Mr. 162

Los Angeles is an awful place to be a lawyer.  On Friday night, I was hanging out with a friend who works in the entertainment industry—a great guy with more natural good looks and people skills than anyone I’ve ever met.  Not slimy politician people skills either.  I’m talking legit dynamic social skills with a head of hair like Hugh Grant.  He can write his own ticket.  He will have a very full and rich life.

So, I’m hanging out with him, his girlfriend and a couple of her friends at a nice lounge near downtown when they decide they want to go to a club.  One of those places on Sunset Blvd. with all the Lamborghinis out front—AKA the sleaze of the sleaze. 

Nightclubs aren’t my scene.  Of course they aren’t.  I’m a lawyer.

I could tell that none of my buddy’s girlfriend’s friends were that into me, and a change of venue over on the “unce unce unce” side of town wasn’t going to change that.  Chances of my pale ass getting lucky after blowing $400 on these thankless bitches and enduring pumping bass for three hours?  0%.  So I demurred. 

My buddy swore he knew a guy working a door at a club where TMZ hangs outside, and it wouldn’t be a problem getting in.  I didn’t give a shit. 

It’s always interesting to me that I earn probably three times of what he makes, yet sweet hook-ups and total access to hard-to-get tables, exclusive parties and private rooms fall at his feet.  My only power in this city comes at the expense of slipping a hostess or a thick-necked asshole a Ulysses S. Grant.  And even then, I still have to wait.  Lawyers have to buy their way into everything.  The legal industry is perk-less.

Two of the girls gave me the obligatory, “Ahh, come on. You gotta come with us.” It was sickly apparent they wanted free drinks.  And probably a ride.  But one of them touched my leg close enough to that part of my inner thigh that makes me horny enough to do stupid stuff, so I said, “Sure.  Let’s go get judged.”

To me, the club scene is so obvious.  The velvet rope, the arbitrariness of it all.  There are no standards, no rules—yet so much effort goes into making you believe there are.  What in the hell does the phrase “Dress to impress” even fucking mean?  The whole thing’s a shit-show.  You walk up, you show no fear, you look good, you get in.  There’s no magic to it.

I’ve got total confidence except in one area, and it’s that I do not have faith that I’m good looking enough.  I don’t belong to this world of pretty people that exists outside my doorstep.  That’s why I went to law school—because my looks weren’t tradable.  A thriving legal community in a city best known for its vapidity, implants and camera-ready populace is an anomaly.  I have no idea why I live here.

My opinion of my physical self may improve with further successes…like making partner…and having enough clout to bang gold-diggers.  But we’re not that far down the line yet.  That level of guile will have to come with time.

My quip from earlier must have forcibly hung like a stalactite in one of the girl’s cavernous domes because she couldn’t stop repeating my off-hand remark while we pounded 5-Hour Energy shots in a Chevron parking lot before rolling up the Hollywood circus of see-and-be-seen freaks.

“Let’s go get judged!”

It was like a toddler parroting words without any conceptual meaning, but at least she looked good in her short skirt saying it.  I, on the other hand, have always seen social interactions such as nightclubs—especially in Los Angeles—as nothing more than a process of being judged.  You leave your entire existence up to someone else’s opinion: Who made your car, who made your clothes, who do you think you are?  Then, if you’re not the face of a Dolce & Gabbana campaign, not any level of legitimate “Producer” or “Agent,” and/or have no medal grommets or screen-printed crosses on your shirt, you best be planning on bottle service.  If you’re judged unpopular or unsatisfying to look at, you best be judged rich enough to afford your presence.

Screw them. 

Maybe that’s an insecure way of looking at it, but on what planet does a single male lawyer thrive inside a club that doesn’t include topless dancing and a Champagne Room?  Not this one.  Not any.

There’s one primary reason why clubs and lawyers don’t mix: You can’t talk.  And talking is my strong suit.  If you’re dumb yet good looking, then a nightclub is your church.  Chicks who speak with their hips and guys who purse their lips worship there.

Think a club plays to your strengths?  Well, good for you.  Maybe you can fake it in a dark laser show long enough for someone to get concupiscent enough to sleep with you.  Maybe they won’t realize how dumb, boring, not funny, or [insert perceived shortcoming here] you think you are.  But I’m just the opposite.  My approach is to think that if I keep talking long enough, a girl will forget that I need to loose 10 pounds around the midsection.

I alienated most girls who had long-term interest in me in law school.  My lifestyle wasn’t conducive to women, and I thought I was BigLaw bound.  I could afford to turn down 7s, assuming 9s would be waiting around the corner from my windowless Jones Day office in a few years.  Skinny blonds with Brentwood baby-making dreams would be awaiting me on the off hours I was allowed out of the building.  But never count your chicks before you’ve hatched your career.  Or something like that. 

I’m not proud, but I’m also no longer ashamed to admit that this town can get the best of a single, middle-of-the-road lawyer if you let it.  The options are limited for a guy who is too abhorrent of nightclubs but not good enough for country clubs to find a woman worthy of second date—or even a second drink. 

Lest you think this story doesn’t have a happy ending, I did get the number of a P.Y.T. (pretty young thing) that night.  We even made out for a while in the breezeway leading to the side exit.  Raven hair, big green eyes, perfect c-cup cleavage…

But I doubt I’ll call.  It’s already doomed.  I told her I was a producer. 

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Call it karma.  I buy a new (slightly used) car and it has a squeak.  Nothing major.  Just a tiny little squeak coming from behind the dashboard.  Just a little peep to remind me that this car is, in fact, not new.  New cars do not have squeaks coming from behind the dashboard. 

True: It is a 2008 Mercedes Benz.  True: It is black.  True: I love this car.  True: It will not get me laid—but still, why does it have to have that squeak? 

It’s like my goddamn resume.  No matter what I accomplish in life, every article ever written about me on Above the Law or in a legal paper will contain the TTT imprimatur or footnote that while I managed to [fill in impressive legal feat here], I graduated from [TTT shit law school].  The car is my legal career.  The squeak is the subtle reminder that my credentials are like the bold orange script written on windshields in a used car lot.  “Like new!” “Runs great!” Fuck you.

Lawyers always focus on the exception to the rule.  The tree and not the forest.  That’s the whole point of our stupid profession—figuring out how and why this one specific instance is different from all the rest.  In success, I’m like the young minority who manages to go to college and not smoke crack despite a mother who didn’t finish high school and smokes crack.  My relevance will never be that I did well—it will be that I did well despite a less-desirable start.

When I go back to my law school to volunteer as a trial advocacy coach, it’s like I’m leading a support group for slightly used cars.  These kids are clueless, just as I was back in the day.  They don’t realize that no matter what they do—no matter how many times they wash or wax the car—they’re buying a squeak.  For 3Ls, this mentality becomes apparent pretty quickly. 

My job as a trial ad coach is to rekindle the spark of confidence that is the key ingredient to any good oralist’s presentation.  To remind them that their resumes not mean NOTHING in a courtroom unless they let them.  The concept of “the sale” is foreign to any law school student who has spent the past three years being told that where you put the comma is a life and death decision.  “Forget the rules, just SELL me.” Without a willingness to embrace their competitive advantage, a TTT resume will wreck these poor kids.  “The fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves if we are underlings.”

Back to the car: Yes, it is sick. (Sick the way urban youths mean it, not the way a nurse means it.) Yes, it’s black-on-black with a big engine and all kinds of bling.  It’s a work of art. 

However, the half of me that is Jewish must note, for the record, that I got a great deal on the car.  Got a great rate.  Could sell it today and make a profit.  I’m borrowing the money from an insurance company at 4.5 percent, which for a used car is a steal.  And to hear me tell the story of the buying experience is akin to those bass fishing shows on ESPN at 8 AM on Saturday mornings during baseball season.

But no matter how much confidence and pride I have in that car, that goddamn squeak won’t go away.  It never will.  I won’t let it.  Because even if I get it fixed, I’ll just be upset about something else.  The car is dirty, or that it’s not the newest model, or that it somehow reflects the inner inferiority I feel to Big Firm associates.  And that’s exactly what they want.  And then the terrorists win.

It’s that squeak that drives me.  It reminds me that I’m glad all your friends got laid off.  And I hope more law firms fail.  Big ones.  I hope the whole system comes crumbling down on your silver-spooned heads. 

After just 13 months on the job, I am on my way to court appearance #150 tomorrow.  Just so happens it’s in Riverside.

I live in Santa Monica.  That’s as far west as you can get in LA—or as far west as you can get in the lower 48, pretty much.  My appearance is in Riverside is scheduled for 8:30.

Riverside Superior Court, according to the navigation system installed on my new-to-me Benz, is 78.3 miles away.  Imagine you live in Manhattan, you have a hearing in Philadelphia, and you have to be there at 8:30 tomorrow morning.  From Latham’s evil layer on 3rd Ave. in Midtown to the Southampton courthouse is also, ironically, about 80 miles away. 

This whole appearance is to cover a CMC (the 5 minute hearing where the judge gives you a trial date a year from now and tells you to play nice with the other children).  So what would any logical lawyer do, even if he has a shiny new car to play with?  Arrange a CourtCall.

CourtCall is the company that sets up telephonic appearances.  Why drive when you can strain to hear what is being said into a speakerphone on the other side of the courtroom?  Sure enough, I emailed my trusty office manager, Holly—a newly hired Alpha Pi UCLA grad—and asked her to set it up.  I know I sent this email because I had to find it and forward it to her as proof when, after I asked her where my CourtCall sheet was for tomorrow, she looked at me as if I asked her if she was on her period.

While Holly generally does a good job, this kind of mistake is practically unheard of at Latham.  Which means my alarm is set for 5:25 to gear up for a 160-mile ride.  Squeak. 

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I’ve wanted to be a lawyer for years. Can’t remember when it started, but if you would have given me an aptitude test in grade school, “lawyer” would have come up top 5. I’ve always argued dispassionately and felt more confident arguing a position than talking about what I believe.  But perhaps some of my aptitude and disposition towards the profession is not a cause but an effect.

I always thought that if any girl was going to like me, I would have to buy her affection. I understand the utter foolishness of this statement, but I clearly remember thinking it for years. I didn’t have lousy parents or anything, but I also didn’t have anyone ever sit me down and tell me how the world works. Alcohol was involved.

The main reason I went to law school was the promise of $125,000 per year. From when I was about 16 and through my “off year” between undergrad and law school, that’s what a BIG associate made. And where I come from, nobody makes that kind of cake at a young age. To me, that salary guaranteed adoring hot chicks. I had no self-esteem for a long time.

So my plan was to reverse-engineer my way into one of these mythical positions. For a number of years, Skadden was my target. I interviewed for a file clerk position during my “off year” and got to see their office in LA. Still today, I have to admit that, next to Jones Day, those may be the sickest offices downtown. (But, until you’ve been to some Hollywood production companies’ offices, you have not seen the Promised Land, my friends. Live and learn.)

The requirements to be a BIG associate can be listed and proven on a sheet of paper—and it’s inherently racist, elitist, sexist, and generally biased. But, I was hell bent and wanted the cash. I wasn’t thinking straight. Because no 16-22 year old male thinks logically. Between obsessing over girls shallower than a blow-up pool and pleasuring yourself, there’s not a lot of introspection and deep thought going on.

I am a product of public schools. I was state academic decathlon champion in 2000. My high school GPA was 3.2, mainly because my favorite number is 32 and the cost-benefit analysis between smoking cigarettes in the parking lot and doing my AP Chemistry reading usually resulted in an extra cig. I took the SAT test twice. The first time I was hungover, and I got a 1390. The second time I wasn’t, plus one of the essay questions was the same as the first time I took it. I got a 1490.

My friend Dean got a 1540. His IM screenname is still “Dean1540,” which makes it safe to say that he 1) still uses IM; 2) has a doctorate in music theory from Columbia and does not shave often; 3) has slept with more than one girl who turned lesbian soon thereafter.

I went to a prestigious liberal arts college. There I studied under ambassadors, met President Clinton, wrote a grant to study political trends in Germany and rubbed elbows with other trust fund babies. My undergraduate GPA was 3.2—mainly because my favorite number is 32 and the cost-benefit analysis between smoking cigarettes outside the library and doing my kinesiology homework usually resulted in an extra cig.

Senior year, I took the LSAT. I bought a $29.95 LSAT book four weeks before the exam.

Actually, my parents gave me $2,995 for the Kaplan course that I was supposed to take for six weeks, then rock the test (similar to how I handled the SATs) and then get into a top law school despite a lackluster work ethic as measured by my 3.2.

When I got the check from my mom, it was impossible not to speculate how far $3K could go in Vegas.  After a four-hour drive and three hours in the craps pit at Caesars Palace, I had exactly $800 left. After another five hours in the poker room, the entire $2,995 was gone.

Some people have to learn lessons the hard way, and to say I am stubborn is an understatement. I was headstrong and committed to accepting my eight-hour loss of a potentially prosperous legal future as a lesson on disciplined spending.  I could have easily owned up to my mistake and asked for another $3K, but like I always say, “Better to act like your s#!t don’t stink than admit weakness.”

I got my LSAT results shortly before graduation: 162.

“It’s not a terrible score,” I thought.  I surmised that I had an outside chance at USC, and my backup was Loyola. Both had good track records of placing students at BIG law firms. So long as I completely reinvented myself over the summer and became the type of student that got A’s instead of B+’s, I’d be okay.

First denial letter in: Columbia.  Expected.  Then I got denied at UCLA. I got wait listed at USC. And I got into Southwestern. I took a year off.

I worked as a budget manager for a real estate company.  I reapplied to schools.  But ultimately my bed was made, and I enrolled at Southwestern. (If you’re not from LA, you haven’t heard of it.) I graduated in the top 20% of my class—the law school equivalent of a 3.2. I smoked outside of the library.

The upper echelon of the legal world truly is a rat race. If you deviate even a little from “the plan,” the system will chew you up and spit you out. There is no margin of error. I cannot change what happened, and I cannot change my law school.

Since my 2L summer gig, I have not spent five minutes feeling sorry for myself. No, I am not one of the BIG associates. Never have been much of a worker bee. But I am where I am supposed to be.

I call it a boutique, you may call it whatever you like. We do some plaintiffs work. I work in business lit. I win more than I lose. There’s no fear of being laid off.  I get to wear jeans to work while enjoying the hottest interns UCLA and USC can provide.  (Youth is wasted on the young.)

And I’ve never played craps at Caesars again.

A boss that I otherwise hated once told me, “One of the most important things you can do as a lawyer is sit and think about a problem.” I had no idea what he meant. After a couple of years at a firm, I know exactly what he meant. Associates are smart: Really smart. If you give your brain enough time to work on a problem, you’ll come up with stuff nobody else did. But you gotta have faith in yourself and your skills. Brute mental force will not get anything done without a confidence to fuel the fire.

Sometimes I feel bad for the small group of lawyers who dotted their “i”s, crossed their “t”s and still missed the BIG boat. Too many of those sorry sops are toiling away in midsize firms for half of what they “should” be making. That is not fair. But screw them, we all end up where we belong and need to own it.

Before you work a single day as a lawyer, you’re inundated with the belief that if your law school isn’t elite enough or if you fall short of the BIGs, you’ll forever hate yourself and regret your life.  I now believe it’s the other way around. 

I strayed from the narrow BIG path early, but as D.H. Lawrence (by way of G.I. Jane) taught us:

“I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself.

A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough

Without ever having felt sorry for itself.”

I own my legacy and enjoy my life.  The rest of you are nothing but haters.

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[Ed. Note:  Please again welcome Mr. 162 to Bitter Lawyer.  He may have fallen short of the first tier, but in these crazy economic times, “small is the new big.” This is the “learner, more efficient” account of the fast-talking, no-support-staff lifestyle of a Los Angeles boutique associate.]

Even for a boutique lawyer, there’s no way to ever get 100% away from work. Even if the other lawyers in my firm had the time or inclination to help me out—which they don’t—there’s a lot of “getting up to speed” in a case that is required to make effective arguments.  And by “getting up to speed,” I mean none of my files are sufficiently notated for another associate to jump right in.  Most of the big-picture strategy is locked away in mi cabeza.  I’m generally not playing a team sport.

Answering to (primarily) only myself is the double-edged sword of SmallLaw. When things don’t move forward without me, it sometimes provides the power to call a time out and have an extended visit with my personal life.  Usually, it means I’m more tied-down than ever.  So I need to take advantage of my limited resources to creatively find free time.

Life is a negotiation, and negotiations run differently depending on who’s calling the shots. At a boutique, there is always one attorney in charge of a case. That person decides strategy, applies tactics to that strategy and establishes his/her own rapport with the other side. Asking another lawyer to “fill in” for the point person on a case is like asking Salvador Dali to finish the upper right-hand corner of a Monet: Not a good idea. They’re both brilliant, both do amazing work, but their styles are, well, incompatible.

I actually have to hand it to the BIGs on this point—you lemmings are as close to fungible as lawyers come.

“Write an objective memo!”

“Proofread this document!”

“Check these citations!”

There is only so much delegation that can happen in a boutique without the work product suffering. Small firms run in such a way that they cannot take advantage of assigning out menial tasks like the BIGs do so well.

So here’s how a boutique associate can guarantee himself or herself a job: Focus on duplicating your boss’s style.

As long as the boss feels like he is without substitute yet believes he has an efficient-enough, dependant-enough laborer at his shingle to fill in the gaps in his absence, he is free to roam the Earth, and everyone wins.  The secret is to make him believe that you’re a tad responsible (though obviously not as much as he is) for the status quo he enjoys. 

Boutique partners are convinced that, like their associates, they can never really go on vacation. Their unique style and approach to problems will be too sorely missed if they go on hiatus.  But, if they can “groom” an associate to parrot out the same response to the standard 85% of problems that repeat over and over in their practice, they can escape with a BlackBerry and only have to field questions on the other 15% of less-routine business.

The skill of mimicking your boss is not the objective: There is no test to see if you pass. Instead, it’s about being proactive enough while the boss is around to earn enough trust.  Make him hear himself in you. If he screams on the phone and makes opposing counsel’s life miserable, you’ve got to scream on the phone and make opposing counsel’s life miserable. If he likes his declarations to be full of arguments, make sure your declarations are full of arguments.

If the boss believes that replacing you would take years of housebreaking someone new, he will put up with a lot of crap to ensure that doesn’t happen. BIG associates, on the other hand, aspire to be the best cog in the wheel: Write the most objective memo, spell check, etc. They’re aspiring to be replicable.

I’m finally seen as the well-trained Doberman who can sufficiently guard the house while the owner’s away.  Knowing I stand guard in a style befitting his own is how he feels comfortable enough to book his big summer getaway and get gone.  The reason I mime all day when the boss is in the office is so I can enjoy the type of flexibility I have when the big guy isn’t next door. 

Named partner has been in Asia whoring his way through the Burmese jungle for the past three weeks. It’s amazing how you can bark orders, send off incendiary emails and add five exclamation points to every sentence just as easily there as you can here. While he’s been away, I’ve been asking opposing counsel for extensions left and right. I mean, what’s the point of busting ass to meet deadlines if the partners aren’t here to see it? 

Hearings: Putting them off. Client meetings: As few as necessary.  Yesterday I arrived at work at 10:15 AM uninspired. Yes, that’s right: Uninspired. So, I took a two-hour lunch. I had some errands to run. I got sushi, which is supposed to be “brain food.” But it didn’t help. So, I left at 4:15 and went to a movie theater that serves beer and watched The Hangover. (Funny, but a very simple plot.)

See, unlike a BIG, the boss doesn’t really review the billing records here. So, anytime I want credit for kicking ass and taking names, I need to make sure he’s within earshot.

That’s the joy of a boutique: When he goes on vacation, I go on vacation.

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