Being an experienced lawyer

 

• Paralegals

To help with my mountains of paperwork, I sometimes enlisted the assistance of two different paralegals, namely, Kate, the former editor, and Gary, who wanted to be a playwright. After you've met a few paralegals like these, you start to contemplate the brain-drain that goes into the paralegal world:


If you want an interesting experience, go talk to your paralegal coordinator and ask for the 10 best resume's he has on his desk right now. At least in our firm, those resumes are breathtaking. We are looking at economics majors who were junior Phi Beta Kappas; we are looking at physics majors with A averages, English majors, historians, people who have written graduate thesis. After a while, some people stay on and you build a management structure around them.

You like to think that, say, a brilliant young physics major with an A average isn't permanently seduced by the money, and that s/he eventually goes back to school and does something with that brilliance. I sure hope so. In my experience, paralegal work might be defined as "that which is too boring for an attorney to do."

Paralegals occupied a sort of middle world all their own. They didn't tend to stay with the same firm as long as secretaries, and anyway seemed more replaceable than the secretary who gets to know his/her boss very well. On the other hand, since paralegals lacked law degrees, they didn't fare well in prestige comparisons against attorneys either.

This ghostlike status was sometimes painfully obvious. One day, for example, a new associate arrived at the firm. Bill, the social greeting partner, was walking this associate around, introducing him to everyone. When he got to my office, Gary and I were talking. Bill said, "Excuse me. Ray, have you met Lee?" I said, "Yeah. Hi, Lee," and waved. Lee waved back. Bill turned to go. Lee was still standing there, expecting to be introduced to Gary. Bill stopped, looked back toward Gary, obviously failed to remember his name, and said, "Oh, uh, Paralegal, meet New Associate. New Associate, Paralegal." Poor Gary.

A few paralegals did have a more permanent status. In particular, we often referred to Brenda as "Para-Mom" because she was responsible and stable. She had been with the firm for a long time and probably would be there for quite a while to come. She was in charge of a bunch of "Para-pups" - that is, college students and other junior paralegals that seemed to come and go with the wind.

Paralegals like Brenda can easily be more capable, in particular situations, than the attorneys who originally trained them. That's because the paralegals have more time to learn how to do things properly, and they keep on doing them and learning new angles. They get trained from the ground up in the nuts and bolts, whereas associate attorneys cost too much per hour to justify educating them on some practical matters.

Following that philosophy one step further, a recent development at law firms is the hiring of non legal professionals (NLPs). Unlike paralegals, NLPs may cost as much as an attorney per hour but, by their specialized training, may handle the work more efficiently. Consider these words from a big firm's managing partner:

a. Quarter to a third of what many of our associates do can be done by a talented economist or MBA. We have just hired our first person like that. She is an economist in the international trade field. We compensate her like a young associate and she's got an office with a window. I wish we had 10 more like her.

Given the limits on lawyers' practical knowledge when they come out of law school - and for years thereafter - it's not surprising that law firms are showing a greater interest, not only in hiring more paralegals but also in employing economists and lobbyists, among others, to increase the range of services they offer to clients. So if you'd like to get on the law firm bandwagon without having to become an attorney first, this is an angle to look into.

• Secretaries

When you graduate from law school, you're lucky if you know where the courthouse is. Your practice will be filled with forms and documents you've never seen before and don't have the vaguest idea how to prepare. For these purposes, among many others, a legal secretary can be worth his/her weight in gold. With their assistance, you can get the job done without calling endless numbers of bureaucrats and plowing through mountains of books for the answers you need.

That's what secretaries do. But how about who they are Wall Street is close to Brooklyn, so my secretaries tended to be from that borough, where rents are cheaper and where a lot of them grew up. And since I've mentioned Brooklyn a couple of times, I think it's time to give Kings County its due, if you'll pardon a brief diversion.

Brooklyn has the broad parkways and the Promenade. It's the home of "Prizzi's Honor" and the original Mafia; of the disco in John Travolta "Saturday Night Fever"; and of Neil Simon's "Brighton Beach Memoirs." When some American diplomats in Vietnam once tried to fool Ho Chi Minh, he asked them, in street-smart English, "What are you guys trying to pull?" He'd been a cook in Brooklyn. Babe Ruth ended his career in Brooklyn, as coach of the Dodgers. I'm told that Barbra Streisand was in the same high school graduating class there as Neil Diamond, who sang "Brooklyn Roads" after he moved to California.

On Mother's Day, the whole world returns to Brooklyn. My secretaries Marie, Susan, and Nereida and my good friends Rena and Linda and Jim, all came from Brooklyn. I've met good cowboys and I've met good farmers, but I don't think I've ever met people with more heart than my buddies from the Big B.

But you don't want to go there. If you do, you're apt to get killed. The place is full of loonies. I may be a romantic, but only when it's safe. My friends survived their childhoods in that place, and maybe it made them more determined to be good than they might have been if they'd grown up in a more pleasant world. I just wish they'd get out of there now and go someplace decent.

And maybe that's what the Brooklyn secretaries in my office were trying to do. Save up the money, get married, and move to Queens, or maybe Jersey, where he is better. All I knew was I loved their accents. If the word ends with an A, you add an R to it. On the other hand, if the word ends in an R, you ignore it.

Despite the pressures and the occasional conflicts in the office, I had fun gossiping with the secretaries and paralegals, sometimes joining them instead of the attorneys for a drink after work, and commemorating the higher moments in their lives, such as when Daisy celebrated, would you believe, her sixtieth anniversary of working as a secretary at the firm. The secretaries, like Brooklyn, were a world unto themselves, and with my farmland-and-law-school cultural baggage, I was never really able to explore those worlds like I wish I could have.

• Chinese Waiters

You have to figure, if a guy orders Chinese food delivered to the same office twice a week for two years, and if he always orders the same thing, you'll get to know him, even if you're a cold-hearted Chinese waiter in the stone tombs of Wall Street. Right?

Wrong. Such was not my luck. I always phoned in an order for fried dumplings, hot & sour soup, and tea. The same guy - I called him Won Ton Lee - always took my order, and yet he did not have a clue who I was. He'd claim to have problems with my credit card number. He'd forget the frigging tea. He'd refuse to deliver to my office. I couldn't believe it. After a morning of stressful corporate negotiations, I'd look forward to a relaxing lunch; instead, I'd get Lee, haggling with me in broken English about the notion of delivering a meal to 14 Wall Street. I'd remind him that he had delivered the identical order to me two days earlier, and then he'd agree to do it, as though it were a special favor to me.

On my last day at the Wall Street firm, I ate a dozen fortune cookies that had accumulated around my desk, just for good luck. And then, sure enough, a few weeks after I left the firm, my friends there told me that two well-dressed representatives of the Hunan Cuisine restaurant had made a personal visit to the firm, to find out what had happened to Woocok, the guy who used to order fried dumplings and soup twice a week.