I don’t see Matt for the next two days at work, but the office calendar said he was in Atlanta for a court hearing. I took the time to acclimate myself to my office, meet as many of the other firm members as I could, and work on the one, single case that I had to my name.
Most of my work as an associate attorney with Lorraine was to basically do the grunt work on her cases. I had one true case that was mine alone, and that’s because Lorraine told me she wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. Miss “I Only Represent Corporate America” couldn’t bother herself to touch a regular old personal injury case. In fact, she actually sneered at me when I told her I had taken the case of one Mr. Larry Jackson.
I pretty much worked the case myself, trying to figure things out as I went along. Luckily, I had a Torts professor at Columbia that gladly dispensed out advice to me as I needed it. One day… I’m assuming out of sheer boredom, Lorraine asked me about the case. When I told her my client had a rather severe brain injury and the economist I hired had projected his medical and earning losses into the millions, her face did take on a rather orgasmic look and, since then, she didn’t think the case was all that stupid anymore.
You may wonder how I ended up with such a delectable case being only one year out of law school.
Well, it was pretty easy.
Apparently, it’s not that great of a case. My client claims a dump truck turned left in front of him, and he had no time to stop. The dump truck driver insists my client was speeding and didn’t have his headlights on, even though it was almost half an hour before dawn, when headlights would have been required.
The insurance company even took great pride in showing me pictures of my client’s speedometer showing the needle stuck at sixty-six miles per hour when he was in a fifty-five mile per hour zone.
So, yeah… I landed this case because seven other attorneys had turned it down. They all said it was a dog… said there was no chance at victory, which is depressing to say the least. But I am not ready to give up.
I admit the speedometer is an issue, and I haven’t quite figured that out yet, but I did blow their claim clear out of the water that the headlights weren’t on. I hired an expert that studied my client’s headlights. He said the bulbs unequivocally proved the lights were on because the filaments were bent, indicating there was a heat source on at the time of impact. Had the lights been off and thus cold, the filaments wouldn’t be so ‘bendy’—my words, not the expert’s—and would have shattered instead.
Score one for the recent law school grad who has only one case to her name and plenty of time on her hands to try to figure this shit out.
On my third day at my new law firm, I have a lovely conversation with my client’s wife, Miranda, and tell her about my move to Connover and Crown. I usually talk to Miranda because with Larry’s head injury, he can’t remember three-quarters of the stuff I tell him anyway. It’s a tragic side effect, and one that cost him his job as an electrical engineer, which he had worked at for thirteen years. We chat for quite awhile and then I sign off, promising to call her the following week with an update.
Putting Larry’s case aside, I pull out a thick stack of files that Lorraine wants me to review for her—back to the grunt work. It’s at times like this I could kick myself in the ass for ever wanting to be a lawyer.
I get immersed into the scintillating world of corporate finance—aka drool-inducing law—and am just considering a break for a cup of coffee when someone knocks on my door. I don’t even look up from the arbitration clause I’m reviewing for like the hundredth time because it’s so boring and merely say, “Come in.”
“Got a minute?” Matt says.
My head snaps up and I put on my mental boxing gloves, prepared for him to jab me with a scathing remark, or God forbid, call me doe-eyed. Which, if he does that, may cause me to need my literal boxing gloves.