My Illustrious Legal Career, Continued
It’s hard to blog when you get a new puppy. It’s hard to do anything when you get a new puppy. Please follow Clover on Instagram: @clover.the.havanese. All puppy tips and tricks are welcome – seriously, help me.
As you remember from my last post, in 2003, I was a baby lawyer who was largely ignored by my superiors. The billable work I did get was complete garbage. One attorney, whom we will call Brad, worked down the hall from me. He was “Counsel”: somewhere in the netherland between associate attorney and PARTNER. Brad worked in an office the same size as mine (small), but had a practice and attendant documentation the size of a partner’s. So, his office literally overflowed with binders, papers, folders, and general crap.
Brad bounded down to my spartan office one day, did that annoying “knocking on the open door” thing, and asked if I had time to help him with a project. Oh Brad, all I had was time! I followed him down the hall, and he had a giant stack of paperwork and binders in the cubicle outside of his office. Brad was a transactional attorney. He handled leasing and buying and selling of airplanes. He was working on the sale of a bunch of planes, and what he needed me to do was match the ID numbers of each airplane, which was represented by a binder, to a master list. So basically, I was doing what my first grader does in her math workbook. I had graduated college with honors, was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, had written onto law review, passed the California Bar Exam on the first try, and Brad wanted me to do a matching game. Okay. Fine. I took the client/matter number and billed my heart out, matching binders to master lists and organizing them numerically.
I worked with Brad on this for a few weeks, and one day he told me he was going on a cruise, and would not be easily reachable for a week. He asked if I could be the contact for the client while he was on the ship. Sure thing, Brad. On his last day before his cruise vacation, I stopped by his office to see if he needed me to work on anything while he was out. What I meant was: Brad, do you have any actual, billable work for me to do while you are on a cruise ship in the middle of the ocean? His reply? “Oh. Yes. Thanks.” Then he gestured generally around his pigsty of an office and said, “Do you think you could…tidy this up? Like these piles of papers here, they could be cleaned up, and take the binders off the floor and put them on the bookshelf?” I stared at him, not understanding quite what he had said. “You want me to…clean your office?” “Yeah, it’s kind of messy in here, if you could just clean things up, that would really help me out.” I stared at him for another moment or two, then I walked away without saying a word.
I may have been a baby lawyer, but I was still a lawyer. Cleaning a man’s office was such a wildly inappropriate thing for me to be asked to do, I couldn’t even formulate a response. I wondered if he would have asked a male associate to do the same. I sat in my office chair, dumbfounded, and Brad’s assistant stormed into my office. “I just told that man he was crazy as shit,” she said. “Your job is not to clean his mess. He can clean his own mess, or he can ask me to clean it with him, but he cannot go on vacation and ask you to do that. That asshole. Don’t you dare set foot in his office while he is gone.” And then she stormed out. So I wasn’t wrong! And wow, I guess his assistant didn’t like him much, either!
A few hours later, Brad knocked on my open office door and said “well, I’m headed out! I’ll see you in a week! Oh, yeah, and don’t worry about my office, you don’t need to do that.” And he left. I never did work with Brad after that, but that wasn’t the last of him. The audacity didn’t stop at his office mess…
