“Is that what they call it?” I grinned.
“Yeah, this building I mean.” He gestured around the lobby. “I think it has something to do with the ominous big, black steel looming over the Empire of New York.” I noticed the most adorable glint in his eye when he emphasized the word “looming.”
“I’m Jason.” He extended his hand.
When he asked me out for dinner a week later, I couldn’t believe my luck. I was certain he was going to go for Fiona, easily the prettiest summer associate, with her long blond hair, sparkling blue eyes, and yoga instructor’s body. I won’t be modest, I’m pretty, but I haven’t always been that way. Mom used to tell me that one day I’d be a beautiful swan, but she failed to mention the whole ugly duckling stage I’d have to suffer through first. I hit every awkward stage possible: braces, pimples, unfortunate haircuts, tragic fashion choices. But when I went away to college the braces came off, the pimples cleared up, and I left my scrunchies behind. Boys finally started to notice me, but none of them in any way, shape, or form had been on the same level as Jason.
We left right from work (separately, of course, not wanting to arouse any rumors) and headed to an oyster bar in the West Village. With no awning, it was the kind of place that you would never know was there unless you were an insider. Jason had confidently, but not cockily, taken my hand and navigated me to our table. As he pulled out my chair, he leaned down and whispered—no, more like growled—in my ear, You look fantastic. It sent a scrumptious, involuntary shiver down to my toes. More importantly, though, I believed him.
It was one of those perfect New York City dinners, where everything from the butter served with the bread to the whipped cream on top of the dessert makes you feel like your taste buds have been amplified tenfold. We chatted easily and I found myself amazed that, despite his good looks and exclusive boarding school background, he was down to earth and fun and even a tiny bit goofy. “Why do you want to work in the corporate department?” he’d inquired, forking out a mussel and popping it into his mouth. “You do realize it’s the most intense department in the firm, don’t you?” After briefly debating which version to share, I gave him the same answer I’d given the on-campus interviewer from F&D—I like to look at a corporate contract the same way I do a crossword puzzle, figuring out the words that fit, and I love the challenge of a puzzle. Not only did he not laugh at my nerdy answer, he’d beamed and said, “I love how ambitious you are.” I’d rolled my eyes playfully, but could think of nothing other than how the word “love” sounded coming out of his mouth.
The rest of the summer flew by in budding-relationship bliss. Jason and I were inseparable, taking turns sleeping at each other’s apartments, sneaking kisses at summer associate events, and making out furiously on cab rides home. The goal of the firm that summer was to introduce us to law firm life while preventing us from getting a significant glimpse into the inner workings of Biglaw. F&D spared no expense to shield us from the reality so we would return to the firm after graduation to work as first year associates. “Fattening you up for the slaughter,” one associate termed it.
Our relationship survived long distance during our final year of law school and even our first year as associates, which seemed like a hazy blur to me now. We learned to adapt to the unpredictable Biglaw timetable, spending time together whenever work allowed—sometimes a quick lunch at a deli close to the office, other times a lingering Saturday night dinner at the latest hot restaurant, putting our large paychecks to work. Jason’s schedule in the Trusts department wasn’t as demanding as mine.
Being in the corporate department meant being on call twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, and never leaving the office until the partner you’re working for has left the building for the night. It could be eight in the evening or two in the morning, but most days it was impossible to tell. Some days I would bite the bullet and sneak out before eight. Sneaking out was a finely honed survival technique that involved a fair amount of planning and forethought. Above all, it must appear to other lawyers that you are returning to your office, not actually leaving to go home for the night. When you leave, you have to pretend you are just going to the word processing center to drop off a document for revision or to the cafeteria to grab a Red Bull (Gonna need some help staying up all night!). Always be carrying a file. Your office has to look like you are coming back shortly—a coat left on the back of the chair, your computer logged on, a half empty cup of coffee beside a document left open on your desk. You only take the elevator down to the lobby when there isn’t anyone senior to you in it. If there’s a partner in the elevator when you enter, you get off on the next floor, take a lap, and try again. If you happen to be really unlucky and there’s a partner in the lobby when you exit, have your back-up plan (“Just picking up my Seamless delivery!”). These were details I had mastered. They may sound ridiculous, but they were necessary to Biglaw survival. Otherwise, you risked getting caught leaving early, meaning you’d suddenly find yourself staffed on a deal no one wanted to work on because, clearly, you had too much time on your hands. Some associates resorted to taking the stairs down twenty-seven floors to avoid being caught in the elevator, but I never did that. Too desperate.
“Who’s the partner on the deal?” Sadir called from the other side of the partition, knowing full well who it was.
“Maxwell Gold.”
“Stay Puft?” Sadir whistled through pursed lips. “Wow—a deal with a four corner partner and you’re just a second year associate. You’re moving up in the world.”
I rolled my eyes. The only thing that excited Sadir more than gathering information on his fellow associates was the rigid law firm hierarchy. He’d actually ranked all ninety-five attorneys in the corporate department in order of alleged importance, on a list he referred to as “The Power Players.” Of course, if anyone wanted to discern the pecking order, all they had to do was look at the offices. Partners had the biggest offices with the best views and the partners that brought in the most business were rewarded with a corner office. In the corporate department, associates called them the “four corner” partners. They were the top rainmakers, the partners who enjoyed the bulk of the profits, while the other partners, the “service partners,” sweated it out in the trenches. After the “service partners” came the senior associates, who had their own offices. Next were the junior associates, who shared an office with another junior associate. Enter yours truly. Share a 150-square-foot space with another person for fifteen to twenty hours a day, and even the most unobtrusive, agreeable officemate will eventually get on your nerves. It reminded me of an experiment I’d studied in tenth grade science—a cage of rats are supplied with food and water, replenished to support an increasing population, but the size of the cage remained fixed. The result was hyper-aggression and increased mortality. Some rats even ate their own offspring in an effort to prevent the overcrowding. After more than a year sharing a small space with Sadir, I could relate. At least I hadn’t killed him … yet.
My computer pinged with Alex’s response. Still here and you’re going to need a boatload of caffeine. I just heard Russ tell his secretary to have breakfast delivered to the war room at 5 A.M.
I groaned, suddenly reminded of why I never liked working with Russ Tornelli. He lived at the office. “Literally,” Sadir had emphasized when he’d passed on this tidbit of gossip. When his lease ran out a year ago, Russ had apparently slept in his office for two months because he was too cheap to rent another apartment. He was currently sleeping on his parents’ couch when he wasn’t at the office and still had no intention of getting his own apartment.
As part of my preparation for hunkering down I reluctantly sent an email to Jason, who I knew was waiting patiently for me at my apartment, as he was most nights when he left the office before me.
To: Jason Kermode
From: Mackenzie Corbett
It’s going to be another late night here—you can go ahead and order the pizza and watch Mad Men without me. Sorry!! If you’r
e awake when I get home I promise to greet you like Megan greets Don ;)
To: Mackenzie Corbett
From: Jason Kermode
Now there’s no way I’ll be asleep! 1-4-3
A wide smile broke across my face. 1: I. 4: Love. 3: You. It was a special code we had developed early in our relationship, a way to secretly connect at work. Sometimes Jason would tap out the code on the table when we were in the same meeting, other times I’d arrive at work to find a yellow sticky note on my monitor with the code. It still felt unreal that I was the girlfriend of such an irresistible guy. Not that I was inclined to ever resist him.
1-4-3, I wrote back, wishing I was snuggling up with him on the couch instead of holed up in my office.
“I’m going to grab some caffeine,” I announced to Sadir. “Need anything other than Red Bull?”
“Just get me the Red Bull,” he mumbled without looking up.
I pecked out a quick IM to Alex. Wanna join me on a coffee run?
See you at the elevator, he wrote back.
I grabbed a random file, ensuring I looked busy, tucked it under my arm and made my way down the corridor. Despite the late hour, lights were still gleaming in offices, phones were still ringing, photocopiers still whirring. F&D, like all Biglaw firms, ensured its lawyers could work twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. There were night time secretaries that could be reserved when your own secretary went home and a round-the-clock photocopy and document support center to ensure that the marked-up drafts lawyers dropped off before leaving for the evening were retyped and waiting for them in their inboxes first thing in the morning. The full-service cafeteria, complete with a salad bar, sushi bar, grill station, and sundae bar, was available for all three meals. If you didn’t have time to leave your desk a cafeteria worker could bring it right to your office, piping hot. Prefer food from the outside world? No problem—simply place an order (or have your secretary place an order) with Seamless, an online food delivery service offering any type of food available in the city. A uniformed deliveryman would bring it right to the lobby. Dinners were always billed to the client automatically, so no need to bother with cash. If you were one of the lucky ones leaving for the night, you simply emailed the firm’s operation center and they ordered you a Town Car home. Pantries were stocked with snack food and toiletries for those spending the night at the office. There was even a fully stocked medicine cabinet should you require … oh, I don’t know … three Advil and a swig of Pepto-Bismol at 3 A.M.? All of it set up so that associates never had to stop working. There might as well have been a large neon sign erected outside that blinked “Open 24 Hours.”
I pushed through the glass doors to the elevator bank, expecting to see Alex. Instead, there stood Sarah, looking hostile and unpleasant with her arms folded and her brow furrowed. Shit.
The earliest sign that Sarah and I weren’t exactly going to be Oprah and Gail was when she’d stood me up for the mentor/mentee introductory lunch. Giving her the benefit of the doubt, I’d gone to her office to introduce myself and discovered, behind a meticulously clean desk, a woman so full of tension that even the air around her seemed to emit stress. One look at her and I knew I wouldn’t be picking her brain for advice on surviving in the male-dominated Corporate group or “leaning in,” as they say. The crease in her pinstriped pants was so flawlessly pressed it could have been used as a paring knife, and her pointy-toed Jimmy Choos could’ve doubled as weapons. All in all, she’d expertly cultivated a look that screamed, I can crush you.
I grinned tightly at Sarah now, nodding what I hoped was a friendly hello. She glared in my direction before facing the elevators, not even acknowledging my presence.
Taking her cue, I stood stiffly in silence, keeping my distance, gripping my hands around my file. I couldn’t help stealing a surreptitious peek at Sarah out of the corner of my eye. Everything about her was rigid and taut—from her long blond hair pulled back into a severe pony tail, to her pointy hip bones that looked like they might poke out from beneath her skin at any moment. Even the sides of her squared manicure looked razor-sharp. Every part of her was precisely in place, but precariously so. I imagined that if you pulled out one bobby pin from her perfectly slicked back hair, she would completely unravel.
What little I knew about Sarah I’d learned from Sadir. He’d given me the run-though of all the senior associates in my first week. Derek Boyle, he explained, was an eighth year associate who was “riding his ponies to partnership,” which meant he staffed deals heavily with junior associates, had them do all of the work, and then took all of the credit. Brian Gambrill, on the other hand, was a seventh year associate famous for emailing associates while they were on vacation and demanding an immediate response. According to Brian, vacation was no excuse for not continually checking your BlackBerry. “I was responding to emails while on the Matterhorn ride at Disney World with my nine-year old daughter during our only family vacation all year,” Brian would brag. His daughter will be telling that story to a therapist one day, I’m sure. Although something tells me she won’t be hunting for material.
“What about Sarah?” I’d asked, figuring that while Sadir was dishing I might as well get some information on my mysteriously bitchy mentor.
“Never worked with her. I try to avoid working with women. No offense,” was his response. “But I know she’s a fifth year associate who graduated top of her class from Columbia, is supposedly brilliant in a diabolical kind of way, and is gunning for partnership. Which means she’ll throw anyone under the bus to save her own ass. You definitely gotta watch your back with that one.” He made a stabbing motion with his hand to emphasize the point.
I was shivering at the memory when, to my surprise, Sarah broke the chilly silence.
“So what’s keeping my mentee here so late?” she asked icily, her eyes still fixed forward.
My body jolted, startled not only that she’d spoken, but also that she’d remembered she was supposed to be my mentor.
“I’m just working on a merger that’s signing tonight,” I answered, a little too manically. “For uhh … a client of Maxwell’s.”
She turned her head slowly to face me, giving me a frigid once-over.
I was suddenly aware that after being at the office nineteen straight hours, I was looking as disheveled as I felt.
“Well, I hope it’s work keeping you here and not something else, Mackenzie.” Her overly glossed lips curled into a smirk. “Rumor has it you’re hooking up with another associate.”
Hooking up with? That sounded so tawdry. “I’m in a relationship with another associate.” I struggled to keep my tone as pleasant as I could. Suddenly realizing neither of us had pushed the button for the elevator, I pressed the down button three times, hoping the high speed elevator lived up to its name.
“I guess you didn’t get the memo on how unprofessional it is to engage in a romantic relationship with a work colleague.” She raised one overly plucked eyebrow, and with her thin nose and slight sneer, I swear she was a dead ringer for the evil witch in Wicked. “I hope you don’t end up like my last mentee. She got married after ten months at the firm, pregnant immediately thereafter, and was never heard from again. It’s women like her that put the women’s movement back decades. Why would any firm promote us if they think we’re just here to meet men and make babies? I choose to counteract that stereotype by putting my career first. I suggest you do too.”
As if on cue, the elevator doors opened and she stepped inside and turned around, facing me.
“Oh, go … go ahead, I’m just waiting for someone.” I pointed at the glass doors to the elevator bank.
“Of course you are,” she said frostily as the elevator door slammed shut.
2
TRUTH BE TOLD, MY fondness for crossword puzzles wasn’t the reason I chose the corporate department. In Biglaw, the corporate department was a mark of success and I’d been fixated with success ever since I saw my sister, Margaret, draped in four first place meda
ls at the regional swim competition when I was ten years old. Mom had signed Margaret and me up for the swim team at the community center that summer after reading an article on the importance of sports in building girls’ self-esteem. Margaret had groaned, but I was excited—I loved swimming. When the season started, it didn’t take a stopwatch to tell me that Margaret was easily the fastest swimmer on the team, often finishing races a full length ahead of everyone else. And I would know, being that I was usually the one bringing up the rear. “I think you just need to practice more,” Mom would gently instruct when I complained to her about being last. “You can achieve anything with hard work.” So I spent the summer in the pool, with Dad dropping me off early on his way to work while Margaret was still in bed, and stayed long past when Margaret skipped out to head to the beach with her friends. I didn’t mind, though, because I couldn’t wait to show my parents how good I’d become in the final match of the summer—the All East swim competition. But things didn’t go exactly as my optimistic ten-year old mind had planned. Margaret won four first place medals, and all I walked away with was a cruddy participation ribbon. Watching my sister standing on the makeshift podium, the medals draped around her neck, nodding humbly at the rousing applause, somewhere deep inside I was filled with a burning, pulsing need to be up there. But so long as I embodied the athletic ability of Charlie Brown, it wasn’t going to happen.
I didn’t want to just be a hard worker. I wanted to be a winner. And in that moment, I knew what I would be plagued with for the rest of my life if I embraced the same things Margaret, a year older than me, did—new coaches looking at my last name on the roster, certain they had a gem with “another Corbett girl.” Until they saw me play. Unless I wanted to grow up in Margaret’s superior gene pool shadow, I had to find another way to get noticed. Soon, I learned that if I studied hard enough and had a 4.0 GPA, I’d earn awards, scholarships, and feel the thrill of victory when called up on stage to give the class valedictorian speech while my parents cheered proudly in the audience. I discovered that if I steered clear of sports or sororities in college and filled my time with lawyer-friendly extracurricular activities like the debate club and civil liberties club instead, Georgetown Law School would offer me a spot.
Big Law Page 2