Jobs I've Had Part VIII: "Attorney at LAW"

I did not work my first year of law school at BU, because it was generally prohibited. During my first year I was so focused on studying and preparing for exams that I did not submit resumes for any of the cushy big firm jobs that were available the summer after my first year. The applications were due just as mid-year exams were beginning, and the only information the firms would have to go on was our undergraduate experience. I figured a degree from FSU was unlikely to win me any interviews, so I did not bother to apply. Then I got shockingly managed to get straight A's my first semester, and kind of wished I had applied after all.

The rest of us who had not scored one of the plum summer associate gigs for our first year summer had to find something else to do. I wanted to stay in Boston, and needed my job to be paid. That ruled out internships for government agencies or judges. I sent resumes and letters begging for summer work out to virtually every small law firm that I could find, but all of my classmates were doing the same thing so competition was fierce. (At the suggestion of a friend of my father's I even sent a resume to a lawyer he knew at a firm where I would end up working 5 years later...a strange coincide.) I considered working as a legal secretary, since that would at least pay my rent for the summer, but then finally I saw an advertisement for a small litigation firm that was looking for a summer law clerk. I applied and was hired.

The firm was run by a diminutive man with a big attitude, and consisted primarily of personal injury litigation. I wrote briefs, answered discovery, and researched legal issues. I also wrote demand letters for injuries as silly as broken fingers and black eyes. It's pretty hard to trump up a black eye into $2000 worth of damages, which at the time was the Massachusetts threshhold for personal injury cases, but I found a way.

The most interesting case the office was handling at the time was the defense of a car dealership that had been sued by the EEOC because the owner was accused of same-sex sexual harassment. The depositions were hilarious and awful at the same time: at sales meetings, he would put his penis on the shoulder of certain salesmen not as a sexual advance, but for humiliation. The case was revolutionary at the time, because it was still unclear if a person could commit same-sex sexual harassment, particularly if there was no evidence that they were sexually attracted to the person they harassed. As we had discussed in law school, the law on sexual harassment is actually premised on discrimination law, meaning that such cases required proof of discriminatory treatment between male and female employees. It was an open question whether a harasser who was equally awful to both men and women was actually committing legally cognizable sexual harassment, because there was no discrimination in such a situation.

The attorney I worked for was like a caricature of the little man who is always over-compensating. He was about 5' 4", and at the time I was already 5' 11". He was always bellowing loudly and yelling into a Nextel phone, and he answered his office telephone with "Thomas J. Cox, Attorney at LAW." (Name changed to protect the not at all innocent.) He hated redheads for some reason I never really understood, and the other employees told me that he had even specifically requested not to get a redheaded baby when he and his wife had adopted a daughter.

He also hated me because he was frequently wrong in his understanding of a legal rule at issue in one of our cases, and when I would point this out to him and show him the correct rule, he would scream at me. For example, he had a client who had been sued in Michigan by a company that had leased him a credit card machine. The leasing contract specifically provided that any lawsuits arising out of the contract would be filed in Michigan, and the client had signed this contract. However, this attorney wanted me to draft an Answer to the Complaint for him to file in Michigan, even though he was not admitted there and had no local counsel. I told him that he would have to either have the client file the Answer pro se, or engage local counsel and get admitted pro hac vice. He insisted I was wrong, and that as our client's Massachusetts lawyer, he could file whatever he wanted anywhere he wanted. I insisted he would be risking ethical proceedings in Michigan, and thankfully I talked him into asking one of his friends at a big firm in Boston what he should do. The friend said the exact same thing I did, and then my boss didn't speak to me for a week. Apparently he didn't like that a first year law student had known the right answer when he did not.

He also was constantly either suing or threatening to sue a host of companies on his own behalf, including the EEOC because a chair had broken from underneath him during a deposition. He claimed this had left him severely injured, even though he only wore the neck brace at certain key moments. If he ate a bad candy bar or got sick after a meal at a restaurant, we'd whip up a claim letter to the company. If he bought a swingset for his daughter that rusted, another claim letter. The secretary and paralegal in the office one day showed me an entire drawer full of his various individual lawsuits and claims, and there must have been at least 50.

It was a shitty job, but it was legal experience for my resume. When the summer was over, I didn't try to stay on part-time for the next school year. I was ready to be done with the Attorney at LAW.

(The sexual harassment case eventually settled without a trial, but I never found out exactly how much the owner of the dealership paid.)