Джозеф Файндер - Judgment

“Dude,” said Duncan, turning around.

“You’d better care,” Juliana said. She worried about the kid. He didn’t seem to give a damn about anything. There was something self-protective about that, she figured. If you lower your ambitions, you won’t get disappointed. You won’t get slapped down by the Splintered Ruler of Life. But the way he was going, he could end up circling the drain, like her screw-up brother, Calvin.

“You look like you could use some coffee,” Duncan said.

“What about Mom’s rule?” Jake said.

“That’s your parents’ rule, Jake,” she said. Jake wasn’t allowed to have coffee until he was a senior in high school. A totally arbitrary policy, she had to admit. But it had been her father’s. Then she added, “But you know what? Rules are meant to be broken. Go ahead and have coffee.”

“Why not?” Duncan said, after throwing a surprised glance at Juliana. He took a mug out from the cabinet and poured some coffee. “You’ll probably want a lot of cream and sugar.”

“I’ll take it black,” Jake said.

“Really?” Duncan said.

Jake took a sip and grimaced. “Yeah, I like it black now,” he said.

“Jake, can you sign me into Skype?” Juliana said. “I think you changed the password.”

“No, I didn’t,” Jake said.

“Sign me in, okay?”

“Anyway, I don’t have time to talk to her. I’ll miss the bus.”

“Talk to your sister,” Duncan said. “I’ll drive you to school. And sign your mom into Skype.”

Duncan, a professor at New England Law, had an easier schedule than hers. His first class didn’t start until ten. She had to be at the courthouse no later than eight thirty.

Duncan put The Boston Globe down on the table in front of her, folded to a story about Wheelz in the Boston market, about all the competition in ride-hailing apps and how the ordinary cabdriver was getting screwed big time. She saw a big picture of the extremely rich founder of Wheelz, Devin Allerdyce, a pointy-faced man of thirty-five with scraggly brown hair and a pinched face that reminded her of a mouse.

“That rat-faced scumbag,” Duncan said. “Hope you drop an anvil on his ass.”

She smiled, shook her head. “Dispassionate judgment. Procedure. Rule of law. You know, all the stuff you tell your impressionable law-student groupies is just a mask for the workings of power and hegemony? Call me old-fashioned, but that’s still how I roll. We are not having this conversation.”

He smiled, and then she admitted, “He does kinda look like a rodent.”

This morning she found herself looking around the kitchen, watching Duncan slide a couple of sunny-side-up eggs onto Jake’s plate, and suddenly her throat got tight and tears came to her eyes. This happened to her, every once in a while: her heart would swell. She never knew when it would come on.

“You okay?” Duncan said, putting two crisp pieces of bacon on her plate.

“An eyelash,” she said. “I’m fine.”

The Skype ringtone sounded, and she pulled the laptop close to answer. “Ash, baby,” she said. “I miss you.”

That afternoon, Juliana returned to the courtroom to hear oral arguments in the case of Rachel Meyers v. Wheelz , in which a young woman was suing a hot, new ride-hailing start-up in Boston for sex discrimination. The case had been going on for months, and it showed no signs of slowing its march to trial. Juliana sometimes thought of it as Jarndyce v. Jarndyce , the unending court case from Dickens’s novel Bleak House .

“All rise,” the court officer called out. She entered, and everyone stood. Long ago she’d figured out that they weren’t standing for her. They were standing out of respect for the system of justice, respect for what they were all undertaking. You had to show respect. That was why she didn’t let witnesses chew gum, wouldn’t let people read newspapers or talk on their phones in her courtroom. She sat, and everyone in the courtroom sat.

At the plaintiff’s table sat the lead attorney, Glenda Craft, a fit, slender woman in her late fifties who either wore false eyelashes or used a lot of mascara. She talked loud, walked quickly, and thought faster on her feet than any other lawyer Juliana had ever met. There were rumors that she had never lost a case, and others about the legions of opposing lawyers who were heard throwing up in the courthouse bathrooms before going up against her each day at trial.

She was wearing a St. John suit. You could tell from the knit. It was forest green with brass buttons, and it draped beautifully without clinging. Her necklace was three strands of oversize pearls, feminine but strong, a perfect balance. The outfit said I’ve arrived .

The attorney for Wheelz, Harlan Madden from the law firm of Batten Schechter, was his own kind of killer. He was a deceptively affable man of around sixty with a large potbelly, a Yalie who’d gone to Andover, whose father and grandfather had likewise gone to Yale and Andover, who’d been the captain of the tennis team in college and was said to have been ferociously competitive, back in the day. He was wearing a perfectly tailored charcoal suit.

When Juliana finished law school, trial law was still a boys’ club, an occupation dominated by alpha males who were big and tall and had loud voices. She had no interest in imitating them. So she joined the US Attorney’s office, where she learned to be twice the trial lawyer any of the guys in private practice were. In cross examinations, instead of intimidating witnesses like male trial attorneys did, she’d win over witnesses and then suddenly turn on them, catch them off-guard in a contradiction. Her male colleagues used to call her “the pit bull” because she never let go. Witnesses on the stand would wilt under her politely relentless questioning.

Both Craft and Madden had their assistants, associates who did the grunt work, and there was a lot of grunt work. Reams of documents to go through, hundreds of linear feet. In the courtroom behind the bar sat the plaintiff, Rachel Meyers, a fragile-looking blond woman in her mid-thirties. She wore a blue blazer over a white button-down shirt. Seated nearby was a sprinkling of lawyers there for the defense.

Or maybe there to intimidate. Wheelz was a competitor to Uber and Lyft, nowhere near as big as either one, but growing fast. They had a self-driving-car unit that they believed was the future of the ride-hailing business, the near future. They had a lot of cash and could afford an expensive Big Law defense. They’d offered Rachel Meyers a generous settlement a few months back, but Rachel wanted to be heard. She wanted a trial. She didn’t want to settle.

Juliana looked over her courtroom. Everything the way it was supposed to be. The court officers in their uniform, the white shirt and black tie, the American flag patch on one shoulder. The court reporter with her gray stenomask, the oxygen-mask-looking thing with foam rubber around the mouthpiece.

She took a breath and began. “Good afternoon, Counsel. We’re here on the defendant’s motion for a protective order. I’ve read the papers. I understand there’s a dispute over whether certain documents should be produced or are entitled to a protective order. Mr. Madden, it’s your motion; why don’t you start?”

Harlan Madden stood. The lawyers always stood when addressing her. “Your Honor,” he said, “as you know, this is a gender-discrimination case. The plaintiff alleges she was terminated due to sex discrimination. Whereas the evidence shows she was clearly terminated due to ongoing performance issues. It’s as simple as that. But now they’re asking for the records of hundreds, if not thousands, of private electronic company chats, which the plaintiff knows is how employees at Wheelz conduct company business, much of it proprietary and confidential—”