Dear Mr. Schaeffer:
Back when my new girlfriend Kristen and I were both associates at a large firm in San Francisco, we didn’t want to have anything to do with one another. She thought my fondness for brand-label clothing was snooty, and I thought her fake blonde hair looked cheap. For three years, we hardly said a word to one another. But one night we were brought together unexpectedly. As the only two associates still on the 49th floor at 7 p.m., a high-level partner assigned us to spend the night wading through ten banker’s boxes of client documents. Our task: to find the evidence needed to convince a judge to issue a temporary restraining order against our client’s competitor. The motion was scheduled for hearing the next morning.
The first two hours of document review were tense and uneventful. But then I remembered the bottle of Scotch I kept in my office for emergencies. Although I didn’t really want to share, Kristen asked politely, and one thing led to another, and—Well, let me put it to you this way, Mr. Schaeffer: by the time the sun began to rise, our knees were very chewed up by the law firm’s industrial-strength carpeting. Not only did we look like a mess, but the client lost its motion. No surprise there, since we were both too drunk (and too naked!) to finish the assignment.
What’s the silver lining? Kristen and I found true love where we never expected to find it--on the floor of the firm’s 49th-floor conference room. The hitch is that our one night of unrestrained law-firm passion ended up spawning lots of ancillary litigation. The client I mentioned is suing the firm for legal malpractice. And the firm is trying to sue us. Did I mention that Kristen and I were fired? It’s true, and we’ve been on the run for more than three months trying to evade service of process. We’ve eaten so many steaks and watched so many steamy in-room movies that our money is about to run out.
Let me get right to the point: Would you consider representing Kristen and me as our attorney? If not, could we at least crash at your house for a week or two?
Signed, Down and Out in Denver, Colorado
Dear Down and Out:
It’s nice that you would ask me to play a small supporting role in your high-stakes road movie. Unfortunately, my retainer fee is too large for you to afford and my house is already filled with my children and their friends. Where does that leave you? Out of luck once again. I suggest either bunking at the Motel 6 or giving Professor Reynolds a call.
In the meantime, you and your girlfriend have got to get your overheated libidos under control. You’re lawyers, remember, and law school was supposed to cure you of the affliction that’s ailing you, one which I would describe in lay terms as an “excess of sexuality.” It’s obvious you attended a Tier II or Tier III school. At a Tier I school, you would have been taught to sublimate your natural physical longings into a focused drive to bill 2,400 hours in a year. When this sublimation process is effective in real-life lawyers from Tier I schools, you can tell by the way they seem to be walking around with a stick up their ass. You don’t seem to have this problem.
On the other hand, knowing what I know about your "appetites," I fear you might take my advice too literally. Please don’t! Having a stick up your ass is only a figure of speech—one which, if you’ll allow me to backtrack a little, I regret having used already. Frankly, I’m beginning to regret everything about you and your acrobatic blonde girlfriend. So I’m going to sign off. Good luck, and don’t let those knees become too infected.
Your friend, Evan Schaeffer
[Like this post? It's one of many included in my book How to Feed a Lawyer (And Other Irreverent Oberservations from the Legal Underground). Details here.]Related posts:
1. Advice to Law Firm Partners #3 (Managing the Younger Generation)
2. Advice to Federal Judges #2 (Curing Federal Judgitis)
3. The "Advice" Category--all the other advice posts
Alas, such behavior often predates legal work. I'm semi-reliably informed one of my classmates roughed her knees up for the benefit of another in the law school subbasement where the various journal and student organization offices are located. I myself cast a wondering eye on my journal's couch before testing the lock on my way out.
Posted by: Dylan | November 19, 2004 at 03:00 PM