by Ron Liebman
ALSO BY RON LIEBMAN
Grand Jury: A Novel
Shark Tales: True (and Amazing) Stories from America’s Lawyers
Death by Rodrigo: A Novel
Jersey Law: A Novel
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
Copyright © 2017 by Ron Liebman
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
Blue Rider Press is a registered trademark and its colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC
Ebook ISBN: 9781101983010
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Liebman, Ronald S., author.
Title: Big law / Ron Liebman.
Description: New York : Blue Rider Press, 2017.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016026671 | ISBN 9781101982990 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Lawyers—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. | Corporations—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. | Corruption—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Legal. | FICTION / Thrillers. | GSAFD: Legal stories. | Romans á clef.
Classification: LCC PS3612.I33526 B54 2017 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016026671
p. cm.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
For Simma, still and always
CONTENTS
Also by Ron Liebman
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
PROLOGUE
TWO YEARS EARLIER Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
TWO YEARS LATER Chapter 49
Chapter 50
ANOTHER TWO YEARS LATER EPILOGUE
Acknowledgments
About the Author
“BigLaw” is an industry nickname for the nation’s largest law firms. BigLaw firms are full-service law firms that traditionally:
Employ large numbers of attorneys (100+);
Rank among the top-grossing law firms in the nation;
Pay top-market salaries;
Recruit from tier one law schools;
Maintain a national or global presence, with multiple offices across the country or the world.
—About.com Legal Careers Glossary
Size matters.
—Anonymous
PROLOGUE
I’m not much of a drinker.
“Another over here, please,” I call to the barmaid.
She’s good-looking, decked out in tight jeans with a shrink-wrap black top and, of course, tattoos. Tattoos and piercings. So common these days they hardly provoke a second glance.
My brother seated beside me raises and wiggles his empty glass.
“Me, too,” he calls to her. “You lovely example of flowering womanhood,” he adds, smiling that in-the-bag grin he gets when sloshed.
My brother, Sean, is drinking Jameson’s. So far I’m sticking with beer. It’s coming on to 11:00 a.m. I need to stay sober. (Okay, I’m not, but I’m not hammered either. Not yet anyway.) There’s a jury out. We’re waiting to see if the nine women and three men will reach a verdict today.
Yesterday the jury told the judge at the end of their second day of deliberations that they were deadlocked. He read them something lawyers call the Allen charge. It dates all the way back to 1896. Allen v. United States. Sometimes referred to as the dynamite charge.
The jury tells the judge they are hopelessly deadlocked and can’t reach a verdict.
The judge tells the jury go back into the jury room and work on it some more, tells them—in so many words—get back in there, talk some more, and agree on a verdict. Do your fucking jobs.
Then, if the jury still can’t agree, more often than not a mistrial is declared. The jury is excused and the defendant or defendants walk. Of course, the prosecutors can retry the case. Sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t.
I sound like a lawyer?
“Thanks,” I say to the barmaid as she places a new frosty mug in front of me. When she puts Sean’s new whiskey down, he tells her how luscious she looks this morning. She raises her eyebrows, smiles, but no way is she falling for any of his bullshit.
Well, I am a lawyer. My brother isn’t. He’s a professional fuckup.
I’ve got to make this my last beer.
Sean and me are at Cahill’s, one of the last Irish bars in this part of lower Manhattan where both the state and federal courthouses are located. I’d say the neighborhood is almost all Chinatown now.
We are the sons of Irish immigrants. Working-class people. Sean is upholding the tradition. In spades. Me? Well, I guess the priests saw something in me. They got me educated. Prep school rather than public or even Sacred Heart down our street. Full scholarship. Then college and law school. Also a free ride.
So you’re thinking, here I am a lawyer waiting on a verdict and sitting here drinking with my brother while my client’s fate is hanging in the balance, that the poor son of a bitch is off somewhere biting his nails while his world crumbles before his very eyes. That I must be one of those low-life criminal lawyers who hang around the halls of the local courthouse. Some schlub whose client roster is a collection of dopers, murderers, molesters, and whatnot.
Actually, that’s not who or what I am. I was a young partner in the New York office of one of the most prominent law firms in the country. I worked long and hard to get there. I’ve overcome my fair share of adversity.
And there is no client sitting somewh
ere biting his nails waiting for the jury.
I’m the client. I was the one indicted. It’s my fate on the line.
My cell beeps. I remove it from my pocket. It’s a text from my lawyer.
“The jury’s in,” I tell Sean. “They have a verdict.”
He signals for the check.
TWO YEARS EARLIER
1.
I didn’t start taking notes right away.
It took me a while to figure out what was actually going on. Then I made sure to take notes.
I did it every morning, soon as I got out of bed. At first it was . . . I don’t know, a self-preservation technique. I was afraid that I just wouldn’t remember. So much was happening so fast.
I also figured that someday somebody—maybe another lawyer taking my deposition, questioning me under oath, or maybe bar ethics counsel—would expect me to recall all the important details. If the thought of a prosecutor entered my mind, I’m pretty sure I wiped it away before the ink was dry.
Writing this memoir? It actually wasn’t my idea. It was my brother’s. By that time most of the facts were out in the open. There were lawsuits, an SEC investigation, depositions, and document productions by the boatload. So I was able to piece together the story, pretty much all of it, from the events that I personally observed and a lot of what happened out of my presence.
I was just beginning my second year as a newly minted partner at Dunn & Sullivan. I had spent eight years working day and night as an associate attorney at the firm. Trust me when I tell you I was far from a shoo-in to make partner, let alone to last the full eight years as an associate.
Dunn & Sullivan’s main office was in Manhattan. It also had offices in just about every major city in this country and throughout the world. At the time of this story, there were over twenty-five hundred lawyers on the payroll and another three thousand staff employees of one kind or another.
So my involvement with the story began on the day I was summoned to Carl Smith’s office. Carl was the firm’s chairman.
At the time I had only a nodding relationship with Chairman Smith. He’d nod to me in the elevator, in the firm’s cafeteria, in the halls. Never said a word. Did he even know my name? Turns out he did.
I got to his office at the appointed hour. His door was shut. His secretary was away from her desk. I stood there deciding, should I knock or should I wait for the secretary to return?
I decided to knock, and just as I raised my fist, the door flew open and a bull of a senior partner named Richard Miller stormed past me with enough force that we knocked shoulders.
When I was still an associate, I had worked on several of Miller’s cases. What a miserable prick. He brutalized everyone who worked under him. Around the office he was known as “Mad Dog” Miller.
I watched him bombard his way down the hall. He seemed to be clutching a single sheet of paper. He was a big guy, barrel-chested, with steel-rimmed glasses and a Teddy Roosevelt mustache. Like I said, a bull of a man. I’ve seen Miller in the locker room of our firm’s fitness center. (Yes, we have our own fitness center in the building.) Naked, he’s got a pair of chicken legs holding up that massive upper frame.
“Mr. Blake? Carney?”
I turned at that. Carl Smith calling my name. I poked my head in his open doorway.
“Sir?” I said, feeling stupid. We were law partners. Shouldn’t I be calling him Carl?
“Come in. Have a seat.”
So I did.
Mr. Smith . . . Carl . . . was seated behind this massive, ornate partner’s desk. Something Napoleon could have owned.
Dunn & Sullivan’s New York office, the command center for the entire firm, was located in this spanking new glass-and-steel tower stuck right smack in the middle of Times Square. This was the new Times Square. Gone were the strip joints and porn emporiums. It had become a choice business address.
Carl Smith’s office looked like the nineteenth century embedded in the twenty-first. There must have been a small fortune of antique furniture in there.
I sat on one of the two needlepoint chairs across from him. At first, Smith said nothing. He seemed to be studying me. Considering.
“You’re a third-year, right?”
“Second.” (I think I mumbled “Sir.”)
Smith shrugged. He looked at me some more. Did he need a third-year partner for whatever he had in mind? Was I about to be dismissed?
I leaned forward, sort of ready to spring to my feet and leave, when Smith reached over to the corner of his desk and picked up an iPad.
I watched as he did some forefinger tapping on the screen. Then I heard the whoosh.
“Sent you a file.”
Okay? And?
He kept looking at me. I kept looking at him. What was on his mind? And why was I so fucking nervous?
Carl Smith was a legend in his own time. He came from humble beginnings. Like me.
His father was a German immigrant, a laborer, so the story went. His mother came from a large Staten Island working-class Italian family. She was the one with the smarts. Carl back then was still Karl Schmidt Jr. After his father, Karl Sr.
Carl cut a wide path around his stern father but adored his mother, who raised him in the Catholic faith. Until he entered Yale (on scholarship), Carl was very Italian, a mama’s boy with a German name. The Ivy League changed all that. He became a synthetic patrician. The full monty. That was when he legally changed his name.
After law school (Harvard), followed by his clerkship for a United States Supreme Court justice, he joined Dunn & Sullivan as an associate. Made partner after five years. No one had done that before, or has since.
Welcome to the world of Big Law. A world run by men like Carl Smith. (Mostly) white men with brilliant minds and easy smiles that at once conceal and reveal their true nature: they’re predators.
Big Law is selective. Hard to get in. Even harder to stay in.
The country’s leading law firms recruit new lawyers each and every year. Almost exclusively from the best law schools. Mostly from the big three: Harvard, Yale, Stanford. Top-of-the-class students graduating from state law schools and so-called second-tier law schools do also get hired, though in smaller numbers.
I was first in my class at Rutgers University’s law school. I made the cut.
From the first day I stepped into the offices of Dunn & Sullivan, I got the distinct impression that I was cannon fodder. That I was there to work my ass off, but there was no way someone like me would be allowed to go the distance. The obligatory (except for Carl) eight years before eligibility for partnership selection.
I was an outsider. In the club, but only as a guest.
Work my ass off I did. On every assignment. Did my job no matter what, no matter how long it took, or how many times I had to do it over.
I beat the odds. Made partner on my first try. But know what? That feeling of otherness, of not being one of them?
Still there.
I’m a big guy. Not overweight. Just big. I love my Irish roots. I’ve got dark, curly hair and dark eyes. I grew up lower-class, what back then was called “shanty Irish” or, given my looks, “black Irish.” Now I suppose I’d be called “lace-curtain Irish.”
I could dress a little better, could keep my ties more tightly tucked under my shirt collar. And I still speak in a working-class New Yorkese. I could change that. Drop the accent. But I don’t. In some way I can’t really articulate, it defines me.
Carl Smith (still checking me out) was my opposite. He was small-boned and oh, so very neat. Brioni suits (I later learned), crisp designer ties, perfectly coiffed hair. And not even a trace of Staten Island in his speech. Then Carl said:
“Here’s what I want you to do. Read that file. It’s a plaintiffs’ class-action case. You have handled class actions before, right?”
And I had.
; Class-action cases contain a large number of claimants who have the facts and law in common. The courts allow all the plaintiffs to join together in one lawsuit rather than having umpteen lawsuits litigating the same case over and over and over.
I had been a member of several class-action trial teams. But Dunn & Sullivan had always been on the defendants’ side of these cases. Never the plaintiffs’. Typically the defendants were the corporate bad guys: The drillers. The spillers. The killers.
Yes, those were our clients. The best lawyers for the worst offenders. That’s the system. Everyone is entitled to legal representation. Bad guys included. Otherwise there is no system.
Okay, so Smith wants to take on the plaintiffs’ side. The good guys for a change. Fine with me.
So I nodded, yeah, I have. (It would be nice if that cat would come back with my tongue.)
“Okay. Learn the file, then put together your trial team.”
My trial team?
As though Smith read my thoughts:
“I am placing you in charge of this case. Everyone on it will report to you. You will report to me. But you will be in charge of all day-to-day activities.”
Up until then I hadn’t been in charge of anything. Junior partners were not placed in charge of major cases. Yet Smith was placing me in charge of one.
Something wasn’t adding up.
I quickly flushed that thought down the drain. Instead my thinking went along these lines:
Carl Smith had seen something in me that caused him to ignore firm practice and put me in charge of a major case (the firm chairman didn’t personally assign minor cases). This despite my relative lack of experience.
Maybe it was our similar childhoods? Maybe he had a soft spot in his heart for up-from-the-street achievers like he was?
Then again, Carl Smith didn’t have a heart.
He did have this false charm. Something he could play like the proverbial Stradivarius when he chose to, though he never did for me.
So I was sitting there feeling pretty good about myself. Totally missing Smith’s body language signaling that the meeting was over. That it was time for me to leave.