12

Dave Petrosian

I can say without any hesitation that the day the file landed on my desk was the most interesting day of my career. All right, that’s not saying much. Representing the federal government in the United States Claims Court doesn’t usually get the blood pumping. It’s a steady diet of government contracts, pension disputes, and insurance coverage claims. Not the kind of stuff most people get excited about, certainly not the kind of stuff novels and movies are made of. But it’s a steady job. When I come into the office in the mornings I see my name on a small plaque perched on the front of my desk, and I am content: United States Department of Justice, Civil Division, David R. Petrosian, Senior Litigation Attorney. I think of Maria, and I think of little Raul and Cindy, and I am content.

I guess there is part of me that would like to be out there in the private sector, with some huge law firm, drawing down a junior partner’s salary, or even a senior associate’s salary for that matter. But you know what? I know some of those people. They were my classmates in law school. They are lawyers I have been pitted against in the courtroom. I see them from time to time, and they talk a big game about being close to the centre, about being able to feel the power, about playing in the major leagues. I know some of them earn more in a month than I earn in a year. But I also see them swallowing their ulcer medication in the corner of the court cafeteria when they think no one is watching them. I look in their eyes and see the exhaustion. I listen to them talk, and I hear the premature cynicism, the tales of carnage and devastation in their personal lives, and any trace of envy I might have felt disappears.

I’ll be honest. It’s not like the big law firms were beating a path to my door to hire me when I graduated law school. That doesn’t happen to you when you are working and have to study part-time, when the high grades don’t come easy, and when you give any time you have left to your wife and children instead of writing articles for law review or participating in moot court competitions.

I went to law school late. When I graduated from college in Minnesota, I’d already met Maria and fallen desperately in love. In our senior years we both had part-time jobs waiting tables in a burger joint in downtown Minneapolis to help fund our tuition, and we fell for each other in a heartbeat. I’d always found that dark Latin look irresistible and in any case I wasn’t trying very hard to resist. It was a magic time. But then, life intervened. Towards the end of the year she became pregnant. It wasn’t what we had planned, but, as much in love as we were, neither was it unwelcome. So, very happily, we did what we had to. We got married. I took a job as an insurance claims adjuster, while Maria looked after Raul. Two years later, Cindy came along. It turned out that I had a flair for claims adjusting. I was promoted rapidly, and we were doing pretty well financially. But there was no spare money for either of us to think about going back to school full-time.

I had harboured thoughts about law school in my junior and senior years of college. I’m not sure why, really. I have no family connections in the law. I’m from a blue-collar family of Armenian immigrants, and while my family encouraged my education right through school and college and were always reminding me that it was the key to a better life, they didn’t have many ideas about what exactly I should do after graduation. Law school was my idea, and I guess for some reason it seemed like the natural next step. But now, it seemed, I would have to put thoughts like that behind me, and embrace claims adjusting as my life’s work. And so time went by.

Then one evening, after we had eaten dinner and put the children to bed, Maria sat me down with a glass of wine. Someone had told her about William Mitchell Law School in St Paul, a private law school which would allow me to study part-time. It would still be tough to find the tuition, but the children were six and four now, and she was comfortable making arrangements for them so that she could take a part-time job herself. I think she had a touch of cabin fever by then, and was itching to be out of the house. It made sense. My undergraduate grades were good and with a reasonable score on the Law School Admission Test, I could get in. It would be a hard grind at my age, but it was what I wanted to do, and delaying it could only make it harder. I took the plunge.

I had no clear idea what I was going to do once I was admitted to the bar. As I say, my age and part-time student status were not what the big boys were looking for. Opening my own office had few attractions. I needed the security of a reasonable salary. Then, one day in my final year of school, two attorneys from the Department of Justice appeared on campus to interview students who might be interested in a government career. Most of my classmates, if they were interested at all, were attracted to the Criminal Division with its promise of glamorous high-profile prosecutions. No one else took up the offer to talk about the Civil Division’s work in the United States Claims Court. But it was a position the Department needed to fill urgently. I talked to one of the attorneys, Harry Welsh, for almost an hour. He asked me in detail about my experience in claims adjusting. For once, instead of being a drawback, my age and experience actually gave me an advantage, and I could hear the click as we talked. I was invited to Washington to interview formally the next month, and I was offered the job a week later. Maria was more than happy to move to Washington, and we were able to find a home we could afford, in a good school district in Bethesda. We were happy then, and we are happy now, and if the work is often routine, even boring, well, that’s a sacrifice I am glad to make.

But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t very pleased when the file landed on my desk. It seemed like my reward for all those years of mind-numbing pensions and insurance cases.