Unbillable Hours: A True Story

by Ian Graham

  (New voice) “Paging.”

  “Hi. I was just paged. This is my first day, and I’m not sure what to do.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Ian Graham”

  “Are you in the office, Mr. Graham?”

  “Yes.”

  Click.

  Thirty seconds later, my office phone rang. Julianne Wang, a fourth-year associate in the Litigation Department, was calling from her cell phone as she drove. “Did you get the email from Doreen?” she asked. I told her we had just finished orientation and I hadn’t even had a chance to turn on my computer. “You should probably do that,” she said dryly. “There should be a forwarded email from me to you and a few other first-years explaining the assignment. If you have any questions, call me. Otherwise, I’ll see you in San Diego tomorrow.”

  When I finally got my computer going, I found an email to me and five other stubs with the subject line “First Assignment — SD Document Review Team.” The San Diego office needed some help reviewing documents for a healthcare case. We were to get ourselves to Latham’s San Diego office by eight thirty the next morning and await further instructions. We could drive or take the train, business class. The firm had reserved rooms for us at the U.S. Grant Hotel downtown. Attached to the email were two documents, one a twenty-page subpoena from the U.S. Attorney’s Office that we were to read and bring with us to San Diego. The second, labeled “Billing Instructions,” explained that we were to bill all time and expenses to a ten-digit client matter number.

  As I was printing out the subpoena, Trevor and Mike walked in. They had been recruited for this assignment as well, and they’d seen my name on the email.

  “So I guess we’re healthcare lawyers, whatever that means,” Trevor said with a smile.

  “Go home and grab your shit,” Mike barked. “My secretary put us all on the seven o’clock train.”

  I had been in my office less than five minutes. Before leaving, I took a minute to look around. The room was about fifteen feet long by ten feet wide, with an L-shaped built-in desk that started on my left and doglegged into the middle of the room. Empty cabinets and drawers ran the length of one wall. Two chairs sat in front of my desk, and behind the desk a wall of windows faced northwest. The air was unusually clear for LA. Looking to the left, I could see the rooftop pool of the Standard Hotel a few blocks away, and beyond that, a corner of the Staples Center, where the Lakers play. To the right, if I pressed up against the glass, I could just make out the blue rooftop of Dodger Stadium.

  From high above, the hills of Highland Park and East LA looked serene. I knew very little about that area, except that you didn’t want to run out of gas or break down there on your way to or from a Dodgers game.

  CHAPTER 5

  Monkey Scribe

  I believe in the Rolex Daytona (Black Face), the Porsche Carrera GT, mega yachts, supermodels (or rough facsimiles thereof)… and the yearning of my soul for something more.

  — Anonymous big-firm lawyer/blogger

  ON THE TRAIN to San Diego, Trevor, Mike, and I drank the complimentary Amtrak wine and tried to make sense of the government’s subpoena. It was a request for documents relating to various doctors and diseases. There were at least fifty different Medicare diagnosis codes, and something called “cost reports” were mentioned repeatedly. There were more than thirty densely worded requests, each with several subparts, all of them using broad terms such as “relating to,” “in connection with,” and “in reference to.”

  “I hardly understand a word of this,” Trevor said.

  “Yeah, this looks awful,” Mike agreed.

  “At least we get to stay in a nice hotel!” I said.

  The Amtrak wine was plentiful but poisonous. After only a couple of glasses, I woke up the next morning with no idea where I was. My head felt like a beaten piñata.

  When we met in the lobby the next morning, Trevor, who also looked like hell, was mumbling something about his head. We ordered coffee to go and headed to the office, where we met three other Latham stubs from LA: Paul Martin, Tom Lee, and Eric Chang. Lee had been a summer associate in Latham’s New York office the year before. Martin and Chang had summered elsewhere and were new to the firm. Lee and Martin seemed friendly. Chang had the unreadable expression of a poker player and shook hands with us without a word. Trevor whispered, “Chang was in my section at UCLA. Weird dude.”

  A few minutes later a paralegal fetched us, and we followed her upstairs to a windowless conference room that she called “the opium den” and then began laughing hysterically. Three San Diego associates were already there and had been the whole night, it appeared, from their disheveled clothing and thousand-yard stares. They nodded as we entered, glad to see help arrive. Cardboard boxes covered the huge conference table, and hundreds more were stacked along the walls. Twelve sheets of white paper were posted along the far wall, each with the name of a different person on it. We stood there in awkward silence until Trevor spoke up.

  “I’m just a stub and all, but I’m guessing the guys on the wall are pretty much fucked.”

  “Something like that,” said Julianne, entering the room behind us. She handed us another fifteen-page subpoena from the U.S. Inspector General’s Office to our client, an HMO being investigated for fraudulently overbilling Medicare. Our job, Julianne said, was to review every piece of paper in every box and pull any documents that were responsive to any of the more than thirty requests in the first subpoena, or the twenty requests in the second, or that contained any of the names posted around the room. For each document we pulled, we were to fill out a form, listing which request the document was responsive to and signing our name at the bottom. “Billing instructions are in the email you received. Submit all receipts for dinners and travel to your secretaries for reimbursement. Any questions?”

  I had a few, like “What is a cost report?” and “Can you explain Medicare?” But I kept quiet. After a beat came the only question: “Do you have any good restaurants in San Diego, like Spago in LA?” from Jeff Sanders, a late-arriving LA stub.

  “Shut the fuck up, Jeff,” I heard Paul Martin whisper to him amid disgusted groans and eye-rolling from the San Diego attorneys who had been working through the night and had now pegged us as typical LA types, more concerned with fancy dinners than work — which wasn’t altogether inaccurate.

  “I’m sure these guys can help you with that,” Julianne said, nodding to the San Diego associates. She thanked us for coming and told us lunch would be brought into the conference room at noon so that we could work straight through. Then she left.

  Each box held thousands of documents. There were now more than fifty broadly worded requests for documents in the subpoenas. It was our first full day of law practice, and none of us knew anything about the healthcare industry or the issues involved in the case.

  “Shoot me in the face,” Mike Wilke muttered as we sat down at the table.

  It took me most of the first day to get through one box. In response to the subpoena, our client had sent every document that could possibly relate in any manner to any of these requests, including emails, billing records, patient medical reports, and other unidentifiable business records. My first box contained thousands of pages of Medicare billing reports and emails from hospital staff, all laced with incomprehensible codes and industry jargon. Each page in each box had to be compared carefully to the fifty requests in the subpoena and inspected to see if it contained any of the names posted on the wall or the names and/or email addresses of a list of attorneys. In some cases, it took me close to an hour to review a single page.

  It was mind-numbing work, but there was a feeling of camaraderie in the conference room. Jeff Sanders’s question, ill timed as it was, caught our mood. We were still excited at staying in fancy hotels and dining at expensive restaurants on the client’s dime. We laughed and joked amiably about how hard we had worked to get here just to do mindless work. Except for Eric Chang.

  Chang was not so amiab
le. He didn’t say a word in the conference room for the first several days and kept to himself in the evenings. Finally, on Friday, apparently sick of our chatter, he spoke up. “You think this is funny?” he snarled. “If I’d known I was going to be a glorified secretary, I would have taken a job on Wall Street where I’d be making a lot more money. $125,000 may look like good money to us, but broken down by the hour, at 2,600 billable hours a year we’re making, like, $40 an hour. That’s what I pay my cleaning lady!” He jabbed his finger into the table for emphasis. “The firm bills us out to clients at $250 an hour, and even if half that amount goes for overhead, we’ve paid for our salary after 1,100 hours. Every hour we bill after that is profit for the partners. We’re just units of income!” When he finished, he put his head down and resumed working in silence.

  “Eric Chang, ladies and gentlemen,” Trevor whispered to Mike and me.

  It would have taken us years to look carefully at each document. I figured this was why there had been so much emphasis on “diligence” and “attention to detail” at our orientations. The work was so tedious that it was tempting to turn off your brain and just coast. We tried to stay attentive, but by the middle of the second week, we all felt brain-dead and nobody cared anymore. By consensus, we started taking a narrower approach, tossing out every document as unresponsive to the subpoenas unless something in it jumped out at us. And the pace picked up. By the end of the second week, we were starting to think we could finish in another two or three weeks.

  The following Monday, a paralegal quietly wheeled in a stack of new boxes, and then another, and another. “You didn’t know?” she asked, seeing the pained expressions of surprise on our faces. “There’s an entire warehouse full of these. Like, thousands more.”

  And so, for the next few months, the routine was the same. Every Sunday night, I would take the seven o’clock Surfliner down to San Diego, review documents all week, and return on the eleven o’clock train Friday night. It wasn’t difficult work by any stretch — “easy hours,” the more senior attorneys called it. But within a few weeks, we had eaten at every fancy restaurant in San Diego, the novelty of hotel life was wearing off, and cramped in a conference room together for more than twelve hours a day, we were starting to get on one another’s nerves. Arguments flared up over reality television, sports, and other trivial things, to the point where Chang and a second-year associate from the San Diego office couldn’t even be in the same room with each other. Chang began reviewing his boxes in a storage closet.

  In addition to the document review, most of us were also being peppered with other assignments from The Book. “John Rodin needs you for a five-to-ten-hour research project to be completed by Friday,” or “Joe Cathey needs emergency research for a hearing by tomorrow.” Most nights, after finishing in the conference room, I would work into the early morning hours in the San Diego office’s law library, and on most weekends I would go into the LA office to research and write memos for these other assignments.

  It wasn’t all bad during those first months. On the nights and weekends I had free, life was good. Life was great, actually. I had money to dine at expensive restaurants and run up hundreddollar bar tabs without batting an eye. I bought a BMW and started dating a cute blonde who lived in the apartment across the hall. But getting a small taste of the good life in LA only made the long hours at the office more painful. Most of my nonlawyer friends weren’t making the money I was, but they had time to meet up for happy hour during the week, to surf on weekends, and to go out at night.

  To compensate for what I was missing, I bought things. During breaks at work I found myself shopping online, looking for expensive toys to remind myself why I had taken this job. I bought a Cartier watch, a surfboard, a set of golf clubs I never got to use, and a flat-screen television I rarely watched. I had earned them, I figured, and so far, spending power was the only real perk of my job.

  I wasn’t the only one with the spending bug. As the paychecks rolled in, the associates’ parking garage began to resemble a German car dealership, with BMWs and Mercedes in almost every space. Some people do yoga or eat chocolate to make themselves feel better. Lawyers buy things. It’s is a reminder that despite the impossible hours and tedium of the job, they can afford eighty-dollar socks and thousand-dollar car payments. And as they claw their way up the ladder, they buy more and more. Before they know it, they’re in golden handcuffs, unable to imagine living without a huge income. At this point, an expensive watch and a few toys didn’t have me in chains yet, but I could feel myself becoming very comfortable with my paycheck.

  IN THE OFFICE elevator one Saturday, I ran into Steve Newman, a short, round-faced, intense seventh-year litigation associate for whom I had done some research the previous summer. Steve seemed like a decent guy, but I had heard recently about his reputation for being tough on junior associates and for writing bad reviews.

  “You busy?” he asked.

  It was a common elevator question, the only appropriate response to which was, “Yes, totally slammed.” Anything else and you risked getting yourself assigned more work, or worse, looking like dead weight.

  “I’m totally slammed,” I said. “I’m doing a big doc review and doing research for Rodin, Cathey, and a few others on some of their cases,” I told him.

  “Great,” he said. “I need some help on one of my cases. I’ll email you tomorrow.”

  When I arrived at the office in San Diego on Monday morning, there were ten or so emails from Steve waiting for me. The client was an insurance company being sued for allegedly failing to pay benefits to an elderly man, resulting in his loss of sight. Steve wanted me to research a few legal issues and to send him summaries and analyses of the cases I found. And so, in San Diego that week, in addition to reviewing documents ten hours a day and then doing the other research assignments, I stayed at the office past 2:00 A.M. most nights working on Steve’s case.

  Meanwhile, I was also getting assignments from a partner, Dan Sutton. It was my first direct interaction with a partner, and I was determined to do a good job. On a Friday, Sutton asked me to pull together a list of documents from the case file over the weekend and send them to him and the client in preparation for mediation that Monday. I worked around the clock all weekend to find the documents, double-check that they were the right ones, write a cover memo, and send them off. I thought I’d done a decent job and might get to sleep normally for a few days during the mediation.

  On Monday morning, I arrived to find an email from the senior associate on the case to Dan, the partner, and the entire team on the case including associates, paralegals, and secretaries that read something like: “Dan, I apologize for Ian. I don’t know why he sent those documents to the client. He was not authorized to do so and there is no excuse. I expressly told him not to. I have no idea what he was thinking. He is new and clearly doesn’t get it. I will make sure it is handled appropriately. I’ll get him off the case.”

  Frantically, I went back through the emails from the associate and Dan, trying to see what I had done wrong. Had I missed something? Dan, the partner, had asked me to send the documents to him and the client. What was I supposed to do? As far as I could tell, I had done it just as I had been asked. What was the problem? And if I had messed up, why on earth did he have to include everyone in his email. I began to write a response to all the addressees on the email, explaining what I had done and trying to exonerate myself, but it seemed petty to involve a partner, who was in the middle of mediation, in associate bickering.

  Over lunch I explained the situation to Trevor and Matt, to get their take on what I should do. “Don’t email everyone,” Trevor said. “You’re not going to win a pissing contest with Gibson. I’d speak to him directly, give him a chance to explain, and clear it up with him first.” Trevor was usually the voice of reason. “Tell Gibson to go fuck himself,” was Matt’s advice.

  I left a voice message asking the senior associate to call me back to discuss his email. The next day h
e called me back. “My bad,” he said, and then hung up. He never sent a retraction email. There wasn’t much I could do. When I relayed the story to my father a few days later, he laughed. “Unfortunately, blame rolls downhill in a law firm,” he said. “Most lawyers aren’t good managers. They’ve never been in a position of power until they got into a law firm and are quick to point the finger if anything goes wrong. Probably not the last time something like this will happen.”

  AFTER REVIEWING DOCUMENTS for six weeks in the San Diego office, I returned to the LA office looking forward to getting more substantive, interesting work. I was assigned to work on a merger of two movie studios, which sounded promising. But my task on the deal was “due diligence” — the corporate law equivalent of a document review. When one company is considering buying, merging with, or investing in another, it needs to know what is in “the target’s” contracts, guarantees, financial statements, and loan agreements, in order to know what it is buying. The process of reviewing these documents is called due diligence — words that make associates cringe. It amounts to teams of associates spending long hours reading and taking notes on the fine print of densely worded documents, often for months on end.

  Five other stubs and I were sent to the studio’s annex, a warehouse in Encino, and told to look through all the boxes in the warehouse and take notes on “anything material” to the deal — though we were never told what the specifics of the deal were, nor what was considered to be “material.” When I asked a senior associate for clarification, he handed me a diagram of the deal structure, with arrows and lines connecting more than twenty different entities, and with captions such as “convertible series A stock” and “shelf takedown of subordinated notes.” We spent six hours a day aimlessly sifting through the studio’s files, taking detailed notes on everything we saw.

  At the same time, I was also doing due diligence on an IPO for a large real estate company in downtown LA. This required an additional six-to-twelve hours a day — on top of the time spent in Burbank — looking through more boxes of documents. The deal was worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the client, and they expected us to work mistake-free around the clock to get it done. For me and two other stubs on the deal, Wilke and Jon Davies, a tall, laid-back LA native from Harvard Law, this meant pulling all-nighters checking the fine print in thousands of real estate financing arrangements, leases, signage agreements, and insurance contracts.