John Grisham - The Associate

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 FirmFones. 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?”