TWENTY-FOUR
Murph was quietly let go the next day. Since the firm could not officially establish an unethical motivation for Murph accessing the document, his employment lawyer managed to negotiate a settlement whereby the firm agreed to give him a generally positive reference, and both parties agreed to a perpetual confidentiality and nondisparagement clause.
With a decent reference from Parsons Valentine & Hunt LLP, Murph could start over at another firm, no problem—perhaps even as Of Counsel or a lateral partner.
He was going to be fine. The Murphs of the world would always be fine.
But, as I was finally learning, so would I.
I had worked too hard for too long, and was too good at my job, to give up on my end goal—that is, not to pass Go and collect that final Inoculating Mark.
It might have been naive to think that becoming the first minority woman partner at an esteemed international firm would make me immune to the subtle forms of racism and sexism that still enraged me—that success would thicken my skin—but I’ve never been able to give up on an ideal very easily.
I realized that, ultimately, someone had to try. Someone’s always got to be the first one to do anything, after all. And I was never going to win as long as I continued to play by other people’s rules. Instead, more of us needed to get into the business of making them up for ourselves.
The day after my story got reported in the Wall Street Journal— along with the business section of the Times, the New York Law Journal, Salon, Slate, Gawker, even a wittily observed “Talk of the Town” item in the following week’s New Yorker—that is to say, the day I got my reputation back, the job offers began pouring in.
And once they began to flow, they did not stop.
By the end of that week alone, I had offers from nine other huge corporate firms in the city—every single one of Parsons Valentine’s top competitors, along with calls from both Fortune and Forbes, who wanted to know whether I was granting interviews.
It was, of course, a very smart move for Parsons Valentine’s competitors to make me an offer.
An astonishingly easy PR win for one lucky firm—just by giving me a job, they’d get automatic credit for being the enlightened, twenty-first-century-thinking firm that took in the very darlingest of all the Minority Darlings, at the same time adding a talented young lawyer to their ranks.
It had never been in question how hard I was going to work.
Or, ultimately, that my work was of “partnership caliber.”
Tyler Robinson called to congratulate me on all the job offers.
I congratulated him back. Tyler had given notice the week after I was fired.
The timing made it look like a protest on my behalf, but what had really happened was that an in-house job offer had materialized for him at last, and Tyler was now general counsel of a successful investment fund.
The only offer of employment I even considered for a moment, though, came a few days after my public acquittal.
I got home, flushed and sweaty, from a morning run in Central Park—a new habit I’d had time to cultivate since leaving the firm—to find Dennis handing me a lush arrangement of a dozen red roses.
“These just arrived for you,” he said. “Secret admirer?”
I plucked the tiny cream envelope from among the blooms and read it right there in the lobby.
Slugger:
Heard you’ve recently become a free agent. How about coming to play on our team? I still want the right lawyer running this, as you were all along. Just say the word.
—Ted
I smiled at Dennis. “Not so secret, actually,” I said.
I went straight upstairs to my apartment and called Ted Lassiter.
“I’m flattered, Ted, really I am. And yes, I’d still be delighted to close the Binney deal for you and SunCorp. But here’s the thing—I don’t think I’m ready to go back to working for somebody else.”
“This will be different,” he said. “It won’t be like it was at the firm.”
I hesitated. I thought about what Murph had said, about why Adler had wanted me at the SunCorp beauty pageant in the first place. “Tell me something,” I said.
“Anything.”
“Why didn’t you ever say anything to me about SunCorp’s minority vendor requirements? I know about them, okay?” I said. “I’m over it. It’s okay to talk about them.”
“I’d be happy to talk about them, if I knew what the hell they were,” said Lassiter.
“You mean your board of directors never passed a rule? That your outside law firm’s got to have at least one woman or one minority lawyer working on your deal?”
Lassiter laughed. “If they had, I’d sure as hell hear about it. Look, the only rule we’ve got about who SunCorp does and does not hire is that we need the best lawyer out there running our deals. Period. And as far as I’m concerned, that’s you.”
It was the nicest thing anyone had ever said to me. I exhaled the breath that, until then, I didn’t even know I was holding.
“Now,” Lassiter said. “Are you sure you won’t consider coming on in-house at SunCorp? We’re looking at plenty more deals coming up in the near term. Big ones. Mark Traynor could really use a terrific deputy general counsel like you.”
But I had a much better idea.