The Associate

Chapter 16

Any hope of pursuing meaningful work was promptly crushed at 7:30 Monday morning when all twelve new litigation associates were sent into the abyss of Document Review. As far back as the first year of law school, Kyle had heard horror stories of bright and eager young associates being marched into some dreary basement, chained to a desk, and given a mountain of densely worded documents to read. And while he’d known that his first year would include a generous dose of this punishment, he simply wasn’t prepared for it. He and Dale, who was looking better by the day but showing no signs of a personality, were assigned to a case involving a client that was being hammered in the financial press.

Their new boss for the day, a senior associate named Karleen, called them into her office and explained things. For the next few days they would review some crucial documents, billing at least eight hours a day at $300 an hour. That would be their rate until the bar results were made known in November, and, assuming they passed, their hourly rate would jump to $400.

There was no thought given to a quick word about what might happen if they did not pass the bar exam. Scully & Pershing associates posted a pass rate of 92 percent the previous year, and it was simply assumed that everyone had passed.

Eight hours was the minimum, at least for now, and with lunch and coffee thrown in, that meant, roughly, a ten-hour day. Start no later than 8:00 a.m., and nobody ever thought about leaving before 7:00 p.m.

In case they were curious, Karleen billed twenty-four hundred hours last year. She had been with the firm for five years and acted as though she were a lifer. A future partner. Kyle glanced around her well-appointed office and noticed a diploma from Columbia Law School. There was a photo of a younger Karleen on a horse, but none of her with a husband, boyfriend, or children.

She was explaining that there was a chance that a partner might need Kyle or Dale for a quick project, so be prepared. Document Review was certainly not glamorous, but it was the safety net for all new associates. “You can always go there and find work that can be billed,” Karleen said. “Eight hours minimum, but there is no max.”

How delightful, thought Kyle. If for some reason ten hours a day were not enough, the door to Document Review was always wide open for more.

Their first case involved a client with the slightly ludicrous name of Placid Mortgage — ludicrous in Kyle’s opinion, but he kept his mouth shut as Karleen rattled off the more salient facts of the case. Starting in 2001, when a new wave of government regulators took over and adopted a less intrusive attitude, Placid and other huge home mortgage companies became aggressive in their pursuit of new loans. They advertised heavily, especially on the Internet, and convinced millions of lower- and middle-class Americans that they could indeed afford to buy homes that they actually could not afford. The bait was the old adjustable-rate mortgage, and in the hands of crooks like Placid it was adjusted in ways never before imagined. Placid sucked them in, went light on the paperwork, collected nice fees up front, then sold the crap in the secondary markets. The company was not holding the paper when the overheated real estate market finally crashed, home values plummeted, and foreclosures became rampant.

Karleen used much softer language in her summary, but Kyle had known for some time that his firm was representing Placid. He’d read a dozen stories about the mortgage meltdown and seen the name Scully & Pershing mentioned often, always in defense of Placid’s latest setback.

Now the lawyers were trying to clean up the mess. Placid had been battered by lawsuits, but the worst one was a class action involving thirty-five thousand of its former borrowers. It had been filed in New York a year earlier.

Karleen led them to a long, dungeonlike room with no windows, a concrete floor, poor lighting, and neat stacks of white cardboard boxes with the words “Placid Mortgage” stamped on the end. It was the mountain Kyle had heard so much about. The boxes, as Karleen explained, contained the files of all thirty-five thousand plaintiffs. Each file had to be reviewed.

“You’re not alone,” Karleen said with a fake laugh, just as both Kyle and Dale were about to resign. “We have other associates and even some paralegals on this review.” She opened a box, pulled out a file about an inch thick, and went through a quick summary of what the litigation team was looking for.

“Someday in court,” she said gravely, “it will be crucial for our litigators to be able to tell the judge that we have examined every document in this case.”

Kyle assumed it was also crucial for the firm to have clients who could pay through the nose for such useless work. He was suddenly dizzy with the realization that in just a few short minutes, he would punch in and begin charging $300 an hour for his time. He was worth nothing close to that. He wasn’t even a lawyer.

Karleen left them there, her heels clicking on the polished concrete as she hustled out of the room. Kyle gawked at the boxes, then at Dale, who looked as stunned as he did. “You gotta be kidding,” he said. But Dale was determined to prove something, so she grabbed a box, dropped it on the table, and yanked out some files. Kyle walked to the other end of the room, as far away as possible, and found himself some files.

He opened one and glanced at his watch — it was 7:50. Scully lawyers billed by tenths. A tenth of an hour is six minutes. Two-tenths is twelve, and so on. One point six hours is an hour and thirty-six minutes. Should he roll back the clock two minutes, to 7:48, and therefore be able to bill two-tenths before the hour of eight? Or should he stretch his arms, take a sip of coffee, get more situated, and wait until 7:54 to begin his first billable minute as a lawyer? It was a no-brainer. This was Wall Street, where everything was done with aggression. When in doubt, bill aggressively. If not, the next guy will, and then you won’t catch him.

It took an hour to read every word in the file. One point two hours to be exact, and suddenly he had no reluctance in billing Placid for 1.2 hours, or $360 for the review. Not long ago, say about ninety minutes, he found it hard to believe he was worth $300 an hour. He hadn’t even passed the bar! Now, though, he had been converted. Placid owed him the money because their sleaze had gotten them sued. Someone had to plow through their debris. He would aggressively bill the company out of revenge. Down the table, Dale worked diligently without any distraction.

Somewhere in the midst of the third file, Kyle paused long enough to ponder a few things. Still on the clock, he wondered where the Trylon-Bartin room was. Where were the highly classified documents, and how were they protected? What kind of vault were they stored in? This dungeon appeared to be security-free, but then who would spend money to protect a bunch of mortgage files gone bad? If Placid had dirty laundry, you could bet it wasn’t buried where Kyle might find it.

He thought about his life. Here, in the third hour of his professional career, he was already questioning his sanity. What manner of man could sit here and pore over these meaningless pages for hours and days without going bonkers? What did he expect the life of a first-year associate to be? Would it be any better at another firm?

Dale left for ten minutes and returned. Probably a bathroom break. He bet she kept the meter running.

Lunch was in the firm cafeteria on the forty-third floor. Much had been made about the high quality of the food. Great chefs consulted, the freshest ingredients used, a dazzling menu of light dishes, and so on. They were free to leave the building and go to a restaurant, but few associates dared. The firm’s policies were prominently published and distributed, but there were many unwritten rules; one was that the rookies ate in-house unless a client could be billed for a real lunch. Many of the partners used the cafeteria as well. It was important for them to be seen by their underlings, and to brag about the great food, and, most important, to eat in thirty minutes as an example of efficiency. The decor was art deco and nicely done, but the ambience was still reminiscent of a prison mess hall.

There was a clock on every wall, and you could almost hear them ticking.

Kyle and Dale joined Tim Reynolds at a small table near a vast window with a spectacular view of other tall buildings. Tim appeared to be shell-shocked — glazed eyes, vapid stare, weak voice. They swapped stories of the horrors of Document Review and began joking about their departures from the legal profession. The food was good, though lunch was not about eating. Lunch was now an excuse to get away from the documents.

But it didn’t last long. They agreed to meet after work for a drink, Dale’s first sign of life, then headed back to their respective dungeons. Two hours later, Kyle was hallucinating and flashing back to the glory days at Yale when he edited the prestigious law journal from his own office and managed dozens of other very bright students. His long hours led to a product, an important journal that was published eight times a year and read widely by lawyers and judges and scholars. His name was first on the masthead as editor in chief. Few students were so honored with such a title. For one year, he was the Man.

How had he fallen so fast and so hard?

It’s just part of the boot camp, he kept telling himself. Basic training.

But what a waste! Placid, its shareholders, its creditors, and probably the American taxpayers would get stuck with the legal fees, fees being racked up in part by the now-halfhearted efforts of one Kyle McAvoy, who, after reviewing nine of the thirty-five thousand files, was convinced that his firm’s client should be locked away in prison. The CEO, the managers, the board of directors — all of them. You can’t jail a corporation, but an exception should be made for every employee who ever worked at Placid Mortgage.

What would John McAvoy think if he could see his son? Kyle laughed and shuddered at the thought. The verbal abuse would be funny and cruel, and at that moment Kyle would accept it without firing back. At that moment, his father was either in his office counseling a client through a problem or in a courtroom mixing it up with another lawyer. Regardless, he was with real people in real conversations, and life was anything but dull.

Dale was seated fifty feet away with her back to him. It was a nice back, as far as he could tell, trim and curvy. He could see nothing else at the moment but had already examined the other parts — slim legs, narrow waist, not much of a chest, but then you can’t have everything. What would happen, he reckoned, if (1) he slowly, over the next few days and weeks, put the move on her, (2) he was successful, and (3) he made sure they got caught? He’d be bounced from the firm, which at that moment seemed like a great idea. What would Bennie say about that? An ugly, involuntary dismissal from Scully & Pershing? Every young man has the right to chase women, and if you get caught, well, so what? At least you got fired for something worthwhile.

Bennie would lose his spy. His spy would get the boot without getting disbarred.

Interesting.

Of course, with his luck, there would probably be another video, this one of Kyle and Dale, and Bennie would get his dirty hands on it, and, well, who knows?

Kyle mulled these things over at $300 an hour. He didn’t think about turning off the meter, because he wanted Placid to bleed.

He had learned that Dale earned a Ph.D. in mathematics at the age of twenty-five, from MIT no less, and that she had taught for a few years before deciding that the classroom was boring. She studied law at Cornell. Why she thought she could make the transition from the classroom to the courtroom was not clear, at least not to Kyle. Right now a class of struggling geometry students would seem like a parade. She was thirty years old, never married, and he had just begun the task of trying to unravel her withdrawn and complicated personality.

He stood to go for a walk, something to get the blood pumping into his stultified brain. “You want some coffee?” he asked Dale.

“No, thanks,” she said, and actually smiled.

Two cups of strong coffee did little to stimulate his mind, and by late afternoon Kyle began to worry about permanent brain damage.

To be on the safe side, he and Dale decided to wait until 7:00 p.m. before checking out. They left together, rode the elevator down without a word, both thinking the same thought — they were violating another of the unwritten rules by leaving so early. But they shook it off and walked four blocks to an Irish pub where Tim Reynolds had secured a booth and was almost finished with his first pint. He was with Everett, a first-year from NYU who’d been assigned to the commercial real estate practice group. After they sat down and got themselves situated, they pulled out their FirmFones. All four were on the table, much like loaded guns.

Dale ordered a martini. Kyle ordered a club soda, and when the waiter disappeared, Tim said, “You don’t drink?”

“No. I had to quit in college.” It was Kyle’s standard line, and he knew all of the follow-ups it would provoke.

“You had to quit?”

“Yep. I was drinking too much, so I quit.”

“Rehab, AA, all that stuff?” Everett asked.

“No. I saw a counselor, and he convinced me that the drinking would only get worse. I went cold turkey and have never looked back.”

“That’s awesome,” Tim said as he drained the pint of ale.

“I don’t drink either,” Dale said. “But after today, I’m hitting the bottle.” From someone with absolutely no sense of humor, this declaration was quite funny. After a good laugh, they settled into a rehash of their first day. Tim had billed 8.6 hours reading the legislative history of an old New York law aimed at discouraging class action lawsuits. Everett had billed 9 hours reading leases. But Kyle and Dale won the game with their descriptions of the dungeon and its thirty-five thousand files.

When their drinks arrived, they toasted Placid Mortgage and the 400,000 foreclosures it had precipitated. They toasted Tabor, who had vowed to stay at his desk until midnight. They toasted Scully & Pershing and its wonderful beginning salaries. Halfway through the martini, the gin hit Dale’s mushy brain and she began giggling. When she ordered a second, Kyle excused himself and walked home.

AT 5:30 ON Tuesday, Kyle was wrapping up his second day in the dungeon and mentally drafting his letter of resignation. He would happily tell Bennie to go to hell, and he would happily face Elaine and her rape claim in a courtroom in Pittsburgh. Anything would be better than what he was enduring.

He had survived the day by continually repeating the mantra “But they’re paying me $200,000 a year.”

But by 5:30, he didn’t care what they were paying him. His FirmFone pinged with an e-mail, from Doug Peckham, and it read, “Kyle, need some help. My office. Now if possible.”

He forgot his letter of resignation, jumped to his feet, and bolted for the door. To Dale he said as he dashed by, “Gotta run see Doug Peckham, a litigation partner. He’s got a project.” If this sounded cruel, then so be it. If it was boasting, he didn’t care. She looked shocked and wounded, but he left her there, all alone in the Placid dungeon. He ran down two flights of stairs and was out of breath when he walked through Peckham’s open door. The partner was on the phone, standing, fidgeting, and he waved Kyle into a fine leather chair across from his desk. When he signed off with a “You’re a moron, Slade, a true moron,” he looked at Kyle, forced a smile, and said, “So how’s it going so far?”

“Document Review.” Nothing else needed to be said.

“Sorry about that, but we all suffered through it. Look, I need a hand here. You up to it?” Peckham fell violently into his chair and began rocking, thrusting himself back and forth without taking his eyes off Kyle.

“Anything. Right now I’ll shine your shoes.”

“They’re shined. Gotta case here in the Southern District of New York, a big one. We’re defending Barx in a class action filed by some folks who took their heartworm pills and eventually croaked. Big, messy, complicated case that’s raging in a number of states. We go before Judge Cafferty on Thursday morning. You know him?”

I’ve been here two days, Kyle almost blurted. I don’t know anybody. “No.”

“Caffeine Cafferty. He’s got some chemical imbalance that keeps him up all night and all day, and when he’s off his meds, he calls up lawyers and screams at them because the cases are moving so slowly. When he’s on his meds, he yells, too, but doesn’t swear as much. Anyway, his schedule is called the Rocket Docket because he moves things along. Good judge, but a real pain in the ass. Anyway, this case has dragged on, and now he’s threatening to send it to another jurisdiction.”

Kyle was scribbling notes as fast as possible. At the first break in the narrative, he said, “Heartworms?”

“Actually, it’s a drug that eats away plaque in the major blood vessels, including the left and right ventricles. From a medical point of view, it’s complicated and nothing you should worry about. We have two partners with medical degrees handling that aspect of the case. Four partners total, as well as ten associates. I’m lead counsel.” He said this with far too much smugness. Then he jumped to his feet and lumbered over to the window for a quick look at the city. His white starched shirt was oversized and did a nice job of hiding his bulbous physique.

Bennie’s summary had been typically to the point. Peckham’s first marriage broke up thirteen months after he joined Scully & Pershing fresh out of Yale. His current wife was a lawyer who was a partner in a firm down the street. She, too, worked long hours. There were two small children. Their apartment on the Upper West Side was appraised for $3.5 million, and they owned the obligatory house in the Hamptons.

Last year Doug earned $1.3 million; his wife, $1.2 million. He was regarded as a top litigator whose specialty was defending big pharmaceuticals, though he rarely went to trial. Six years earlier he was on the losing end of a major case involving a painkiller that caused suicides, at least in the opinion of the jury. Scully & Pershing sent him to a spa in Italy for a two-week treatment.

“Cafferty wants to get rid of the case,” he said, stretching a sore back. “We, of course, will fight that. But, truthfully, I would rather see it in another jurisdiction. There are four possibilities — Duval County, Florida; downtown Memphis; a rural county in Nebraska called Fillmore; or Des Plaines, Illinois. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to research these four jurisdictions.” He fell into his chair again and began rocking. “I need to know what juries do there. What are the verdicts? How do big companies fare in these places? Now, there are several jury research outfits that sell their data, and we subscribe to all of it, but it’s not always accurate. Lots of numbers but not a lot of useful info. You gotta dig and dig. You gotta call lawyers in these four places and find the dirt. Are you in, Kyle?”

As if he had a choice. “Sure. Sounds great.”

“I wouldn’t call it great. I need this by 7:30 Thursday morning. Have you pulled an all-nighter yet?”

“No. I’ve only been here for—”

“Right, right. Well, get to work. Memo form, but nothing fancy. We’ll meet here at 7:30 on Thursday with two other associates. You’ll have ten minutes to do your summary. Anything else?”

“Not right now.”

“I’ll be here until ten tonight, so zip me a note if you need something.”

“Thanks, and thanks for getting me out of Document Review.”

“What a waste.”

The desk phone was ringing as Kyle hustled out of the office. He went straight to the cube, grabbed his laptop, and raced off to the firm’s cavernous main library on the thirty-ninth floor. There were at least four smaller libraries scattered throughout, but Kyle had yet to find them.

He could not remember being so excited over a research project. It was a real case, with deadlines and an angry judge and strategic decisions in the air. The memo he was about to prepare would be read and relied on by real lawyers in the heat of battle.

Kyle almost felt sorry for the poor rookies left behind in Document Review. But he knew he’d be back there soon enough. He forgot dinner until almost 10:00 p.m., when he ate a cold sandwich from a machine while reading jury research. With no sleeping bag at hand, he left the library at midnight — there were at least twenty associates still there — and took a cab to his apartment. He slept four hours, then made the thirty-minute walk back to Broad Street in only twenty-two minutes. He was not about to start gaining weight. The firm’s private gym on the fortieth floor was a joke because it was eternally empty. A few of the secretaries used it during lunch, but no lawyer would be caught dead there.

His meter began promptly at 5:00 a.m. By 9:00, he was calling trial lawyers and defense lawyers in Duval County, Florida, in and around Jacksonville. He had a long list of cases that had gone to trial, and he planned to talk to every lawyer he could get on the phone.

The more calls he made, the longer the list became. Lawyers in Florida, Memphis and western Tennessee, Lincoln and Omaha, and dozens in the Chicago area. He found more cases and more trials, and called more lawyers. He tracked every Barx trial in the past twenty years and compared their verdicts.

There was no word from Doug Peckham, no text message or e-mail on the FirmFone always lying on the table next to the legal pad. Kyle was delighted to be given such free rein, such discretion. Dale sent an e-mail and asked about lunch. He met her in the cafeteria for a quick salad at 1:00 p.m. She was still imprisoned in the Placid tomb, but mercifully three other rookies had been sent in to help with the grunt work. All three were thinking about quitting. She seemed genuinely pleased that someone she knew had been given a real task.

“Save me some Placid files,” Kyle said as they left the cafeteria. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

He left the library at midnight on Wednesday, after billing Barx for eighteen hours. Six the day before. He added two more early Thursday morning as he polished up the fifteen-page memo and rehearsed his ten-minute presentation to Peckham and a team of senior associates. At precisely 7:30, he approached the partner’s door and saw that it was closed.

“He’s expecting me at seven thirty,” he said politely to a secretary.

“I’ll let him know,” she said without making a move toward the phone.

Five minutes passed as Kyle tried to settle his nerves and appear calm. He had a knot in his stomach, and there was sweat around his collar. Why? he kept asking himself. It’s just a brief presentation before a friendly audience. We’re on the same team, right? Ten minutes, fifteen. He could hear voices in Peckham’s office. Finally, the door was opened by one of the associates, and Kyle walked in.

Peckham appeared surprised to see him. “Oh, yes, Kyle, I forgot,” he said, snapping his fingers and frowning. “I should’ve e-mailed. The hearing’s been postponed. You’re off the hook. Keep the memo. I might need it later.”

Kyle’s mouth fell open and he glanced around. Two associates were huddled over a small worktable, papers everywhere. And two more were seated near the desk. All four seemed to be amused.

The False Deadline.

Kyle, of course, had heard of this little maneuver. The hapless associate is run through the grinder to produce a useless memo or brief that is time sensitive but will never be used. But the client will nonetheless get billed, and will pay, so even though the research is not needed, it is at least profitable.

Kyle had heard of the False Deadline, but didn’t see this one coming. “Uh, sure, no problem,” he said, backtracking.

“Thanks,” Peckham said as he flipped the page of another document. “See you later.”

“Sure.”

Kyle was at the door when Peckham asked, “Say, Kyle, where’s the best place for Barx to try the case?”

“Nebraska, Fillmore County,” Kyle said eagerly.

Two of the associates laughed out loud, and the other two were highly entertained. One of them said, “Nebraska? No one tries cases in Nebraska.”

“Thanks, Kyle,” Peckham said, patronizing. “Nice work.” And please get out of here.

For $200,000 a year, plus treats, the job would naturally have its moments of humiliation. You’re getting paid for this, Kyle kept repeating as he slowly made his way up the stairs. Take it in stride. Be tough. Happens to everyone.

Back in the dungeon, he managed to smile. When Dale asked “How did it go?” he said, “It’s hard to say.” At the far end of the room two associates were plowing through mortgage files. Kyle nodded at them, then parked himself near Dale, arranged his pen, legal pad, and FirmFone. He opened a box, removed a file, and reentered the world of Placid Mortgage. It was known territory, and he felt oddly safe there. He would not be harmed or humiliated. A long career as a document reviewer would no doubt be dull, but it would also be much less hazardous than that of a litigator.