Yoga class

When you first meet her, Doris does not strike you as a natural yogini.

Curly of hair and stiff of limb, she appears to live in a world of her own. She is in a consistent state of confusion and has some trouble telling her left from her right. But once she gets a posture down, she rocks that posture. Rocks it, as in, Gandhi himself would be so jealous that he would lock himself into a McDonalds and embark on an all-you-can-eat cheeseburger binge out of sheer frustration.

The rest of us in the weekly subterranean yoga class are not so lucky, or rather, gifted. It must be said that our yoga teacher, the lovely Helena, is ridiculously encouraging.  "Yes," she clamors ecstatically as we grunt and groan in downward dog position, "Beautiful, very pretty!" I venture a glance in the ballet-style wall-length mirrors and see a sweating, red-headed lawyer with shaking knees and an oddly angled behind stare back at me in obvious physical pain. Beautiful indeed.

Of course there is a reward.  It comes in the form of 7 minutes of utter relaxation at the end of each class. Brutally stretched and involuntarily subjected to positions that Mother Nature couldn't possibly have intended, the body is in such shock that it happily submits to a state of semi-slumber. A true yogini can achieve such Nirvana even without the physical exertions that for a beginner necessarily precede it. For now, I'm just happy to get my ass kicked by Helena so I can enjoy 7 whole minutes of Nothingness.

After class, I float back up to the 18th floor, visualizing my inner smile and greeting the yogini deep inside as instructed. The problem with Nothingness, I find though, is that it is a pushover in the real world, having little means to occupy space or mark its territory.  It is, after all, Nothingness. How do you protect Nothingness from all the Somethings that encircle it, itching to step in once the 7 minutes are up?  Timid, spineless, flabby Nothingness cedes its place faster than chocolate melts in the bain-marie. 

And so the day continues.

Secretly yours,

The Undercover Writer.

Thick skin

Today, I am struggling with the thickness, or rather thinness, of my skin.

As a laywer, I am required to be knowledgeable, responsive, courteous and cool-headed. Like a surgeon, I am expected to pay obsessive attention to detail.  Like an HR manager, I am expected to understand how to drive and motivate a team.  Like a CEO, I am expected to grasp the business realities behind a complex legal conundrum.

It turns out that like a politician or a Hollywood celebrity, I am also increasingly expected to "walk it off" and move on when I am seriously dissed.

"Undercover, that memo you wrote on discovery didn't cite enough case law. Back to the drawing board!" bellows the ulcer-inducing Partner Number Two from behind his desk. No matter that his response to my previous memo had been: "Undercover, why is this draft crawling with footnotes? Take them all out! The client doesn't care about the case law!" This is one of very many reasons why Partner Number Two will never be Partner Number One.

"Undercover, what is that stink you're wearing?" grumbles Jaded Officemate after I return to my desk from Partner Number Two's office.  I give him a hard stare.

"It's Chanel N° 5, you ogre, the scent of choice of millions of women around the globe.  But knowing your knack for refinement, you'd probably prefer essence of flatulant gorilla or yeasted horse dung."

"I'm not into perfume," he responds gingerly as he turns back to his screen.

I am typing more aggressively on my keyboard than strictly necessary when Down the Hall waltzes into our office.

"Hi, Undercover! Turd." she acknowledges Jaded Officemate with a curt nod.  They don't exactly see eye to eye.  And turning back to me: "Oh my, you look like a train wreck today, are you feeling alright?"

I wince and then involuntarily pass a finger underneath each eye to catch traces of runaway mascara that could be mistaken for dark circles.

"Yeah, I'm fine, jeez.  What's up with everyone today?  You don't look so hot yourself you know!"

That is quite honestly not true.  Down the Hall looks irritatingly fabulous as usual.  Fresh-faced and wide-smiled, she looks like she is just taking a break from the movie set of Pride and Prejudice rather than being ensconced in the death traps of BigLaw.

"O-kay," Down the Hall responds slowly as she rolls her eyes, "one of us is clearly not having a good day.  Oh, not you, Turd," she interjects as Jaded Officemate looks up from his papers, "nobody's talking to you." Jaded Officemate shrugs and drops his head back to his papers. "I'll, er, come back tomorrow, when you're feeling a bit more sociable."

An hour later I am still wearing my "Trespassers will be shot" expression as I run downstairs to grab something high in refined sugar from Emile's bagel shop. Emile has his day off, and his deputy makes change at the register. As I turn on my heels to go back upstairs, a tall handsome thirty-something investment banker-something calls out.

"Ah, mademoiselle!"

Cautiously, I turn around.  Mademoiselle?  The investment banker must be visiting from somebody's Paris office.  With a deliciously strong accent, he hands me the coffee I had forgotten on the counter as he says: "Chanel N° 5, excellent choice."

Sometimes it is quite nice having thin skin, I ponder, as I wait for the goose bumps to subside.

Secretly yours,

The Undercover Writer.

Saturday night

The weekends of a BigLaw associate are anything but predictable.  Two weekends ago I billed 24.5 hours.  This weekend it seems that there is nothing going on at the office - until further notice.  It's tricky pencilling in a social life that way.  How can you make plans if you are one e-mail away from having to cancel them and spending your Saturday night tucked away behind your computer screen?

To fully take advantage of my free time while it lasts, I arrange to meet Cameron for drinks.  She's an old high school friend from an old family with a lot of old money.  An only child and the heiress to an inconceivably large fortune, she has somehow managed to stay relatively grounded.

She sweeps into the bar with a perfect bleached smile mirrored in the heavy pearl strands around her neck. "Hello darling, lovely to see you! Excellent idea to meet for drinks. What are we having?"

After ordering us both Mojitos, Cameron swivels on her bar stool and stares directly into my eyes to command my full attention.  It works.

"So," she says. "I actually have something to tell you." Her eyes light up as she waves the back of her left hand gingergly in front of my nose.

"Oh my," I gasp, "It's the Heart of the Ocean!" The engagement ring on her finger features a blue diamond large enough to take someone's eye out if applied correctly. "Congratulations! Who's the lucky fellow?"

"Preston Merriweather III. Old family from Atlanta.  His great-grandfather made a fortune building railroads in the 19th century. It's going to be a grand wedding with at least 1,500 guests." Pensively, she stares at the ring and slowly turns her hand back and forth to let it catch the light. "There's just one little hiccup."

"You find it impossible to hail a cab or brush your teeth with that rock weighing down your left arm?"

"I'm pregnant." Her voice is matter-of-fact, as if she is complaining about a minor inconvenience like a bad hair day or late dry-cleaning.

"Pregnant?" I repeat slightly louder than I should. "With little Preston Merriweather IV?"

"Well, it's not the gardener's," she hisses, "And keep your voice down!" I'm ashamed at my oafishness as I try to digest the news.

"Then why is it a hiccup? That's great news, isn't it?  You were already getting married, right? Or is that why you're getting married?" I say, adding as I see her take a large gulp of her drink, "By the way, should you be drinking a Mojito in your current, er, condition?"

"Oh, I'm not actually recognizing the pregnancy at this stage.  I'm only in my second month.  I'm trying to ignore it while I still can, you know, before I start to show."

Swallowing my judgmental shock, I decide to be a friend and give the moralistic lecture a pass.

"So how is Preston dealing with this? He must be thrilled, no?"

"Hard to say." Her face hardens as she slightly clenches her jaw. "He got me this gargantuan rock, he gets points for that.  He's freaking out though, in a genteel Southern sort of way. Most of the time he's ok with it, and then suddenly - usually when he's had a little too much to drink - he'll start ranting about how I'm going to lose my figure and how I'll love his child more than I love him. 'Where does that leave me?' he'll cry, 'You won't be my wife, you'll be the mother of my child!' So we've just put the whole pregancy thing on hold for now, to give us both some time to come to terms with it.  We'll tell the family in a couple of weeks and then we'll fast-track the wedding." With their combined fortunes, they could probably organise a 1,500 guest wedding yesterday if such were their desire.

"Honey, you can't really put a pregnancy on hold, you do realize that, don't you?"

"Well, no, but we just find it easier not to talk about it for the time being and deal with it once I start to show. He worries about the impact it will have on him."

"The impact it will have on him?" I echo incredulously. This one sounds like a real catch. "What about the impact it will have on you?"

"Yes, I know.  I've thought about that but I think I'll enjoy staying at home to care for a baby, perhaps doing a little charity work on the side.  We both know it was unlikely that I was going to have a career...  I was never going to be a hotshot lawyer like you."

I consider the comparison.  Me, cooped up in my windowless office with Jaded Officemate, cranking out billable hours at ever increasing levels, taking abuse from the client in the "Your Momma" case and bowing to the nonsensical demands of Partner Number Two and his cronies. Her, spending a secluded life in some wide-porched mansion, quietly sipping lemonade in the shade of a rustling Sycamore tree, watching her children play in the sunset. Perhaps out of the two of us, she's the one who has it all figured out. Of course, I don't have random millions lying about that provide me with the luxury to live the life of my choosing.

Then it occurs to me as I watch Cameron finish her Mojito that, with all her wealth, she may not have that luxury either.

Secretly yours,

The Undercover Writer.

Jaded

The current buzz on the internet around BigLaw firms that are nearing bankruptcy seems to have brought out the worst in some people.  Cloaked in anonymity, commentators on law blogs are using increasingly vile language to describe their satisfaction in seeing other people suffer, going so far as to actually encouraging people to "all go kill yourselves".  This is more than just a little Schadenfreude (a guilty pleasure we probably all delight in every now and then), this is disaster tourism and plain old meanness.

Why is it that this kind of commentary comes up most frequently on law fora?  Are lawyers so jaded and frustrated with their existence that their only pleasure is to watch their peers suffer?  What does that tell us about our profession? Or are these comments coming from people who were (sadly) laid off and as a result don't feel welcome in our profession, resorting to spraying their verbal vitriol all over it like a jilted lover?

I cautiously raise these questions with my officemate as we eat salads over our keyboards at lunch. I don't know him very well; for all I know he may be the single most active commentator out there, releasing his many frustrations under ever changing code names.  

"Hmpfh," he shrugs as he swallows a mouthful of designer hummus. "Why do you care? People are people, if someone goes down in flames, they're going to watch with popcorn.  Especially if it's a whole BigLaw firm going down at once, that's not just flames, that's 4th of July fireworks."

"Imagine if that happened at our firm though.  Wouldn't you like a little empathy rather than a bunch of goons standing in a circle around you, rubbing their hands at your misfortune?" I ask in a final attempt to evoke a slither of humanity.

"Nah," he says. "I'd get out as fast as I can and join the circle with the hand rubbers."

I no longer wonder whether my officemate belongs in the "Jaded" category. 

Secretly yours,

The Undercover Writer.

Emile

I like to make a lunch date with Emile when the somewhat over-privileged and navel-gazing tendencies of the BigLaw crowd get on my nerves.  Emile works at the bagel shop located in the ground-floor atrium of our building.  He may sound French, but he really isn’t.  He’s from Cleveland, has never set foot outside the United States and still thinks of pizza as a foreign food. His teenage parents named him Emile on a whim after finding a reference to French intellectual and author Emile Zola in their history textbook. Short-lived domestic bliss ended abruptly for one-year old Emile when his father took a job in a steel factory in Detroit and his mother joined a commune in California.  Emile was raised by his gentle, common-sense paternal grandparents and made his way to the City at the age of 18 where he stayed ever since.

Now in his early fifties, Emile is the pater familias of an ever extending clan of his own.  He keeps me grounded with his no-nonsense take on the hurried over-achievers he serves with slow-baked bagels and custom-made lattes every day. He strongly disapproves of take-away food and I have often seen him on the verge of refusing a customer’s request to “wrap that to go, please”.

“What, these people have two extra hands or something so that they can eat and type at the same time?  Why don’t they just sit down for ten minutes and taste the bagel for chrissakes,” he grumbles after barely accepting payment from yet another “to go” patron.

“Yeah, I know, it’s crazy,” I agree as I sip my freshly squeezed orange juice on a high stool at the counter.  I don’t have the heart to tell him that I get my lunch to go at least four times a week myself.  But never at Emile’s.  His bagels are too oven-warm, too imperfectly round and too overstuffed to eat on the fly.

“So, watcha working on?” asks Emile as he wipes the counter with a red-checkered cloth.

“I have to prep the client for depositions in the “Your Momma” Case.” With Emile, I use my private code name for the file so he won’t know which client I’m talking about.

“Oh boy,” he says, rolling his eyes. “Does he behave since you told him off about the bad e-mails?”

“Most of the time.  I’ve got him on a pretty tight leash. He still doesn’t get that he did anything wrong though.”

“Didn’t he steal away all his company’s clients, set up his own business and use all of their secret know-how to compete with them?”

“Pretty much,” I admit. “Allegedly.”

“Sure, allegedly.” Emile shakes his head.  “Don’t bite the hand that feeds you is what I say.  I’ve been making bagels at this place for twenty-five years and I never thought of setting up my own business.  Mind you, I don’t know what goes into the bagel batter.  Or the tuna salad.  If I did, I might’ve given it a shot,” he winks.

“I wonder if I should set up shop somewhere and practice law on my own,” I say dreamily.

“What, and not come down here to eat my bagels?  I won’t have it, your dreams aren’t coming out of my paycheck, Missy!”

“Don’t worry,” I laugh, “Before I leave, I’ll tell my client in the “Your Momma” case to give you a bagel contract to supply his whole company for ten years.  That should tie you over.”

“Sure,” he grumbles, “As long as they don’t get them to go.”

And on that note I return upstairs for the afternoon session.

Secretly yours,

The Undercover Writer.

Monday morning (2)

As I enter the glass-walled meeting room (affectionately referred to as “the Aquarium”), people are making overly pleasant conversation to pretend that they are awake and happy to start their week with an 8 AM meeting.  I take a seat next to Down the Hall, my friendly neighborhood associate who has an indestructible good mood and has helped me through many a crisis in my 4.5 years with the firm.  She gives me a meaningful look and then yawns without opening her mouth, making her nostrils flare.  Suddenly, I feel like I’m back in the third grade passing around a naughty note, and I stare hard at the conference table to push back the impending giggles.

“Partner Number Two, Partner Number Two, Partner Number Two,” I repeat to myself in an urgent mantra.  Partner Number Two is not a laughing matter.  He is Very Serious and nothing about him must be taken in jest.  “Number Two, Number Two, Number Two” echoes my rebellious brain, which has just decided to wake up, and I squeeze my hands together as tightly as I can between my knees to avoid a laughing fit.

“Down the Hall, what will you be working on this week?” asks Elvis, aka the King, who is the department head here at BigLaw litigation as he goes round the table.  Down the Hall responds as she always does, succinctly, to the point, clearly stating her busy-ness and effectiveness for the firm without sounding like a total bitch. Nicely done.  My turn.

“Very well, Down the Hall, thank you.  Undercover?”

“Yes, I will be finishing my research for Partner Number Two before noon.” 

“Wasn’t that due first thing this morning?” asks Elvis.

What is it with these people?  Most days, they can’t even remember my name, and suddenly their smartphone calendars are all synched up and blinking reminders that my deadline has passed?  I shoot a quick look at Partner Number Two, but he is typing away on his Blackberry, oblivious to the meeting around him.  I manage a convincing “By 2 PM in fact, sir” without Partner Number Two looking up. “And then I will be available for other work until Wednesday, when we will start prepping the client for depositions in the “Your Momma” Case.”

It’s not officially called the “Your Momma” Case, actually. I like to refer to it as the “Your Momma” Case because the parties are so upset with each other that if their lawyers hadn’t stopped them when the litigation started, they would still be writing the rudest, most vitriolic e-mails in the foulest language ever read by impressionable young document reviewers in the history of law. Deposing the parties in the “Your Momma” case will be like watching an uncut Quentin Tarantino movie or any recent footage of Mel Gibson.   

“Thank you Undercover. Next?”

After the tour of the table, I make my clever hand gesture and sneak out of the room, catching a frown on Elvis’ face as I go. I have weighed my priorities here: better a frown from Elvis than a number two from Partner Number Two because I missed my Moscovian deadline.

At precisely 5 minutes to noon, I knock on Partner Number Two’s door with my memo, neatly researched, footnoted, formatted and ready to go.  All it needs is his stamp of approval, and of course his name signing off on the cover letter.  Hard work, being a partner, signing your name on pre-packaged memos at  1,000 bucks an hour.

“Thank you, Undercover,” he says without looking up, “leave it in my in-tray.” So long, sweet memo, may you have a happy and prosperous couple of days once you make it out the door of this building and before you are shredded by the client after a quick read-through. I enjoyed writing you.

“Oh, and Undercover?” Partner Number Two lifts his head.

“Yes, sir?”

“Next time, make sure you meet the deadline.”

Did I mention I don’t like Monday mornings?

Secretly yours,

The Undercover Writer.

Monday morning (1)

It is common knowledge that mankind must be left alone on a Monday morning.  Between the hours of 8 and 11 AM on that first and most daunting day of the week, nothing good can come of awakening the human brain too brusquely after two days of non-intellectual occupation. One should be left to stare out of one’s window or over one’s cubicle wall as the case may be, type aimlessly in an unsaved document, or slowly prepare one’s coffee to kick-start the mind. Breathe in that aroma.  Aaaaah.

“Undercover, when can I expect that draft memo on my desk?” bellows Partner Number Two[1].  I secretly call him Partner Number Two because I know it would piss him off.  He thinks he’s Partner Number One, but he’s not.  Partner Number One may have less seniority, but he is much nicer to work for and he does not impose fake deadlines.

My brain is vaguely aware of the fact that it is being addressed through human speech, reluctantly raises its head, opens one eye, grunts lightly, and then happily goes back to sleep.  I let the coffee answer this question.

“Yes, sir, the memo, I’m putting the final touches on it and will have it ready for you before noon.”

“Right.  Hadn’t I said I wanted it on my desk first thing Monday morning?”

“I believe not sir, I distinctly remember you told me you wanted it by 2 PM.” 2 PM in Moscow, that is.  Partner Number Two won’t notice the little white lie; with all the fake deadlines, how could he possibly keep track? It’ll just be sitting on his desk for another week.

“Alright then. Oh and, Undercover?”

“Yes, sir?”

“That’s no excuse to skip our Monday morning meeting.”

“Of course not, sir, wouldn’t dream of it.”

Not good.  I may have to reshuffle my time zones and shoot for 2 PM in Anchorage. Or Honolulu.  Monday morning meeting is a parade of partner egos and they usually have a lot to talk about.  It may last for anywhere between thirty minutes and an hour and a half if they really get carried away.  I’ll get a seat close to the door so that after a respectable period of time, I can point my thumb at my ear and my little finger at my mouth in the universal sign language for “phone call” before stealing away.  [To be continued...]

Secretly yours,

The Undercover Writer.

[1] The names have been changed to protect the guilty.

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