Jackson Winchester Smith, the founding and controlling partner at Smith, O’Leary, and Stanley, P.A., charged into my office while I was grinding the beans and heating the Zephyrhills bottled spring water for my second pot of coffee.
“Good win on that kayak whiplash case,” he thundered. Jackson never talks, he thunders. He has a portrait of Stonewall Jackson in his office big enough to be a weight-bearing wall, and his favorite quote is “Don’t get in a pissing contest with a skunk.” It does not worry me in the least that the man who signs my paycheck believes that he is the physical reincarnation of Stonewall Jackson. Despite a certain love-hate cachet to our relationship, he is my hero, my mentor, and the man who single-handedly made me the firm’s only woman partner.
Jackson glared at my French press. “What’s wrong with the coffee in the lunchroom?”
Oh, please. Shall I start with the dioxin in the bleached paper coffee filters, or the pesticides in the coffee, or the white fake dairy creamer consisting almost entirely of fat, dye, and chemicals? Or limit myself to the apt observation that the stuff tasted like crap?
Smiling, though I felt the muscle spasm kicking in at my jaws, I asked, “Join me?”
I maximized the swing of my hair and my smile while I fixed us both coffee with just a dollop of organic two percent milk. We tipped our coffee cups together like friends toasting with their wine, and I sat down, leaned back in my chair, and waited.
“Ah, sorry about the mugging. You don’t need to file a workers’ comp claim.”
I noted this was a statement, not a question, but nodded and said, “I’m fine” as if he’d asked how I was.
“I’ve ordered new security lights for the back. Also, I sent out a memo telling people to leave the building in groups of two or more after dark.”
Nothing so silly as saying, “Don’t work nights anymore.”
“A good idea,” I answered, sipping my coffee and waiting.
“How’s your caseload?”
Aha.
“Heavy.” I gave the answer I always give to that question. Not to be overworked is the kiss of demise in a law firm.
“Good,” Jackson said, the answer he always gives to assertions of overwork. “I want you to take over my CMV case, the brain-damaged baby case. One with cerebral palsy and mental retardation.”
Oh, sure, I thought, now that you’ve milked thousands of dollars of legal fees out of the discovery stage of the litigation process, dump it on me. So year-end, your computer printout shows you made a ton of money for the firm, and my score sheet shows I lost a multimillion-dollar veggie baby case after a two-week trial.
“I thought you were going to settle that one.” The rule of thumb being that a defense attorney always settles a brain-damaged baby case unless the mother is a total pig caught smoking crack on a police video while visibly pregnant and pounding her womb with sharp objects in front of forty bishops, all of whom will testify against her. Not that negligence on the part of the doctor or the hospital has a thing to do with the jury’s decision. A sweet young mother, a distraught and earnest father, and a drooling infant dangling his big-eyed, vacant head left and right. No way a jury doesn’t give that skewed Norman Rockwell painting some money. Big money.
“Tried to settle it,” Jackson said. “Parents’ damned attorney has visions of grandeur. Some snotty hot-shot out of Miami.”
Yeah, I knew the parents’ attorney, an arrogant son of a bitch who liked to make sure everybody knew he went to Harvard and who was forever correcting my pronunciation of his name—Steph-fin, not Steve-in. We’d met at some early rounds when Jackson sent me to argue some legal minutia in the case. As I recalled, our theory was that the infant’s birth defects were caused by a common virus, CMV, and not mistakes during the delivery. But it was going to be hard to get around the argument that the obstetrician screwed up by not doing an emergency cesarean when problems developed during labor.
“Up the settlement offer,” I said, hoping I didn’t sound like I was begging.
“Can’t. Already at policy limits.”
That was a lot of money thrown at the plaintiffs. Their refusal showed either confidence or stupidity, and where personal injury litigation lottery stakes are at play, the former is often a reflection of the latter. Me, I’m a “bird in the hand beats two in the bush” sort of girl. I would have taken the offer. Never let a jury of strangers decide your fate if you can help it, that would be my advice.
But, of course, the good-parents had not asked me. And now Jackson wanted to hand this mess off to me.
“Sure,” I said. It wasn’t as if I had a choice, since I was barely even a partner and crap runs downhill, so I might as well pretend to take it with good graces. “Got a trial date yet?”
“End of the month. But I filed a motion for continuance. It’s before Judge Goddard. You argue the motion.”
“What’re the grounds?” I asked, thinking, Other than the usual justice-delayed maxim and the natural human tendency to put off as long as possible anything that was difficult to do.
“The parents’ attorney hired off our leading expert witness, and we need to find another one. You’d better hit MEDLINE this afternoon and read up on the literature, find the leading CMV experts. Look for somebody we don’t have to fly in from California, all right?”
“You mean our doctor who was so emphatic that this sort of brain damage could only develop in the womb? He bailed on us?” My heart made the kind of conspicuous thump-thump that happens after a loud noise late at night.
“Yeah. For twice our hourly rate. After he changed his mind, I set him up for another deposition. Under oath, son of a bitch says the money Stephen LaBlanc offered him didn’t have a thing to do with it. Our doctor’s damn insurance company’s so cheap we can’t even keep a decent expert. Then this overpaid expert says he erred in his initial opinion because we distorted the facts about the microcephaly.”
“The what?”
“Microcephaly. You know, kid was born with a small head. You don’t remember that?”
Yeah, I remembered the small-head thing, only I called it a small-head thing, not microcephaly.
So we were screwed with that physician whore. Nice trick on Stephen’s part, I thought.
“Better get busy.” Jackson put down his coffee cup, keeping his eyes even with mine, probably checking for panic. I hoped he couldn’t hear the thump-thump-thump of my heart, my now fully activated fight-or-flight response in place. Even my mouth had dried up. I smiled, reassuringly I hoped, to the man who had just ruined my life.
Oh, just frigging great, I thought, as I watched him leave. If I didn’t get that continuance, I had less than three weeks to find an expert, hire him, coach him, amend the witness list to include the new expert, set up his deposition so Stephen LeBlanc couldn’t bitch “unfair surprise” and keep my expert off the stand, get ready for the trial, and maintain my regular caseload.
My left eye pounded and my shoulders twitched in spasms.
Two minutes after Jackson left my office, I poured another cup of coffee and heaped it with turbinado sugar, the soul food of any personal crisis. I turned on my computer and went online, accepting my karma that I was soon going to know more than anyone could possibly want to about cytomegalovirus, wisely called CMV, and I had better find a good medical expert, quick.
Just what I wanted to be, the law firm’s leading expert on an unpronounceable virus. Already my “anything wrong with your mouth” fifteen minutes of pop-star status at my law firm had faded. My law firm, where if you rested on your laurels, somebody would steal your billings and your leather desk chair.