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A Husband & Wife Team's Pursuit of Justice: Alone Together

published October 31, 2005

By CEO and Founder - BCG Attorney Search left
Published By
( 85 votes, average: 4.7 out of 5)
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In late 1999, a state judge in Martinsburg, West Virginia, mailed a court order to Andy Arnold assigning the young lawyer a case. Arnold, a solo practitioner in nearby Shepherdstown, was just starting out, and local judges routinely filled his calendar with appointments. In this case the client was a former migrant worker named Rene Jose Cajero, who was serving life without parole at Mount Olive Correctional Complex. He spoke almost no English, but another inmate helped him write a letter stating that he wanted to file a habeas corpus petition. Cajero had come from Mexico to the United States more than eight years earlier to follow crops up and down the East Coast. He was in West Virginia picking apples, one of an estimated 40,000 undocumented workers who travel to Virginia and West Virginia each year to harvest soybeans, peanuts, tobacco, and fruit. A family of four might earn $6,000 a year, but Cajero was making far less. It wasn't that he didn't work hard. The problem was that his crew chief withheld the workers' money each week and made them gamble for it. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the crew chief usually won.

One night, after weeks of losing their pay, Cajero and another worker had had enough. They made a Molotov cocktail, and Cajero's coworker tossed it through an open window in the apartment house where the crew chief lived. The boss escaped the ensuing blaze, but another worker was killed. The man who threw the explosive was burned on his arm, and Cajero drove him to a hospital in the nearby town of Winchester. Cajero, then 21, was convicted of murdering the fire victim and was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole—life without mercy, in the blunt argot of the court system. Now, eight years into his sentence, he wanted a lawyer.


The case was fraught with problems, particularly for a fledgling attorney new to private practice. To win, Arnold would need to uncover a clear violation of the Constitution. He had experience as a public defender, even on felonies, and he knew the case would take time—time that Arnold, who had bills to pay, a new wife, and an office to run, didn't have. The state of West Virginia paid only $45 per hour for work on these cases ($65 for each hour spent in court). Arnold and his wife, Carmela Cesare, ran their two-person practice from a cramped office that leaked when the rain fell too hard. They had a mortgage to pay. They needed paying clients. But in a way, the challenge presented by the Cajero case was exactly what had drawn Arnold to the tiny office in the first place—and to the public defender's office before that, and to law school before that. On this case he would be practicing law in the most fundamental way: alone, defending an indigent prisoner in an uphill battle, undistracted by financial gain, with only his wits to fall back on. The more he worked on the Cajero case, slogging through the discovery process between meetings with DUI clients and abuse-and-neglect cases, the more Arnold was transfixed by it. He knew he would need to find that violation—a bombshell that would break open the case. He just wasn't sure it existed.

Arnold met Cesare during his second year at the West Virginia University College of Law, when she was a 1L. They both worked for the state's public defender after graduating—he in 1992, she a year later—and they married in 1994. Cesare (pronounced che-zuh-ray) later went to work for a criminal defense attorney in Martinsburg, and she started her solo practice in 1998. She focused on criminal work, collecting assignments from judges. By February 1999, Arnold was working out of his wife's office on cases of his own. They eventually joined forces.

Most of the couple's law school friends had clawed their way into associate jobs at large firms. In Cesare, Arnold found a partner who shared his desire to thrive as an indepedent lawyer. "I decided I didn't like working for people," Cesare says. The time she spent as a solo, before Arnold joined, was almost cinematic in its quintessence: the young attorney setting off alone, holed up in a small converted apartment, standing up for people who had no hope and no money. Once Arnold joined, though, criminal defense work wasn't enough to sustain them both—they had bought a house when they got married—so Arnold started to explore more stable and lucrative practice areas like divorce and civil litigation.

Except for the letterhead listing two lawyers, however, the office of Arnold & Cesare retained many characteristics of a solo practice. "We feel like a solo," Cesare says. Solo and small practices have always been an attractive option for young lawyers, provided they can overcome the ponderous debts that often accompany them through their early careers. According to Tom Tinder, the executive director of the West Virginia State Bar, more private practices in the state, and indeed the country, resemble Arnold & Cesare than they do big firms. "Statistically, across the country, the majority of lawyers in private practice work in offices of five lawyers or less," he says. "And that's true of the 4,300 lawyers we have in West Virginia."

Cesare, who is 35, is petite and has short, dark-brown hair and fine, angular features. She speaks quietly, and when she says something funny—which is far more often than her facial expressions let on—she looks away and smiles only a little. She grew up in Millinocket, Maine, a paper mill town near the base of Mount Katahdin, at the end of the Appalachian Trail (which, as it happens, also snakes through Harpers Ferry, a few miles from Shepherdstown). Her great grandfather moved to Maine from Italy to help build the mills, and her grandfather spent his life working in them. A photograph of the mountain hangs in the office conference room. Arnold, who grew up in Fairfax, Virginia, is a year older. He has a quick laugh, and his chestnut hair falls just over his collar.

As their practice grew, Arnold found himself spending more and more time on the Cajero case. While the work was exciting at times, it was also grueling. Arnold & Cesare had no paralegals and few resources. The money he would earn for defending Cajero was meager considering the amount of time he was devoting to it. But Arnold had become something of a debrouillard at the public defender's office and as a solo, teaching himself out of necessity to do everything at once, all by himself.

He continued to attack the case tenaciously, unraveling Cajero's story a little at a time. One key discovery he made was that when the police took Cajero's statement, they enlisted as a translator a Spanish teacher from a local high school who, Arnold says, "spoke worse Spanish than I do." Arnold found Edgar Martinez, a court-certified translator, and hired him as an expert witness. He then managed to obtain a recording of the police taking Cajero's statement with the Spanish teacher translating. Arnold and Martinez discovered that not only were Cajero's Miranda rights translated improperly, but when he asked for a lawyer, the teacher did not communicate his request. Arnold had found his constitutional violation—his bombshell. Now all he had to do was build a case around it.

Last August, Arnold & Cesare moved to a new office, just down the street from the one that leaked when it rained too hard. It's on the second floor of a two-story, brick, Renaissance-revival building that, like most of its neighbors, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. (According to local lore, every building in the area was used as a hospital for wounded soldiers following the Battle of Antietam in 1862.) Shepherdstown is a carefully preserved Civil War town of 800 people—1,200 when Shepherd College is in session—in West Virginia's eastern panhandle, near the borders of Virginia and Maryland. The office is above Three Onions, one of the buzzy new eateries that have appeared recently along the town's main street. The restaurant, with its trendy martini menu and dishes like pappardelle with local morels, is typical of the upscale businesses that have made the town an urbane settling ground for artists, professors at the college, and D.C. commuters. There are new art galleries, a gourmet shop, and antiques stores. The establishments that recall the town's history and character remain, too: the Lost Dog coffee shop, where kids from Shepherd hang out; the Mecklenburg Inn, a tavern built in 1793 that has a couple of rooms upstairs; Betty's Restaurant, where construction workers get their breakfast early; and the two-room Shepherdstown Public Library.

The law office is a few blocks from the couple's house, making it easy to run home for lunch-time visits with their two daughters, Sadie, who is four, and Gwen, who's two. Shepherd College is a short walk in the other direction, and both lawyers teach there—Arnold is in his second year teaching Federalism, and Cesare started criminal procedure in September.

When they moved, they brought along their secretary, Dalisay Olaes, who is known as Daisy. Cesare found her by way of a local auto shop, where Olaes's sister was a receptionist. "We try to have a family atmosphere as much as we can," Cesare says. "Without your secretary comfortable, you're not going to get her to work for you. She's a person—you have to remember that—with her own emotions, her own problems, her own family. Today Daisy has to leave early because her son doesn't have a lift from day care. Family is more important than work. The pay may not be as high, but the flexibility is not a tangible economic thing. Daisy's not punching a time clock. That's what Andy and I like, too: We don't have to answer to The Man, so to speak."

The following recitation is printed on the back of Cesare's business card: "My lawyer has told me not to talk to anyone about my case, not to answer questions and not to reply to accusations. Call my lawyer if you want to ask me questions, search me or my property, do any tests, do any lineups or any other identification procedures. I do not agree to any of these things without my lawyer present and I do not want to waive any of my constitutional rights." It's a crib sheet for her clients, but the card doubles as a sort of pronouncement of Cesare's earnestness about protecting individual rights. It is also evidence of her savvy when it comes to a law practice having a public face. "People can be very shallow, and they honestly believe that if you're driving an expensive car and you're wearing expensive clothes and you have nice furniture, then you're successful and you must be good. And to a certain extent that's true. If your car is 12 years old, park it around the corner. That's what I did. I never let my clients see me get into my car. I had a Honda Civic that was 10 years old. They don't want to see that stuff. They want to see you get into your BMW—at least that's what I believe, I don't know—because it's reflective of the fact that you can afford it, which means that you're successful," she says.

It is her conviction, too, that presenting Arnold as the firm's syndic whenever possible is crucial. "We put Andy out there because I honestly believe that a man is going to get paid more," she says. "We try to put money into Andy's suits so he looks good. You don't want your lawyer having a frayed tie. You can look dumpy and eccentric if you've been doing this for 30 years, but if you're a young man, you need to have good clothes. You need to get your credit card out and buy a couple of nice suits. You need to keep your shirts freshly pressed all the time, and your shoes polished, and your buttons sewed on tight."

Projecting success and friendliness at the same time can, however, invite certain clients to attempt a free ride. "You'd be surprised at how many people will stiff you," Cesare says. "They think they'e the only ones who don't have money, and they think that somehow all of this—she waves her hand at the conference room walls lined with shelves of neat, monochromatic law books—comes from the air. They don't see us as people who have mortgages and families and car payments. They see us as fat-cat lawyers and that, you know, we can just do their case, it's not going to hurt. But it does."

As a solo, Cesare didn't need to advertise, because judges with long lists of indigents sent her a constant stream of cases. ("I was basically a stealth lawyer," she says.) But because $45 per hour can't support a family, these days she nudges Arnold to advertise—it was her idea this year to put up the Arnold & Cesare billboard on Route 11 in Martinsburg, near a stretch of bars. "It's facing where you'd see it if you were sitting in the back of a cop car," Cesare says. "I'd like to get little matchbooks and lighters and put them in all the bars. But Andy thinks that's tacky." Of the billboard, Arnold says simply, "It has produced no known clients."

The appearance of the office is another priority. The couple invested between $15,000 and $20,000 in renovating the space. "It stank like cigarette smoke, the walls were crumbling in spots," Arnold says. "There was so much water damage to the floors that several of the floor people who came out wouldn't even touch them. We carpeted the conference room and our offices because those floors were just too far gone." Arnold's first meeting in the new space was with a DUI client. "The carpet in my office wasn't nailed down yet. It was just lying there. The carpet guy had gone to lunch, and the conference room wasn't even close to being a place where I could meet with somebody. So I set up two of the cheap chairs we had, and we closed my office door and had a meeting. I wrote on my lap," he says. They eventually hired a design consultant named Linda Shea to help with the renovation. She helped them preserve some original details—transoms above the doors, the dark oak molding—and added antiques appropriate to the building's age. "They didn't want the prototypical corporate stuff," says Shea.

The space has proved to be an engaging setting in which to meet clients—professional but not stuffy, unpretentious but not informal. The clients who go there are increasingly diverse in their needs. Cesare, who has a lightened caseload so she can be home with the two girls, still sticks to federal criminal cases, primarily drug and gun offenses. Arnold also handles criminal cases, from traffic offenses to murders, as well as divorces, wills, and anything else he and Cesare decide to take on. Lately, he's become interested in land use law. According to the U.S. Census, the population of Jefferson County grew more than 17 percent between 1990 and 2000, and the influx has caused discordance between eager developers and locals seeking to curb the spread of cookie-cutter homes. "Zoning law itself is embryonic in West Virginia," Arnold says. "It's interesting to be on the ground floor of a developing area, but I have to be careful. It's easy to get overcommitted by not saying no to anyone. That's probably one of the hardest tasks of any lawyer starting out: telling someone no. There are clients who you would be better off paying $100 to walk out the door because you're not going to make enough money to justify your involvement. But saying no is counterintuitive. I mean, you want to get clients."

Sometimes the nonpaying clients—indigent defendants—are doubly appreciative, which tends to countervail the problem cases. "When clients write Christmas cards and thank-you notes saying that we've made a difference in their lives, that's what makes me feel all warm and fuzzy, or makes me feel like I'm actually helping somebody, which is why I like to practice poverty law," Cesare says. "Or the people who want to pay anyway, and you tell them, 'No, I'm free.'"

The state of West Virginia eventually paid Arnold for defending Rene Jose Cajero, a lump sum that was far less than what a paying client would have been charged. By the end, Arnold had spent nearly two years on Cajero's defense. When the judge delivered the decision, Arnold was almost uncomprehending: Cajero would go free. As judges' decisions go, it was extraordinary. "The day he got out of prison was absolutely, unequivocally the most emotional day I've ever had," he says.

The victory was satisfying, to be sure—Arnold had successfully represented an underdog by tearing into the case with the brio of a hungry, young lawyer. Working on it had revealed some heartening examples of the justice system at its best—the translator, Edgar Martinez, for example, never even billed Arnold for his services. Still, Arnold felt a little dispirited. Cajero had, after all, come close to spending his life in jail, even though the evidence showed that he was not the primary actor and even though his constitutional rights had been circumvented. And when you devote your life to working in a system that doesn't always function the way it's supposed to, and you see its imperfections at such close range, as Arnold did, it can be maddening. "It was a proud moment, I suppose, but I also felt a rush of anger when I got the order [for Cajero's release] signed. It was a strange feeling. I didn't know how to feel," Arnold says. After a long moment, his wife adds quietly, "He used to send Andy Christmas cards." When big law firms receive Christmas cards, they've usually been mailed en masse, with embossed signatures inside. They're tacked up in the lobby for a few weeks, then removed, and forgotten. But Cajero's cards struck Arnold. They reminded him why he and his wife went to law school in the first place, and worked in the public defender's office after that, and then, at last, built a practice all their own.

Alternative Summary

Harrison is the founder of BCG Attorney Search and several companies in the legal employment space that collectively gets thousands of attorneys jobs each year. Harrison’s writings about attorney careers and placement attract millions of reads each year. Harrison is widely considered the most successful recruiter in the United States and personally places multiple attorneys most weeks. His articles on legal search and placement are read by attorneys, law students and others millions of times per year.

More about Harrison

About LawCrossing

LawCrossing has received tens of thousands of attorneys jobs and has been the leading legal job board in the United States for almost two decades. LawCrossing helps attorneys dramatically improve their careers by locating every legal job opening in the market. Unlike other job sites, LawCrossing consolidates every job in the legal market and posts jobs regardless of whether or not an employer is paying. LawCrossing takes your legal career seriously and understands the legal profession. For more information, please visit www.LawCrossing.com.

published October 31, 2005

By CEO and Founder - BCG Attorney Search left
( 85 votes, average: 4.7 out of 5)
What do you think about this article? Rate it using the stars above and let us know what you think in the comments below.