on the front. Mario knew the meaning of that hat immediately — his brother had worn one like it when he was in the Highland Park gang. Looking closely, Mario recognized two of them as gang members his brother Danny had hung out with occasionally. Mario knew them by their gang monikers: “Pee Wee” and “Cartoon.”

  Mario didn’t think too much of it. Gang members at parties in Highland Park weren’t so unusual. They were out of place in this closely knit high-school group, but Mario figured they know who I am so they’re not going to bother me. The gate keepers, Padilla and Sanchez, had probably been too intimidated to keep them out.