From The Ridiculous To The Sublime
By Janet S. Kole
Have you ever been
tempted to murder someone? Someone like
one of your colleagues? Of course you’ve
been tempted. Before I retired from the
practice of law, I was tempted to murder some of my law partners. I believe they returned the favor. Living in a big firm is like being part of
some incredibly dysfunctional family, and the passions aroused in the lawyer’s
breast are not unlike those aroused in the heart of an abused spouse.
Most
lawyers, however, don’t kill each other.
Our weapons are usually words.
And I think we can all attest to the fact that the old rubric about
“sticks and stones” is wrong. Words can hurt you. But they are rarely fatal.
As I said to my
son when he was a toddler, and angry, “don’t hit, use your words.” I discovered the transformative power of
words to channel my frustrations with what the practice of law has become. I haven’t murdered anyone, and perhaps more
importantly, I haven’t hit anyone either.
As a litigator, I
have spent a lifetime telling stories.
When I was practicing, it was the story my clients needed me to tell to
the court and to the jury. Now, I tell
stories for the sheer pleasure of it.
I transformed the angst I felt about the
politics of the big law firm into something worthwhile. I kept notes of life in my various firms, and
I have used and will continue to use these incidents in my fiction and in my
books for young lawyers. For the young
lawyers, my books, each focused on a portion of a litigator’s life (such as
discovery or pleadings), have been upbeat and positive, using these examples of
life as a lawyer as teaching moments.
For my fiction, I have used these incidents as examples of bad behavior
which, in my book, is duly punished, usually by death.
I put a minuscule
portion of what really goes on in law firms, based on my own thirty years of
experience, into my first murder mystery novel, Suggestion of Death. The goofy and the ugly things that have
happened over the years will provide fodder for many more books.
That’s what we
lawyers do—we use our words to persuade, to make changes, to undermine our
rivals. You can lose your job, you can
lose your law license, you can lose your mind, all because of the power of
words.
Rather naively, when
I started practicing law, I actually believed that lawyers on the same side
should work together as a team. I also
believed that people usually don’t lie.
Both of these notions were blown out of the water by my actual
experiences.
The rising young star
who stabbed everyone in the back? He’s
in my book. But here’s the funny
thing—he’s a composite of all the rising young stars in all the firms I’ve been
in. Colleagues of mine from these firms
are convinced they know whom I’m writing about, and yet at least three people’s
characteristics went into my rising young star character.
Although all of my
writing is serious, I use humor to make my points. The ability to see the lighter side of even
grim events made my life easier while I watched the legal profession change
from a service to a business. As a
former colleague of mine said, “if you don’t laugh, you’ll cry.” It is definitely better to laugh.
Laughter is a
great coping mechanism. It transforms
tragedy into something you can live with.
For example, I considered it a tragedy when a great Philadelphia law
firm, a firm that had been a wonderful place to work, came apart at the
seams. I was a partner there, and
thought I would practice there until I retired.
It was not to be. The firm dissolved
after fifty-five years of success, because a divisive partner joined us and
started to foment unrest. As a measure
of how divisive he was, when I happened to meet his sister at the wedding of a
mutual friend, she told me she felt sorry for me and the firm because, and I’m
not making this up, her brother was “such an asshole.”
Many of us who
loved the firm were flabbergasted when the divisive partner’s demands,
completely outrageous in our view, were met.
In an attempt to prevent the firm’s implosion, the management committee
decided to—wait for it—hire a psychiatrist to talk to the lawyers in the
firm. Why a psychiatrist? To determine what was causing our sudden
dysfunction. Were we promised
confidentiality in exchange for an honest assessment?
Of course
not. We were damned no matter what we
did. If we refused to speak in a
meaningful and substantive way, the management committee said we weren’t team
players. If we honestly expressed
ourselves, we were traitors. The
psychiatrist rendered a report that said we were schizophrenic as a firm; we
couldn’t decide whether we wanted to be a good place to work or a very
profitable business.
The psych
evaluation fomented even more trauma for the firm. And of course, the firm dissolved. If I hadn’t laughed, I would have cried.
Luckily, I do have
an expansive sense of humor. I have a
heightened sense of the ridiculous. I
also believe in laughing in the face of death—or at least, in the face of
disaster. These are helpful traits to
have while working in a law firm. Some
of the things that happen in firms are too weird to be believable. And yet they occur, every day, somewhere in
the legal profession.
In addition to the
firm psychiatrist who precipitated the firm’s nervous breakdown, for example,
there was the firm that left its good taste in its old offices. Many years ago,
I worked at a national firm that made a move from a class B building to an A
plus building. All of us got new
furniture. I was appointed to the art
committee, to choose paintings to grace the walls of our glorious new
space. The chair of the committee, a
well-known civil rights lawyer who became President of the ABA,
enthusiastically launched into a buying spree.
I discovered that my role was to be a “yes” woman. No problem, because I liked his choices.
After
the artwork was hung, a group of senior partners went batshit. The paintings were disgusting. They were immoral. They were too sexual. The partners demanded that the art be removed
and replaced. The offending paintings were
a series of flowers by the great artist Georgia O’Keeffe. For those of you not familiar with her work,
O’Keeffe painted giant, larger-than-life flowers that were so anatomically
correct that they appeared to be something completely different. In fact, they appeared to be a woman’s
vulva. They were, however, nothing but
flowers.
I
thought the entire kerfuffle was hilarious and ridiculous. I also thought the complainers were a bunch
of dirty old men. But I did not laugh
out loud or express these thoughts to anyone at the office. And yes, we did replace the paintings. Be sure to look for this incident in my next
book.
I
admit that some things cannot be turned into laughable moments. Some of the things that come to mind: the partner who committed suicide by jumping
off the firm fire escape; the staff member murdered by her husband who then
committed suicide. Real life can be hard
and real life can be sad.
But
short of tragic death, almost anything can be cause for risible
reflection. How about the partner who
left his wife for a secretary, then balked when the secretary wanted to marry
him, and went back to his wife? How
about the associate who was so distracted with the amount of work she had that
she forgot to remove the price tags from her new clothes? Both of these situations call for a certain
amount of understanding and a certain amount of cynicism. In other words, they are funny.
You
can’t make this stuff up, as the saying goes:
the litigation partner who lost his nerve every time an actual trial
came up, forcing others to try the case; the office manager whose affair with
the firm’s comptroller gave her unparalleled power over the firm’s finances;
the lawyer whose wife and child were killed in a car accident who transformed
himself within months from a chubby, spectacled nonentity into a slender,
contact-wearing powerhouse. These things
cry out to me to be incorporated into a story somehow.
I
also have the desire to write about the way practicing law used to be. I’m not talking about the early part of the
20th century, when “To Kill A Mockingbird” is set. I’m talking about what it was like only as
far back as the 1980s, when I started practicing. It was a more genteel life, which was both
good and bad. The good included things
like the break for afternoon tea, with real china cups and a wheeled tray full
of cookies. The bad was the paternalism
that is inherent in that sort of gentility, where senior lawyers opened doors
for the influx of women lawyers, but only in the most literal sense. I often heard lawyers opine that none of the
women working at the firm would last long, and that we’d all me married within
a few years. They had a mindset that
forced the first woman litigation partner to continue to write a brief in the
hospital while she was in labor, sending a runner from the labor room to the
firm with the pages as she finished them.
You
might say that my purpose is broadly historical. I also am able to see the funny and the
hysterical in the practice of law.
Apparently, there’s
been talk among my former colleagues in the legal community, trying to figure
out on whom my characters are based. The
really great thing is that as an author, I can combine the evil traits of
several different real life people, creating a fictional character who usually
gets what’s due him—death. And if doing
so gets under the skin of the flesh and blood people I used to practice with, I
really don’t mind. Although George
Herbert posited that living well is the best revenge, I think writing well about
those who aggravate you is actually the best revenge.
My long-time,
wonderful paralegal sent me a t-shirt recently that said “Watch out or you’ll
be in my novel.” As for the lawyers who
have ticked me off over the years, I can only say: you’ve been warned.
