by David Kazzie
"I busted my ass for this firm for eight years."
"Lots of lawyers bust their ass here and don't make partner."
"Yeah, but usually there's a reason."
"There's a reason you didn't either," he said. "I thought I already mentioned that."
"Right. I'm not shareholder material. That's not a reason. That's a load of shit."
"This place isn't for everyone."
More silence followed. Smyth appeared to be out of things to say, and Samantha was trying hard not to pass out.
"I don't believe this," she said. "What the hell am I supposed to do now?"
"You can stay on as of counsel," Smyth said. "You're always welcome here at Willett & Hall. But…"
Samantha knew exactly what was behind the 'but.' A significant cut in pay and permanent exile from the partnership track. She would never again be considered for partner. The fact that Smyth had referred to the firm by name was confirmation she was no longer an integral piece of the puzzle. As if Willett & Hall was a faraway place, and she was on the outside, looking in.
The most devastating ramification of taking an of counsel position would be the immediate and permanent loss of respect, of standing, of clout. She'd be a eunuch, trapped in a netherworld of legal washouts. Other associates would give her a wide berth, lest she contaminate their own futures. Many associates failed to make partner, but only a few decided to stay on as no-counsel, as the joke went. It was the professional equivalent of staying in an abusive relationship because, well, he really loves me.
"Great," she said. "Of counsel. How many people actually take you up on that offer?"
"Not many."
"That's what I thought."
"Take some time to think about your future," Smyth said. "It's a tough economy out there."
One thing Samantha wanted to see in her future was Smyth plummeting down thirty floors to the street below.
"Why wasn't I given some warning?" Samantha asked. "My performance reviews were always good."
"This firm is looking for a very specific type of person to elevate to partner," Smyth said.
Oh, here we go, she thought to herself. She rolled her eyes, making no attempt to hide it. She wasn't much concerned with whether Hunter Pennington Smyth, III, saw her do it. It wasn't like there was much more they could do to her.
"Don't patronize me," she said sharply.
"Well, for one, you lost OmniCare as a client," Smyth said.
OmniCare was a giant health insurance benefits provider serving much of the southeastern United States. During Samantha's first year with the firm, OmniCare retained Willett & Hall to represent it in a lawsuit against HealthSoft, a software company in northern Virginia, for breaching a software contract. The firm agreed to accept a $10,000 flat fee in the hope that OmniCare would join the firm's stable of clients after it successfully handled the HealthSoft matter. That didn't stop Samantha's then-supervising attorney, a decent guy named Damon Evans, from dropping the case on Samantha's lap. Evans left the firm shortly thereafter and became a successful author of children's books.
"That was seven years ago," Samantha said. "And they were a flat-fee client who gave us shitty work, and the only reason they gave us the work was because no one else would do it at that rate. Not even Griffin. And the only reason I was working on OmniCare was because I'd been here for about six months and no one else in the firm wanted to work on it."
"You still lost it."
"Remember why?" Samantha said, wagging her finger at Smyth, almost shouting now. "I filed a response to a counterclaim without running it by their general counsel, and the asshole gets all bent out of shape. Everyone seems to forget OmniCare didn't tell us about the counterclaim until the day before our Answer was due."
"It could've been a big client for us," Smyth said.
"Oh, please just give me the tiniest break, Hunter," Samantha said.
Samantha didn't mention that OmniCare had shipped the case to Griffin & Walker, another local firm, where it ended up paying more than $40,000 in fees and lost the case when the young associate working on the case failed to file answers to Requests for Admission. In Virginia, failing to deny these requests constitutes an admission. Essentially, OmniCare admitted it agreed with all of HealthSoft's allegations. It was sort of like hand-stitching I ♥ you on the towel before throwing it in to your opponent. She didn't mention it because there was no point.
Because logic and deductive reasoning were not among Smyth's strong suits, the wealthy lawyer clapped his meaty hands together and stood up before Samantha confused him too much about the OmniCare business. The truth was, OmniCare had nothing to do with why Samantha had been passed over for partner, but he could never tell her that.
"Well, I've got to be running along," he said. "You stay and pour another glass of wine. Try and relax."
"So no one made it from Litigation this year," Samantha said.
"I didn't say that," Smyth said quietly. His pace toward the door quickened.
"Who?"
"It doesn't matter," Smyth said.
"You didn't," Samantha said, suddenly remembering the smirk on Kimberly Davis' face when she saw her at the elevator.
"Didn't what?" Smyth asked.
"You made her partner, didn't you?"
"Who are you talking about?"
"You know exactly who I'm talking about."
"Busted," he said with a big fat smile on his face, his palms held out in playful surrender.
"Oh, Jesus H. Christ! She hasn't even put in her eight years yet."
"The Committee decided Kimberly was more in line with firm's image. What we're really looking for as we look to the future."
"What the hell does that mean?" Samantha asked, even as she realized precisely what Smyth meant. Kimberly Ashton Davis was a Richmond native. After attending all the proper private schools, she'd earned her undergraduate degree at the University of Georgia, where she had pledged Kappa. Law school at Washington & Lee University followed. Dubyunell, as the alums were fond of saying. Her father was a judge on the state Court of Appeals, and her mother was heavily involved in the Junior League. This was all very important.
Samantha's parents were Lebanese immigrants who ran an ethnic grocery store in the suburbs. Samantha earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Virginia before moving onto the University of Richmond for law school. She did well there, finishing third in her class and parlaying that performance into a job offer from Willett & Hall. Her career had been workmanlike whereas Davis' had been destiny.
"I'll see you later," Smyth said.
"Go to hell," Samantha said.
Smyth left the room without a word, accepting Samantha's request as acceptable fallout from the bomb he dropped in the young woman's life. As such, Hunter Smyth was not in his office for the remaining fallout, which he likely would not have considered acceptable. Samantha staggered to the bar and poured a second drink. Before she took the first sip, however, she walked over to Smyth's desk and plopped down on his black leather executive chair.
Without comment or ceremony, she poured the entire glass of wine onto the keyboard of his shiny laptop.
CHAPTER FOUR
Friday, December 21
2:05 p.m.
Whatever bug Sam had contracted exploded like a hurricane over warm waters. By the time the day's weak light started to fade, Samantha was radiating with fever, her head was pounding, and her throat felt like it had been repaved with broken glass. She was stretched out on the floor behind her desk, near the small ceramic heater she used to warm the office, the temperature fluctuations of which tended to be a bit extreme. Even though she was running a temperature, chills rippled across her body like little Samquakes.
All in all, today was screaming its way up Samantha's list of Worst Days of Her Life. In fact, she was having a hard time coming up with another day that matched this one in the breadth and depth of its misery. As she lay on her back, watching a moth flutter about the fluorescent light in her off
ice, she tried to keep her mind clear. She pushed back thoughts of what was next, ready to bust down the walls of her mind like the Kool-Aid man. That was not a discussion she was ready to have just yet. So, she just watched the moth, that brainless wonder, flirting with the light fixture, which would never do anything but be a light fixture. She found herself jealous of the moth.
Her life at the firm spooled out in her mind like a home movie. Willett & Hall was a 2,000-lawyer behemoth with offices in sixteen cities worldwide. They even had an office in Burkina Faso. Burkina Faso! Samantha did not know where Burkina Faso was and had deliberately chosen not to find out. She was secretly afraid that if she knew where it was, the firm would have transferred her there.
For as long as she could remember, she had arrived at the office at eight in the morning, tall cup of Starbucks in hand, and worked until about ten at night. She could probably have been home by nine each night, but she liked to take an hour in the middle of the day to get out of the building for lunch or a workout or even to just clear her head with a quick walk around downtown Richmond. She was confident this daily respite kept her from happily and ritualistically murdering each of her co-workers.
With a grunt and a wave of nausea, she got up off the floor and fished two expired cold/flu tablets from her drawer. Dry-swallowing them was not an appealing option, but finding the strength to go down the hallway to the water cooler was even less appealing. Christ, someone out there might know about her little career hiccup, and she was in no mood to talk about that. She nearly gagged as she swallowed the pills, which, naturally, seemed to get stuck on her swollen glands. Her eyes watered as she got the pills down. With that done, she crumpled into her executive chair. But for the hum of her desktop computer, her office was silent. It felt like a tomb. Jesus, had it always been this small? This had been her home for the better part of a decade. She had spent more time in this room than in any other spot on earth. Quite a legacy, Khouri. Quite a legacy.
Samantha had been with the firm's litigation section since joining Willett & Hall immediately after law school. This was the firm's largest division, made up of more than eight hundred lawyers scattered worldwide like mercenaries, because what good was a law firm if it wasn't litigating across the globe? Currently, the firm had 3,000 active litigation files, fewer than ten of which would ever see trial. The remaining cases were like picnickers on a hot summer day, feeding the insectine lawyers thousands of billable hours of legal research, discovery motions, motions for summary judgment, demurrers, expert depositions, and document reviews.
Her phone rang, breaking her out of her trance. For the briefest of moments, she wondered if it might be Smyth, calling to tell her that the Committee had changed its mind. She didn't even have to look at the caller ID screen to know that was nothing more than a pipe dream. And when her eyes registered the familiar number on the screen, the pit in the center of her stomach just deepened. She took a deep breath and lifted the receiver.
"Hi, Mama," she said.
"Sweetheart, you still coming for dinner, right?"
Samantha bit her lip and exhaled slowly. She had forgotten about dinner.
"I'm coming down with something. I don't know if I'm up for it."
"What? What are you talking about? You too young to be sick. You eat something, you feel better."
Zaina Khouri had never acknowledged the presence of illness in any of her children. It was as if she thought that would be admitting that they were dying.
"I'll try," Samantha said.
"You promised!"
"I have a lot of work to do," Samantha said. The whole career flameout was a discussion for another day.
"That stupid office. Your father will be very disappointed."
"I said I would try. Bye."
"Yallah." An Arabic brush-off, part Goodbye, part Whatever.
The line clicked dead. Samantha replaced the handset in the cradle, just thankful the conversation was over.
* * *
Samantha tapped her computer mouse, which revved up the hard drive and brought the screen back to life. Absently, she clicked on an icon in the corner titled Scoreboard and waited as the firm's billing records popped onscreen. Through the window to her right, she could just make out the James River, a slate grey cord running through the heart of downtown on this cold December afternoon. Just cold, biting misery as far as the eye could see, thought Samantha. She turned her attention back to the screen. She clicked on a link, which brought up the records for the firm's eighth-year associates.
Each Willett & Hall associate was required to bill a minimum of 2,200 hours per year. That meant 2,200 hours of actual work that could be billed to specific clients. What it did not mean was checking non-work-related e-mail, eating lunch, going to the restroom (unless you were particularly discreet in smuggling a file into the john), or calling the dry cleaner after they stained your favorite skirt. If you worked fifty weeks a year, you'd need to average forty-four billable hours per week. And Samantha had long since calculated that it took about ninety minutes of office time to bill one hour. Meaning she was in the office sixty-five hours a week just to reach the minimum.
But 2,200 was just the minimum, and no associate dared clock in the mere minimum if she had any hopes of making partner. The Executive Committee carefully reviewed an associate's billing history when it came time to decide who was making partner. Partnerships, which were offered only after eight years of toil, rarely went to any associate who had averaged less than 2,500 hours per year.
Willett & Hall was a giant factory of law, and its machinery never stopped churning. The firm provided each new associate with a Blackberry (never to be turned off), a MacBook Pro equipped with a mobile broadband network card, and a standing order to never let three hours elapse without checking e-mail or voice mail. Each time an associate failed to log on to check his messages within the three-hour window, he or she was docked one billable hour. This requirement ran around the clock, 365 days a year (including holidays, vacations and weekends), because the firm prided itself on customer service for all its clients, foreign and domestic. Two nights a week, Samantha took the hit because she needed a full night's sleep every once in a while. But the price for that was billing an extra hundred hours to make up the deficiency.
Without fail, the feeling of importance that accompanied this technological buffet thrilled every new associate as they started their careers with Willett & Hall. By the end of the first month, though, most of the associates felt like Samantha, who often wondered if there was a way to torture her Blackberry and make it suffer. Maybe plug in an incompatible battery charger? Pluck out vital components with tweezers while it was powered up? Take it out in the woods and beat it with a baseball bat, like in the movie Office Space?
Associates worked around the clock. Many slept in their offices a couple nights a week in the never-ending quest to bill, bill, bill! On the firm's Intranet, each associate's billable hour total was updated in real time, available for any more senior attorney in the firm to see. The Scoreboard, as it was not so affectionately known, was broken down into eight sections, one for each class of associates, and each associate was ranked, much like college basketball teams. Associates whose hours-to-date left them projected to finish below the minimum saw their names in an embarrassing shade of red. It was like announcing you were infected with the Ebola virus. Immediately, other attorneys began distancing themselves from the Reds, fearing these slackers would somehow infect them as well. Those go-getters who projected to make 2,700 hours (and the rare associate bonus) saw their names shaded in green.
Two consecutive months in red brought an e-mail from the associate's supervising partner, which was half-encouragement, half-warning. Three months brought an in-person visit from the supervising partner. Four months brought a visit from two security officers, who escorted the terminated associate from the building. There was no further discussion about the matter. On any given day, fewer than ten associates' names were in either red or green.
The Committee believed the Scoreboard was an effective motivational tool, especially given that the firm paid twenty percent more than any other large firm on the East Coast. Despite the challenging work conditions, turnover was relatively low at the firm. Everyone was making too much money to complain, so for the most part, associates kept their heads down and billed until they were dry, bitter and wealthy shells of the idealistic law students they had once been. Or until they'd been told they were not going to make partner.
As it usually was, Samantha's name was in green. Since Labor Day, she had billed nearly eight hundred hours, and it had brought her to the precipice of the $10,000 bonus, which awaited those who broke the 2,700-hour mark. She had earned the bonus four years running and was right at the doorstep again this year. And then they had pulled the rug out from under her.
No way it was because of OmniCare. For eight years, she had been a billing dynamo, never finishing outside the top two highest-billing associates. She had snagged a handful of new clients. She wasn't one to dick around gossiping. Internet surfing was not one of her hobbies. What Samantha did, what she was known throughout the firm for, was work. Document review, deposition summaries, legal research, client interviews and brief writing were the bread and butter of her daily life. She felt oddly empty inside, a void she had never felt before. Would that be her legacy after nearly a decade at this desk?
It occurred to her then that in her eight years as a practicing lawyer, she had never tried a case in front of a jury. She had never even seen one for that matter. She had taken a few depositions here and there, tried a few cases in the district courts. Settlement conferences and mediations ruled the day. Insurance companies were not particularly interested in gambling their bottom lines on what they believed were the whims of bored, distracted and uneducated juries. If there was a good chance a case might be lost, the client paid. Otherwise, W&H lawyers pounded the other side with motions and discovery, choking the usually undermanned opposition with bankers' boxes overflowing with documents until it quit. And the cases that did go to trial were handled by partners.