3
GOOD NEWS in the mail: a court order granting the motion to dismiss that Duncan had filed on behalf of his pro bono clients. In reality the motion was little more than a stall: the summons and complaint hadn’t been personally served on his clients, but just left wedged in their apartment door. The dismissal based on this technicality was without prejudice, so that all the city had to do was refile with proper service.
In addition to buying his clients some time, the motion had been intended as a warning shot, a way of letting the Housing Authority know that he’d be fighting the eviction every step of the way. The hope was that the city would decide that kicking the Nazarios out of their home was more trouble than it was worth. Sometimes simply showing a willingness to outwork the other side was the difference maker in a case. It was hardly an ideal strategy, but Duncan didn’t have a way to win on the merits.
Duncan was still a little surprised to find himself defending the Nazarios at all. Blake and Wolcott generally had more work than its lawyers could handle, meaning not only that associates routinely billed between twenty-five hundred and three thousand hours a year, but also that it lagged far behind more established firms when it came to areas like pro bono. But in the last six months the firm had created a pro bono committee and put a partner in charge of reaching out to various legal service organizations, the goal being that every lawyer would do at least a little free legal work for the disadvantaged.
It wasn’t exactly a secret that this sudden interest in pro bono arose not out of the goodness of the partners’ hearts, but rather as a concession to a series of blows to Blake and Wolcott’s once sterling reputation. In its first years of existence, in the late nineties, the firm had received a cascade of good press as it piled up high-profile victories, much of it focused on Steven Blake. For a couple of years it’d seemed like every big corporate case in the country had Blake on the winning side. He’d been profiled not just in trade magazines, but in Time and Newsweek as well.
But all that attention, and the firm’s exponential growth, had unsurprisingly brought about a backlash. As was inevitable, Blake had lost a couple of cases, tarnishing the myth of his invincibility, and the press that had been so eager to deify him now reported instead on a gender-discrimination suit brought by a female former associate who’d been passed over for partner. The firm had then landed near the very bottom of The American Lawyer’s associate satisfaction survey, which in turn had led to a series of increasingly snarky articles on The Wall Street Journal’s blog covering the legal profession. All of it inevitable schadenfreude bullshit, sure, but there was no denying that such things hurt recruitment, taking the firm down a peg or two from its former perch as the place all the Harvard and Yale hotshots wanted to spend their 2L summers.
While Duncan had been a little surprised to thus find himself taking on a run-of-the-mill eviction case, let alone doing it for free rather than the $450 an hour the firm normally charged for his time, he made a point of bringing the same perfectionism to his work on it as he did any other case. Despite his cynicism about the practice of law (a cynicism shared by all of his colleagues), Duncan still believed in being a lawyer as a profession, and to him providing his best effort to every client was part of being a professional. Besides, he liked the Nazarios, who, based on his couple of meetings with them, seemed like good people.
Duncan called to tell them about winning the motion, Rafael answering. Duncan gave him the update, trying to play it down, not wanting Rafael to get the idea that they’d really won.
“I knew you’d be able to beat them, Mr. R,” Rafael exclaimed, sounding distinctly more excited than Duncan would’ve liked. “I told my abuela you were going to hook us up.”
“I really doubt the city will give up this easily, Rafael,” Duncan said. “So don’t assume the case is over. We’ve still got quite an uphill battle if they do refile.”
As soon as Duncan had hung up with Rafael someone appeared in the open doorway of his office. “Am I interrupting?” Leah Roth asked.
Duncan made no attempt to hide his surprise. Unexpected guests from the outside world were generally nonexistent at the firm: they’d never make it past the lobby security.
“Of course not; come in,” Duncan said, instinctively standing up, then gesturing Leah to a seat.
“Sounds like you had a satisfied customer there,” Leah said as she sat down.
“What, you’re surprised?” Duncan said, sitting himself, looking around his office and wishing it wasn’t such a disaster: there were stacks of paper on the floor; his desk was so crowded with papers that no more than an inch of its surface was visible. He didn’t think such chaos was likely to inspire confidence in a client.
“Blake assures my father that our cases are staffed with the best lawyers this firm has to offer,” Leah said. “He wouldn’t lie to my dad, would he?”
“Lawyers never lie,” Duncan said. “We just deceive, inveigle, and obfuscate. So what brings you to our humble law firm?”
“Your real estate group’s navigating a long-term lease with Ogilvy for us. I’ve been here all morning. You just deposed the reporter in the libel case, right?”
“Yesterday, yeah.”
“Want to give me a report?”
Duncan did his best not to show surprise. “Sure.”
“How about we do it over lunch?”
Duncan didn’t say yes quite as quickly as he would’ve liked, at a loss to understand why Leah Roth, the daughter of a man who was worth something like a billion dollars, the VP of a company for whom Duncan was at twenty-four/seven beck and call, wanted to break bread with him.
They went to Blue Fin, a seafood place on Broadway a short walk from the firm’s office on the Avenue of the Americas. The restaurant was large and open, with a dramatic staircase and a billowing white wall evoking flowing water. They were seated upstairs, the room crowded and loud with a mix of businesspeople and tourists.
Although it was a restaurant where Duncan routinely brought summer associates and interviewees for lunch, he worried that it wasn’t exclusive enough to bring Leah Roth. He told himself that was silly: she couldn’t walk into his office unannounced, invite him to lunch, and expect him to have a table waiting at Le Bernardin. Or could she?
Duncan was rattled by her wealth. It was one of the ironies of his job that while he made far more money than anyone in his family ever had, more than he could have readily conceived of while growing up, it also surrounded him with people who were so obscenely loaded that they made him feel like a peasant. Last year Duncan had cleared a half million, thanks to a year-end bonus that’d matched his annual salary, but in Manhattan in the summer of 2008 that barely felt upper middle class. Even someone like Blake, who made about ten times what Duncan did, hardly qualified as rich when you put him next to people like the Roths.
“So, Duncan,” Leah said after they’d ordered. “What’s your story?”
Duncan was not sure what she was asking for. “You mean my life story or my résumé?”
“Surely you have a life story?”
Duncan wasn’t in the habit of reciting biographical information to clients, and wasn’t particularly comfortable with the prospect, but then again he was trying to build a long-term professional relationship here, which certainly had a personal component. “I grew up outside of Detroit, went to college in Ann Arbor. I got lucky enough to get into Harvard for law school, so off I went. After clerking I wanted to go to a firm where I’d have more responsibility and less hierarchy than the white-shoe places, so I joined Blake. And here I am.”
Leah narrowed her eyes at him, although Duncan couldn’t say if her disappointment was real or just for show. “I have to say, even for a lawyer that’s a pretty boring life story.”
Duncan hadn’t been trying to tell her anything, but he still felt a stab of resentment at Leah’s response. What was she expecting him to offer up? He wondered how she would react if he actually told her a fuller version of who he was, but he wasn’t tempted to find out. Although Duncan didn’t consider his background to be a secret, at least not among his friends, it wasn’t something he routinely disclosed in professional situations. Telling people complicated things, and his interaction with Leah Roth was already complicated enough. “You didn’t expect me to give up my secret identity right off the bat?” he said instead.
“Are your parents lawyers? I’ve noticed it often runs in the family.”
Duncan was the second person in his family to graduate from college, the first to get an advanced degree of any kind, but he wasn’t tempted to admit that to a woman who stood to inherit a family fortune. Instead he just shook his head. “My father does a lot of negotiating for his job, but he’s not a lawyer. He chairs a local for the UAW in Detroit.”
Leah cocked her head slightly, Duncan guessing she was recalculating her initial impression of him. If you only knew, he thought. You think you know who I am, where I come from, the road I took to get here. But you’re wrong about it all. “So what are you doing representing the corporate overlords?” she asked.
Duncan grinned. “My dad asks me the same question every Christmas,” he said, not truthfully.
The waiter brought Duncan’s tuna and Leah’s lobster salad. “So,” Duncan said, once they’d started eating. “Why are you interested in the libel case?”
“I’m not, especially. I tried to talk Dad out of it, but he wouldn’t listen. He hates reporters. He thinks they exist to take people like us down, look for anything they can find to smear us with. He knows that we’ll probably end up losing, but he’d still really love to teach the newspaper a lesson.”
“Win or lose, their legal bills will help see to that.”
“Why, that never occurred to me,” Leah deadpanned. “Of course, Dad’s known Sam Friedman forever, so that’s part of it too.”
Friedman, another wealthy and well-known developer, was the owner of the New York Journal. Duncan felt an uncomfortable awareness of being a pawn in a much larger game: two real estate moguls pissing in each other’s flower beds. If the lawsuit actually went back to some personal beef between Simon Roth and Sam Friedman he didn’t want to know about it.
“Wheels within wheels, I’m sure,” Duncan said. “Anyway, as for the deposition, it went okay. The reporter was defensive and testy, didn’t come across very well. So in terms of atmospherics it was a win. But the case is an uphill battle, and she didn’t give us anything that changed that in terms of substance.”
Leah nodded. “I remember from Con Law 101, actual malice and all that. It’s part of why I told Dad not to waste his time.”
“That’s right,” Duncan said. “You’re a lawyer.”
Leah smiled thinly, not bothering to feign surprise that Duncan knew this about her. “Only technically; I never practiced. I was dual degree at Columbia with the business school.”
“I don’t imagine you ever planned on joining a law firm.”
“It was more about the skill set. When I was growing up Dad wasn’t exactly enthusiastic about the prospect of my joining the family biz, so a law degree seemed like a way of keeping options open.”
“Why didn’t he want you joining the company?” Duncan asked, wondering as he did so if it was too personal a question.
Leah didn’t look bothered by it. “Commercial real estate is still a very male world,” she said. “Even more than law, if you can believe that. Not that my dad was any more fond of the idea of my going to law school. I’m not sure how a man who’s as litigious as he is can complain about lawyers so much.”
“He and Blake are friends, though, right?”
“I don’t know that my father has friends, as such. But Steven is definitely a family ally.”
“Allies are important.”
“They certainly are, Duncan,” Leah said. “In a few years my father will retire, and I’ll take over the business. Blake has to be what, sixty?”
Duncan noted that Leah had said that it was she alone who would be taking over the business, with no mention of her brother. “He’s around sixty,” he replied. “But spry.”
“So he’ll presumably be out of the trenches in five years or so, certainly in ten. Hopefully we can be allies one day too, Duncan.”
“We’re allies now,” Duncan said, smiling.
Leah shook her head, her expression serious. Whatever it was she was getting at, it was clearly not just banter. “We’re not yet. Being my lawyer is something, but a true ally is more than that.”
Duncan hoped he was keeping uneasiness out of his expression. “We go to the wall for our clients,” he said, unsure whether this qualified as a reply.
Leah just studied him in response, Duncan having no idea what she was looking for. “We’re having a party for my father’s seventieth birthday next Saturday,” she finally said, pushing her half-eaten salad forward a little and dropping her napkin on top of it before leaning back in her chair. “I believe Steven is coming.”
Duncan raised his brows, trying to look interested. Leah was clearly waiting for a response from him, but he wasn’t sure what. “Blake doesn’t exactly keep me apprised of his social life,” he finally said.
Leah still with her evaluating look. “It would probably be useful for you to come,” she said.
This was certainly the most passive-aggressive party invitation Duncan had ever received; he wasn’t entirely sure it was an invitation. “For my future as a rainmaker, you mean.”
“Precisely.”
“Does that mean you’re inviting me?”
Leah looked at him quizzically. “Wasn’t that clear?”
“Not completely,” Duncan said. “But sure, I’d love to come.” In truth he could hardly imagine a party he’d less like to go to.
“I’ll e-mail you the details,” Leah said as the waiter brought him their check. “So tell me, Duncan, does family background still matter at the elite law firms?”
Duncan had been doing his best not to be provoked all lunch, but he couldn’t fully contain his irritation. He got the feeling Leah was going to keep poking at him until she got some kind of reaction. “Certainly not at our firm, though it probably doesn’t hurt if you’re talking about a place like Sullivan and Cromwell. But I’ve never felt that being a working-class kid from the provinces was particularly hampering my legal career, if that’s what you’re asking.”
Duncan had said it with a smile, but it came out harsher than he intended, and there was a moment of silence between them. “I apologize if I offended you,” Leah said, her expression unchanged. “You’ll find that I’m somewhat blunt on occasion. I didn’t mean to sound snobbish. I am quite snobbish, admittedly, but not in the classic Upper East Side sense. I don’t actually have much patience for people like myself, if you want to know the truth. I admire people who’ve worked hard to get where they are. My snobbishness is entirely a tyranny of the interesting.”
“That’s true of this whole town,” Duncan said.
“I was brought up suspicious of inherited wealth, odd as that might sound. The family money’s all tied up in trusts—I actually live on my salary, believe it or not. Which is certainly not that hard to do, but still.”
“I wasn’t offended, anyway,” Duncan said. “And I do think having to work for everything from scratch has its advantages.”
“I’ve no doubt it does,” Leah said, with a smile that Duncan tried not to take as condescending. “So who were you talking to before? Back in your office?”
“My pro bono client. We won a motion to dismiss, though it’s without prejudice.”
“Meaning the case is still going to go forward.”
Duncan shrugged as the waiter returned with his credit card. “I hope not,” he said. “My only defense on the merits is likely to be going after your security guard who busted my guy in the first place.”
“Who’s the security guard?”
“His name’s Sean Fowler. You know him?”
Leah shook her head, though Duncan thought she’d reacted to the name. “Loomis’s crew are mostly ex-cops. They can probably take it. So do you enjoy doing pro bono work?”
“I take it as seriously as anything else,” Duncan said. “But honestly, I prefer working on the big-ticket stuff. What’s the point of being the smartest person in the room unless you’re doing something that no one else in the room can do?”
“I guess it’s no surprise that you’re ambitious,” Leah said. “What is it you want your ambition to get you?”
It wasn’t a question Duncan knew the answer to, and he wasn’t inclined to try and come up with one for Leah. “My ambition is just to win,” he said instead. “I win for a living.”