Chapter Five
I finished my coffee and walked back to Jessica’s apartment, wanting to give myself enough time to figure out the subway from Brooklyn to the office.
I showered and put on the Theory dress, then packed black pumps, my new employee paperwork, and a bottle of water into my Longchamp tote.
I slid into the stylish pair of Tod’s loafers Jessica told me to borrow for the commute and did a final once-over in the mirror.
I still felt like Ben’s wife pretending to be a New York lawyer.
The subway was overrun with men and women in suits. I finally found a seat after the train emptied at Wall Street, reading orientation emails until the train reached Forty-Second Street.
Abramson I had no connections.
Among the usual suspects of “white-shoe” law firms, A&K had a distinctive reputation for taking on high-profile cases with newsworthy clients, most of whom were titans of industry, from studio heads to college dropouts turned app inventors.
The corporate lawyers closed deals that single-handedly moved Wall Street.
I’d been warned by more than a few of my professors that even though it was one of the strongest choices in terms of reputation, the culture was cutthroat, and the hours were brutal.
The elevator opened to a receptionist who saw me coming a mile away. I stepped into the firm lobby, which was starkly decorated with splashes of expensive artwork and framed accolades.
“Samantha?”
Susan Klein, the firm’s head of HR, was nearly six feet tall in heels, with short hair styled the way Demi Moore made famous in Ghost. Height aside, she had the presence of a woman who’d spent decades watching associates come and go or rise to partnership.
She started her career overseeing the secretarial pool and was running HR twenty years later.
“Welcome. I’ll show you to your office,” she said crisply, guiding me back to the elevator. She put on tortoiseshell readers and looked down at the folder in her hand.
“Your employment file from last summer lists you as Samantha Walker.” She glanced at me as the elevator door opened. “Congratulations, then.”
I swallowed my pride and stepped confidently into the elevator. “Thank you.”
I was prepared for everything except explaining my new last name.
We stopped in front of a door at the end of a long hallway. She paused to knock lightly, which confused me until I saw that the office had been converted into a shared space with two desks and a small partition in between.
“Charlie Bronstein, Samantha DeFiore. She starts today.”
Susan pointed to my side of the office as she explained the firm had recently poached sixty partners and associates from a competing firm, and now first-year associates needed to double up.
He jumped up and shook my hand. “I heard you were starting today,” he said with an approachable smile.
“Charlie was with us as a paralegal during law school and is one of the few to be offered an associate position. So I’m sure he’ll be helpful in getting you up to speed.”
She handed me a sealed manila envelope. “Here’s the orientation schedule for your first week. If you have questions, you can set a time with my office.”
She closed the door behind her. I was still clutching my Longchamp, floating uncomfortably in the middle of the room. My eyes landed on a sealed MacBook box sitting on my desk.
“First things first, I guess?” I said, trying to look like I wasn’t surprised to be sharing an office.
“Oh yeah. Set that thing up first. It’ll take all morning to get through the security prompts,” he said.
“I knew I should have taken that cybersecurity class at Georgetown,” I said half jokingly.
“Ah, a DC draft pick. That’s refreshing.”
I lifted the silver laptop out of the box. “What about you?”
“Fordham, but originally from outside Boston. Still not sure how I ended up here,” he said good-naturedly.
His dad was a history teacher, and his mom was a nurse.
Most of his friends had gone to community college, but he went to Boston College.
On a whim, he took the LSAT with his girlfriend their junior year.
She got a 164, and he got a near-perfect 177.
“I actually got into Yale and Columbia, but Fordham gave me a partial scholarship,” he said. “Less debt and law school in the city seemed like a no-brainer.”
He moonlighted as a paralegal for A&K during his second and third years to cover living expenses, and the firm promised him a job if he passed the bar. Somehow, we’d landed in the same place, only I had a quarter million in student loans.
Charlie had started a week before me. “I know they like me, but I just want them to see me as an actual associate now, instead of a paralegal, you know?”
I nodded along, grateful to have an officemate. It somehow made everything feel less intimidating.
“We have tech training at 10:30, but after that I can take you down to the cafeteria and show you what’s safe to eat.
Almost everyone takes lunch back to their office.
It’s a real scene. Associates running into each other, too busy looking down at their BlackBerrys so they can race upstairs the second they get an important email.
Luckily the food is decent, and the service is fast.”
He clicked his pen. “What else can I tell you . . . oh. Make sure you take the billing tutorial sooner rather than later. They just started docking pay if you’re late entering your time.”
“Have you been put on any interesting cases yet?” I asked.
Charlie took off his glasses and I noticed one eye was greener than the other.
“So far, just one of the cases I worked on as a paralegal. It’s been going for eight years. But I’m keeping an eye out for new ones. If you hear of anything . . .” He winked.
“Is the firm as competitive as everyone says? Is anyone trustworthy?”
Charlie shook his head. “Not even me.”
“That’s tough, given we’re sharing an office.”
He pointed to his monitor. “Tricks of the trade. Screen protector. I could be playing blackjack all day, and you’d never know. Even though we sit three feet away from each other.”
“If you’re playing blackjack all day, at least I won’t have to worry about competing with you for cool cases.”
He grinned. “All they told me was your name was Sam, and we’d spend every waking minute together for the next two years. I guess this is a bad time to tell you I don’t know how to talk quietly on the phone.”
A calendar alarm went off on Charlie’s laptop.
“Tech training,” he announced. “To be continued.”
The first week at the firm was a blur of learning how to track and enter time, reserve a conference room for clients, and navigate the unspoken rules of office life.
We were being given the tools to succeed, but it was up to us to find enough work to meet the lofty requirement of twenty-five hundred billable hours a year, which meant billing at least ten hours of actual work Monday through Friday and multiple hours most weekends.
“It’s like the best and worst system,” Charlie said Thursday afternoon at Hatsuhana, the sushi bar around the corner from the office.
After three days of orientation lunches catered by the firm, I was ready to be outside in the middle of the day.
“No one is going to come in and make sure we’re billing enough time.
You have to be focused and direct. Know what type of work you’re interested in, and go find it.
You want to defend finance guys when the SEC is on their ass?
Figure out which partners bring in those clients.
Like Rich Kepler. Represent producers who are getting sued, Eddie Kaufman.
But the Eddies and the Riches of the firm are literally being stalked by associates all day long.
So you have to be tactically aggressive. ”
“Eddie Kaufman is the reason I’m here,” I admitted, feeling self-conscious. Charlie had probably watched dozens of associates try to get on Eddie’s radar in his paralegal days.
“Get ready to cut in on a very long line. It can be done, but you have to get in there.”
“I know. Even if it doesn’t happen right away, I can be patient. I’ve read every single article about him, going back to his prosecutor days.”
Eddie Kaufman was a Greenwich Village kid whose later life looked nothing like the early years working in his parents’ drugstore on Mott Street.
He’d gotten a full ride to Harvard, studied political science, then worked full-time to support himself through Columbia Law.
He was one of the only graduates recruited to join the US Attorney’s Office as a prosecutor right out of law school.
A chance meeting with the great poet Bob Dylan early in his career prompted a pivot to music, and thirty years later, he was New York’s most high-powered entertainment lawyer.
I patiently waited while Charlie finished chewing the handroll he had taken in one bite.
“When did you know you wanted to be a lawyer?”
I bit the tip of my chopstick. “Don’t laugh. After I read To Kill a Mockingbird. When I was nine.”
“I hope you put that in your cover letters.”
“And all my application essays.”
“Obviously.”
“What about you?”
“You can’t laugh either.”
“I swear.”
“Josh Lyman.”
“From The West Wing?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Does that mean you want to go into politics eventually?”
“Social justice work. Maybe immigration or prison reform.”
“Oh, the easy stuff.”
“Yup. I’m just putting in a few years in Big Law so I can pay off my student loans. Then I’ll burden myself again with poverty-level wages.”
“Seems like a solid game plan.”
He checked his watch, then waved for the check.
“Okay. I have an insider tip, but I’m only giving it to you because I think the movie business is a dying industry, which means we’re not competing for work. Seriously. Anyone who sinks millions into a terrible business model shouldn’t be bailed out.”
“Hit me.”
He leaned in. “Every Thursday, the paralegals get a list of new clients and the partners who brought them in. There’s usually a one-line description of what the matters are about too.
Lena leaves it in my mailbox. She’s the supervising paralegal.
It’s only supposed to be for them, so if I share it with you, you gotta keep it confidential.
But we can look at it together in our office if you want. ”
He half jokingly looked over his shoulder.
“It’s not like we’re really gaming the system—you still have to fish out which senior associates are doing the heavy lifting for partners in terms of how they staff the case, that kinda thing .
. . but it just gives you a little lead time to get there first. We can see what looks good and come up with a game plan. ”
“Why are you being so nice to me? Even if you’re not competing with me for entertainment stuff—what’s your angle?”
He shrugged. “I worked with a lot of associates when I was a paralegal, and you seem different. You admitted To Kill a Mockingbird made you want to be a lawyer. It takes balls to be that cliché.”
“Okay, Aaron Sorkin.”
He grinned. “Everyone needs a partner in crime, especially in this place. Officemates unite, or something cheesy like that.”
We called them Thank You Thursdays. Lena put the list in Charlie’s mailbox at 9 a.m. We’d meet at Joe’s Coffee in Grand Central on the way in, then swing by the mail room before heading to our office to divide and conquer.
The first few lists had more matters Charlie was interested in than I was.
While I kept plotting a way to get on Eddie Kaufman’s radar, I tried to set meetings with senior associates who worked with him.
It was even harder than I thought. He either worked with one or two associates on most cases or handled them solo.
He also spent a lot of time in Los Angeles, which made it more difficult because when he needed to staff a matter, he only needed LA people.
It was starting to feel like I needed to cast a wider net and find work outside of the entertainment practice.
Luckily, the firm gave new associates six weeks to ramp up before the billable-hour requirement kicked in, but the end of the grace period was hurtling toward me. I couldn’t keep spinning my wheels.
On the fourth Thank You Thursday, I complained to Charlie as we walked back from Joe’s.
“I’m thinking of reaching out to the Intellectual Property group to get on some copyright cases. At least that wouldn’t feel like a total failure. Copyright is kind of in the realm, right?”
He shook his head. “Nope. Maybe take on a copyright case just to get some hours in, but it’s way too soon to give up.”
He pushed the elevator button and grinned. “Besides, we got the list. Something is bound to turn up on there. You just need one little break, and you’ll be golden.”
Charlie closed the office door behind us. “Damn, there’s six pages this week! Here, take the first four. I have a good feeling about those.”
“Here goes,” I said hopefully.
There were four new Eddie Kaufman matters on the first and second pages alone.
“This is interesting,” I said cautiously. “It’s a pro bono matter for Film at Lincoln Center. I didn’t even know someone like Eddie did pro bono.”
Charlie smirked. “He probably has associates do it all. Could be cool, though. Work with Eddie and do something good for the world. Besides, not a lot of associates want to do pro bono because the firm only lets you bill half your time. So you might actually have a shot. Maybe you should email Patricia.”
He explained Patricia was Eddie’s longtime assistant who notoriously scheduled his entire life.
“And say, ‘Hey, I’m dying to work with Eddie and willing to only bill half my time to do it’?”
“We can do a little recon on the Lincoln Center thing. I’m sure it’s some kind of relationship, and he’s doing it for optics or whatever.”
I couldn’t have dreamed up a more perfect opportunity.
“Film at Lincoln Center puts on the New York Film Festival,” I explained.
“The biggest filmmakers in the world screen their movies there. Everyone from Ingmar Bergman to the Coen brothers . . . Godard, Truffaut, Kurosawa, Tarantino. Absolutely insane.”
Charlie nodded. “I’ve heard of at least two of those names.”
Through a combination of Google and Charlie’s paralegal moles, we learned that Eddie had recently become a board member of Film at Lincoln Center. Beyond that, no one seemed to know what the case was about. I just needed an in so I could prove myself.