“Is the firm as competitive as everyone says? Is anyone trustworthy?”
Charlie shook his head. “Not even me.”
“That’s tough, given we’re sharing an office.”
He pointed to his monitor. “Tricks of the trade. Screen protector. I could be playing blackjack all day, and you’d never know. Even though we sit three feet away from each other.”
“If you’re playing blackjack all day, at least I won’t have to worry about competing with you for cool cases.”
He grinned. “All they told me was your name was Sam, and we’d spend every waking minute together for the next two years. I guess this is a bad time to tell you I don’t know how to talk quietly on the phone.”
A calendar alarm went off on Charlie’s laptop.
“Tech training,” he announced. “To be continued.”
The first week at the firm was a blur of learning how to track and enter time, reserve a conference room for clients, and navigate the unspoken rules of office life. We were being given the tools to succeed, but it was up to us to find enough work to meet the lofty requirement of twenty-five hundred billable hours a year, which meant billing at least ten hours of actual work Monday through Friday and multiple hours most weekends.
“It’s like the best and worst system,” Charlie said Thursday afternoon at Hatsuhana, the sushi bar around the corner from the office. After three days of orientation lunches catered by the firm, I was ready to be outside in the middle of the day. “No one is going to come in and make sure we’re billing enough time. You have to be focused and direct. Know what type of work you’re interested in, and go find it. You want to defend finance guys when the SEC is on their ass? Figure out which partners bring in those clients. Like Rich Kepler. Represent producers who are getting sued, Eddie Kaufman. But the Eddies and the Riches of the firm are literally being stalked by associates all day long. So you have to be tactically aggressive.”
“Eddie Kaufman is the reason I’m here,” I admitted, feeling self-conscious. Charlie had probably watched dozens of associates try to get on Eddie’s radar in his paralegal days.
“Get ready to cut in on a very long line. It can be done, but you have to get in there.”
“I know. Even if it doesn’t happen right away, I can be patient. I’ve read every single article about him, going back to his prosecutor days.”
Eddie Kaufman was a Greenwich Village kid whose later life looked nothing like the early years working in his parents’ drugstore on Mott Street. He’d gotten a full ride to Harvard, studied political science, then worked full-time to support himself through Columbia Law. He was one of the only graduates recruited to join the US Attorney’s Office as a prosecutor right out of law school. A chance meeting with the great poet Bob Dylan early in his career prompted a pivot to music, and thirty years later, he was New York’s most high-powered entertainment lawyer.
I patiently waited while Charlie finished chewing the handroll he had taken in one bite.
“When did you know you wanted to be a lawyer?”
I bit the tip of my chopstick. “Don’t laugh. After I readTo Kill a Mockingbird. When I was nine.”
“I hope you put that in your cover letters.”
“And all my application essays.”
“Obviously.”
“What about you?”
“You can’t laugh either.”
“I swear.”
“Josh Lyman.”
“FromThe West Wing?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Does that mean you want to go into politics eventually?”
“Social justice work. Maybe immigration or prison reform.”
“Oh, the easy stuff.”
“Yup. I’m just putting in a few years in Big Law so I can pay off my student loans. Then I’ll burden myself again with poverty-level wages.”
