Jobs I've Had Part IX: Law School Jobs

During law school, I worked for two different small plaintiffs' firms in my second and then third year. The first was a job I acquired midway through the first semester of my second year, when I decided that I really needed some extra money because Boston was so damned expensive. I worked for a two man firm that did a little of everything, though personal injury was sort of the filler in between the cracks of their other cases. I worked 20 hours per week answering phones, drafting legal documents, doing legal research, and basically helping them out on whatever they needed done.

I remember working on documents for the arbitration of a post-divorce case all about stock options. The former husband had been quite high up at a technology company and had acquired millions of dollars' worth of stock options, and a portion of those options had been granted to the former wife in their divorce settlement, with the catch that she only obtained the rights to the stock options once they'd been both vested and exercised. The ex-wife claimed that the ex-husband had been deliberately NOT exercising his options in order to keep them from her. The ex-husband claimed that as a company executive his ability to exercise options was restricted for much of the year due to blackout provisions for stock transactions on company executives who might have foreknowledge of information that could affect stock prices. We represented the ex-husband in the case. I worked there for nearly 6 months and the arbitration still wasn't even completely over by the time I left, so you can imagine I came away from it with a dim view of how well arbitration provides a faster, less expensive alternative to traditional litigation.

One of the two lawyers was also in-house counsel part-time for a technology company, and that company had a patent litigation action that involved most of the other big firms in the city. I don't remember many details, beyond feeling like the poor guy representing them was a little outmatched given the firepower on all the other sides.

Another law student who actually looked enough like me that she could have been my sister shared my schedule there, and we occasionally overlapped enough that we could hang out and talk for a few minutes. I've long since forgotten how it came about, but one of us somehow discovered that we could search the cache of the computer at our desk and see what the 2 lawyers were viewing on the internet when we weren't around. We found URLS to beastiality sites in that computer, and were quite scandalized by trying to figure out who was responsible for it. I don't think we ever figured it out, though we had our suspicions. (One of the attorneys had a teenage son who occasionally came with him to the office on Saturdays.)

I left that job to serve as a summer associate at a big firm in Boston, which I would later join as a first year associate fresh out of law school. It was a cushy gig, since I was paid $1800 a week to do research projects, go to lunch with attorneys, go to cocktail parties and dinners all paid for by the firm, and even take a weekend trip sponsored by the firm to the Vermont mountains. Of course the firm was NOTHING like this when I returned as a real employee, but it was still lovely while it lasted. We had a big class of 30 law students from various schools, and there were several romances and scandals that summer. At the end of the summer I got an offer for full time employment, so I knew I could relax my third year of law school rather than sweating it through another interview process.

Third year I again needed to earn a bit of extra money, so I went to work part time for a solo practitioner. While I don't really want to put her name here because I'd prefer not to have her find this blog through a Google search, let's just say that her first name was the name of a famous main character from a Shakespeare play about star-crossed lovers, while her last name was the last name of the rival family. It was her married name, and she'd long since divorced Mr. M, but she kept the name because people found it distinctive. Also, she was crazy.

She had won a few huge cases in the years before I joined her practice, and I think she still fancied herself as a legal badass. The problem was that the money had started to wear a little thin, and the only cases that we had were not quite the moneymakers she hoped. I worked on a personal injury suit against a large Atlanta-based building supply chain (again, do the math) that really exposed me for the first time to the downfalls of dealing with plaintiffs. It's the reason I will never do that work again: plaintiffs lie, and they're almost all crazy.

I also worked on my first employment litigation case at that firm, a woman who had worked for a large banking organization and had been demoted after refusing her boss's sexual advances. It was a great case for us for a variety of reasons, the biggest of which was that the woman had kept copies of all sorts of emails from the boss saying how qualified she was for this new job, as well as a diary of all the things he tried to get into her pants. Ultimately we settled that case for nearly two years' pay, which is about as good as a sexual harassment case can turn out. (It had some warts, too, but we managed to keep those under wraps.) I had essentially been allowed to bring in and run that case entirely on my own, so I was very proud to get that result.

The lawyer I worked for was constantly trying to expand her repertoire, but sometimes before she really knew enough to take on a new type of work. She was called by a former personal injury client who has arrested for bank robbery, and decided that she could learn how to do criminal defense work. I recall frantically trying to research what I needed to put into a motion to suppress that she had decided we needed to file, and feeling stressed to the end of my rope out of fear that we were flying TOO blind in the case. Thankfully, that case was before a judge who was notoriously lenient on criminal defendants (to the point that she later was the subject of a campaign to kick her off the bench), and my boss managed to secure a deal for 6 months probation and a drug treatment program for the guy. I was amazed, because our client had signed a confession! (While high as a kite on Vicodin, but still...)

I worked there for the second half of my third year of law school, and while I studied for the bar exam. I left that office about a week before I started at my "real" firm, and when I left she asked if there was any way she could convince me to stay. Given what big firms were paying starting lawyers, I told her that I had to take the other deal. Honestly, she was such a strange bird--her depositions were excruciating to read because she liked to do weird things like stand on her chair to intimidate witnesses--that I really didn't think I could in good conscience keep working for her any longer.

However, I ended up being very happy she was still around and wanted me back 2 years later when I was laid off from that cushy firm gig. I worked for her part time for 6 months while I interviewed for full time positions at other firms, and strangely enough the same woman who had been the plaintiff in my first sexual harassment case had somehow managed to acquire a NEW sexual harassment case. I managed to settle that one too, though the terms were far less lucrative. By the time I left there a second time, the boss had started to talk about moving up to Vermont to retire, and it was clear her heart wasn't in it anymore. I ran into her in the courthouse a few years later and she was still working (and still crazy)...and told me a story about how she had an ethics complaint filed against her because she shoved opposing counsel at a hearing. She said this with pride.