The Associate (18 page)

After the old goats were gone, a very diverse panel went to the front and continued with the storytelling. A black man, a white woman, a Hispanic, and a Korean—all partners—talked about the firm’s commitment to tolerance and equal rights and so on.

Later in the day, they ate shrimp and oysters on a private beach, then the buses were reloaded and
headed back to Manhattan. They arrived after dark, and the weary young lawyers headed home for a short night.

For them, the concept of exhaustion was about to be redefined.

A
ny hope of pursuing meaningful work was promptly crushed at 7:30 Monday morning when all twelve new litigation associates were sent into the abyss of Document Review. As far back as the first year of law school, Kyle had heard horror stories of bright and eager young associates being marched into some dreary basement, chained to a desk, and given a mountain of densely worded documents to read. And while he’d known that his first year would include a generous dose of this punishment, he simply wasn’t prepared for it. He and Dale, who was looking better by the day but showing no signs of a personality, were assigned to a case involving a client that was being hammered in the financial press.

Their new boss for the day, a senior associate named Karleen, called them into her office and explained things. For the next few days they would review some crucial documents, billing at least eight hours a day at $300 an hour. That would be their rate until the bar results were made known in November,
and, assuming they passed, their hourly rate would jump to $400.

There was no thought given to a quick word about what might happen if they did not pass the bar exam. Scully & Pershing associates posted a pass rate of 92 percent the previous year, and it was simply assumed that everyone had passed.

Eight hours was the minimum, at least for now, and with lunch and coffee thrown in, that meant, roughly, a ten-hour day. Start no later than 8:00 a.m., and nobody ever thought about leaving before 7:00 p.m.

In case they were curious, Karleen billed twenty-four hundred hours last year. She had been with the firm for five years and acted as though she were a lifer. A future partner. Kyle glanced around her well-appointed office and noticed a diploma from Columbia Law School. There was a photo of a younger Karleen on a horse, but none of her with a husband, boyfriend, or children.

She was explaining that there was a chance that a partner might need Kyle or Dale for a quick project, so be prepared. Document Review was certainly not glamorous, but it was the safety net for all new associates. “You can always go there and find work that can be billed,” Karleen said. “Eight hours minimum, but there is no max.”

How delightful, thought Kyle. If for some reason ten hours a day were not enough, the door to Document Review was always wide open for more.

Their first case involved a client with the slightly ludicrous name of Placid Mortgage—ludicrous in Kyle’s opinion, but he kept his mouth shut as Karleen rattled off the more salient facts of the case. Starting
in 2001, when a new wave of government regulators took over and adopted a less intrusive attitude, Placid and other huge home mortgage companies became aggressive in their pursuit of new loans. They advertised heavily, especially on the Internet, and convinced millions of lower- and middle-class Americans that they could indeed afford to buy homes that they actually could not afford. The bait was the old adjustable-rate mortgage, and in the hands of crooks like Placid it was adjusted in ways never before imagined. Placid sucked them in, went light on the paperwork, collected nice fees up front, then sold the crap in the secondary markets. The company was not holding the paper when the overheated real estate market finally crashed, home values plummeted, and foreclosures became rampant.

Karleen used much softer language in her summary, but Kyle had known for some time that his firm was representing Placid. He’d read a dozen stories about the mortgage meltdown and seen the name Scully & Pershing mentioned often, always in defense of Placid’s latest setback.

Now the lawyers were trying to clean up the mess. Placid had been battered by lawsuits, but the worst one was a class action involving thirty-five thousand of its former borrowers. It had been filed in New York a year earlier.

Karleen led them to a long, dungeonlike room with no windows, a concrete floor, poor lighting, and neat stacks of white cardboard boxes with the words “Placid Mortgage” stamped on the end. It was the mountain Kyle had heard so much about. The boxes,
as Karleen explained, contained the files of all thirty-five thousand plaintiffs. Each file had to be reviewed.

“You’re not alone,” Karleen said with a fake laugh, just as both Kyle and Dale were about to resign. “We have other associates and even some paralegals on this review.” She opened a box, pulled out a file about an inch thick, and went through a quick summary of what the litigation team was looking for.

“Someday in court,” she said gravely, “it will be crucial for our litigators to be able to tell the judge that we have examined
every
document in this case.”

Kyle assumed it was also crucial for the firm to have clients who could pay through the nose for such useless work. He was suddenly dizzy with the realization that in just a few short minutes, he would punch in and begin charging $300 an hour for his time. He was worth nothing close to that. He wasn’t even a lawyer.

Karleen left them there, her heels clicking on the polished concrete as she hustled out of the room. Kyle gawked at the boxes, then at Dale, who looked as stunned as he did. “You gotta be kidding,” he said. But Dale was determined to prove something, so she grabbed a box, dropped it on the table, and yanked out some files. Kyle walked to the other end of the room, as far away as possible, and found himself some files.

He opened one and glanced at his watch—it was 7:50. Scully lawyers billed by tenths. A tenth of an hour is six minutes. Two-tenths is twelve, and so on. One point six hours is an hour and thirty-six minutes. Should he roll back the clock two minutes, to 7:48, and therefore be able to bill two-tenths before the
hour of eight? Or should he stretch his arms, take a sip of coffee, get more situated, and wait until 7:54 to begin his first billable minute as a lawyer? It was a no-brainer. This was Wall Street, where everything was done with aggression. When in doubt, bill aggressively. If not, the next guy will, and then you won’t catch him.

It took an hour to read every word in the file. One point two hours to be exact, and suddenly he had no reluctance in billing Placid for 1.2 hours, or $360 for the review. Not long ago, say about ninety minutes, he found it hard to believe he was worth $300 an hour. He hadn’t even passed the bar! Now, though, he had been converted. Placid owed him the money because their sleaze had gotten them sued. Someone had to plow through their debris. He would aggressively bill the company out of revenge. Down the table, Dale worked diligently without any distraction.

Somewhere in the midst of the third file, Kyle paused long enough to ponder a few things. Still on the clock, he wondered where the Trylon-Bartin room was. Where were the highly classified documents, and how were they protected? What kind of vault were they stored in? This dungeon appeared to be security-free, but then who would spend money to protect a bunch of mortgage files gone bad? If Placid had dirty laundry, you could bet it wasn’t buried where Kyle might find it.

He thought about his life. Here, in the third hour of his professional career, he was already questioning his sanity. What manner of man could sit here and pore over these meaningless pages for hours and days without going bonkers? What did he expect the life of
a first-year associate to be? Would it be any better at another firm?

Dale left for ten minutes and returned. Probably a bathroom break. He bet she kept the meter running.

Lunch was in the firm cafeteria on the forty-third floor. Much had been made about the high quality of the food. Great chefs consulted, the freshest ingredients used, a dazzling menu of light dishes, and so on. They were free to leave the building and go to a restaurant, but few associates dared. The firm’s policies were prominently published and distributed, but there were many unwritten rules; one was that the rookies ate in-house unless a client could be billed for a real lunch. Many of the partners used the cafeteria as well. It was important for them to be seen by their underlings, and to brag about the great food, and, most important, to eat in thirty minutes as an example of efficiency. The decor was art deco and nicely done, but the ambience was still reminiscent of a prison mess hall.

There was a clock on every wall, and you could almost hear them ticking.

Kyle and Dale joined Tim Reynolds at a small table near a vast window with a spectacular view of other tall buildings. Tim appeared to be shell-shocked—glazed eyes, vapid stare, weak voice. They swapped stories of the horrors of Document Review and began joking about their departures from the legal profession. The food was good, though lunch was not about eating. Lunch was now an excuse to get away from the documents.

But it didn’t last long. They agreed to meet after work for a drink, Dale’s first sign of life, then headed
back to their respective dungeons. Two hours later, Kyle was hallucinating and flashing back to the glory days at Yale when he edited the prestigious law journal from his own office and managed dozens of other very bright students. His long hours led to a product, an important journal that was published eight times a year and read widely by lawyers and judges and scholars. His name was first on the masthead as editor in chief. Few students were so honored with such a title. For one year, he was the Man.

How had he fallen so fast and so hard?

It’s just part of the boot camp, he kept telling himself. Basic training.

But what a waste! Placid, its shareholders, its creditors, and probably the American taxpayers would get stuck with the legal fees, fees being racked up in part by the now-halfhearted efforts of one Kyle McAvoy, who, after reviewing nine of the thirty-five thousand files, was convinced that his firm’s client should be locked away in prison. The CEO, the managers, the board of directors—all of them. You can’t jail a corporation, but an exception should be made for every employee who ever worked at Placid Mortgage.

What would John McAvoy think if he could see his son? Kyle laughed and shuddered at the thought. The verbal abuse would be funny and cruel, and at that moment Kyle would accept it without firing back. At that moment, his father was either in his office counseling a client through a problem or in a courtroom mixing it up with another lawyer. Regardless, he was with real people in real conversations, and life was anything but dull.

Dale was seated fifty feet away with her back to
him. It was a nice back, as far as he could tell, trim and curvy. He could see nothing else at the moment but had already examined the other parts—slim legs, narrow waist, not much of a chest, but then you can’t have everything. What would happen, he reckoned, if (1) he slowly, over the next few days and weeks, put the move on her, (2) he was successful, and (3) he made sure they got caught? He’d be bounced from the firm, which at that moment seemed like a great idea. What would Bennie say about that? An ugly, involuntary dismissal from Scully & Pershing? Every young man has the right to chase women, and if you get caught, well, so what? At least you got fired for something worthwhile.

Bennie would lose his spy. His spy would get the boot without getting disbarred.

Interesting.

Of course, with his luck, there would probably be another video, this one of Kyle and Dale, and Bennie would get his dirty hands on it, and, well, who knows?

Kyle mulled these things over at $300 an hour. He didn’t think about turning off the meter, because he wanted Placid to bleed.

He had learned that Dale earned a Ph.D. in mathematics at the age of twenty-five, from MIT no less, and that she had taught for a few years before deciding that the classroom was boring. She studied law at Cornell. Why she thought she could make the transition from the classroom to the courtroom was not clear, at least not to Kyle. Right now a class of struggling geometry students would seem like a parade. She was thirty years old, never married, and he had
just begun the task of trying to unravel her withdrawn and complicated personality.

He stood to go for a walk, something to get the blood pumping into his stultified brain. “You want some coffee?” he asked Dale.

“No, thanks,” she said, and actually smiled.

Two cups of strong coffee did little to stimulate his mind, and by late afternoon Kyle began to worry about permanent brain damage. To be on the safe side, he and Dale decided to wait until 7:00 p.m. before checking out. They left together, rode the elevator down without a word, both thinking the same thought—they were violating another of the unwritten rules by leaving so early. But they shook it off and walked four blocks to an Irish pub where Tim Reynolds had secured a booth and was almost finished with his first pint. He was with Everett, a first-year from NYU who’d been assigned to the commercial real estate practice group. After they sat down and got themselves situated, they pulled out their Firm-Fones. All four were on the table, much like loaded guns.

Dale ordered a martini. Kyle ordered a club soda, and when the waiter disappeared, Tim said, “You don’t drink?”

“No. I had to quit in college.” It was Kyle’s standard line, and he knew all of the follow-ups it would provoke.

“You had to quit?”

“Yep. I was drinking too much, so I quit.”

“Rehab, AA, all that stuff?” Everett asked.

“No. I saw a counselor, and he convinced me that
the drinking would only get worse. I went cold turkey and have never looked back.”

“That’s awesome,” Tim said as he drained the pint of ale.

“I don’t drink either,” Dale said. “But after today, I’m hitting the bottle.” From someone with absolutely no sense of humor, this declaration was quite funny. After a good laugh, they settled into a rehash of their first day. Tim had billed 8.6 hours reading the legislative history of an old New York law aimed at discouraging class action lawsuits. Everett had billed 9 hours reading leases. But Kyle and Dale won the game with their descriptions of the dungeon and its thirty-five thousand files.