Peter Morgan stretched in front of a full-length mirror in his bedroom. Not too bad, he thought. He was wearing khaki pants and a carefully pressed shirt of midnight-blue linen. Business casual would arrive at Morgan Siler over his dead pin-striped body, but this was a uniform appropriate to the occasion. The vision the party offered the associates was what their lives might be like as partners, and part of that vision was the promise that they need not live in suits. Downstairs, white-shirted servitors passed with calm efficiency through the rooms of his house, bearing trays of tuna carpaccio, miniature crab cakes, and other exotic canapés. His daughter Julie, just out of law school and working at a public interest advocacy job in New York, had returned for a few days to show the guests what had happened to the adorable child in the tasteful photographs displayed on mantel and bureau.
The party was expensive. The hors d’oeuvres and dinner ran fifty dollars a person, the full bar thirty-five; each hour of service by the caterers and waitstaff cost thirty. That fee was almost laughable to a lawyer, when even the lowliest associate billed out at over a hundred an hour. Still, there were twelve of them swarming through the house—Cassandra always seemed dismayed at the way they took over the kitchen, sneering at her flatware—and it would add up. A raw bar, flowers, and valet parking upped the ante even more. But the cost was justified. There was a reason the firm went to the trouble and expense, a reason Peter allowed the use of his Georgetown house, a reason the associates would eventually be invited to see the art collection on the upper floors, taken a few at a time
up the narrow stairs to rooms of greater opulence. Keep climbing; a dazzling reward awaits.
Peter Morgan nodded at his reflection. He had climbed, and he had been rewarded. He had worked hard all his life, and his accession to power following Raymond’s death did not change that basic trait. If anything, he worked harder. Now the firm was his, and he was working for himself, creating a world that would bear his impress long years after he was gone.
For Morgan Siler, the issue of the 1980s was the competition from the investment banks. Archie had always dismissed the banks, scorned them as dishonorable. Law rules business, he would say, and for that reason lawyers cannot serve businessmen blindly. Peter could rattle off the maxims by heart. Law is a helping profession, not a facilitating one. The greatest problem is that no one says no anymore. We have to maintain our standards.
For years Peter had been baffled by these opinions, but he was beginning to understand them. It was becoming increasingly clear to him that what some called honor and probity were second-place prizes, offered to those who could not grasp power. Worse, they were distractions, lures set about the path to success. The weak resented the strong, and called them dishonorable. The weak feared the strong, and tried to tempt them from their strength. Archie had been taken in, taught to despise his potential by those who could not match it. But Peter was undeceived. He admired the bankers, and he had no qualms about working for them. What concerned him was that they made more money than lawyers.
The salary differential drew promising undergraduates into business school; it even drew law school graduates away from the firms. And it undermined his sense of self-worth, for he had decided early that the only true measure of value is what others are willing to pay. That was the only objective metric, the only fact that others could not deny. To maintain the firm’s elite status, to maintain Peter’s own place in the world, Morgan Siler had to pay more.
Peter reviewed its structure with penetrating eyes. Associates were paid an annual salary, but the firm sold their services by the hour. The key, then, was getting the maximum number of hours out of each associate. There were things other than work in the lives of associates, things that distracted them from the production of hours. Peter swiftly reached
two conclusions. It was profitable to have other people do these things for associates whenever possible. And if the associates had to do them, it was profitable to have them do so at the firm.
The secretarial staff expanded to four shifts, supplemented by teams of paralegals, ensuring that assistance was available at every hour. The copy center hummed through the night, a constant rolling thunder; the doors were removed from the library to make plain that it never closed. The firm added a fitness center, a laundry service, a florist, lunch and dinner delivery. It brought doctors, dentists, and financial advisors to the associates’ offices; it kept messengers on hand to deliver apologies for broken dates, and drivers to pick the kids up from school. It filled prescriptions, bought groceries, returned videotapes, fed cats, and walked dogs. Rumors spread through the law schools. Morgan Siler would provide a stand-in for jury duty, for your cousin’s wedding, for your own. Morgan Siler would provide a roll-away bed for lawyers working through the night. The last made its way back to the firm when a visiting student dared to seek verification. Peter cocked his head, puzzled. “Of course not,” he said. “If you’re working all night, you don’t need a bed.” Later he reconsidered, and the Morgan Hotel was born.
But maximizing the individual associates’ hours was only part of the answer. Archie’s firm had retained a rough balance between the numbers of partners and associates. Peter’s acquired a pyramid structure, an army of young associates whose ranks thinned as the years went by, a small cadre of partners who were there for the long haul. No partner, he was proud to report, had ever left his firm for another.
The associates did leave. They left in droves, every year, but every year a new crop came in to fill the gaps. That was as it should be. More associates meant more hours, and more hours meant more money. More profits to be divided among the partners, and more money for associate salaries, in return for which the firm could demand more hours. The formula was simple enough once you saw it. Raise associate salaries and jack up their hours; recruit more to replace the ones who leave. He could push the associates, Peter Morgan realized; he could work them as hard as he wanted. Half of them came in telling themselves that they didn’t want to make partner anyway, that they were just there for the experience, and they were surprisingly ready to confuse experience with suffering. Work them hard enough and they would burn out before they ever had to be fired.
Now Peter had the manpower for the biggest deals. He moved the firm aggressively into merger work, studying the latest devices in the battle for corporate control, the technical innovations of the continual arms race between raiders and their targets. He knew he’d succeeded when companies started keeping Morgan Siler on retainer to prevent their opponents from hiring the firm.
Archie retired in 1986, ready at seventy-four to put the law behind him. In his last years he’d spent most of his time talking to associates, wandering from office to office looking for the young men who’d admired him so. Peter’s hires stacked books on their chairs to discourage him from taking a seat. Only when they’d decided to leave did they have time for conversation. Archie gleaned what he could of the new world. “You’ve kept the spirit alive, my boy,” he told Peter. “I was talking to this young fellow who’s going to the District Attorney’s Office. He said he was looking forward to the new job, but he felt bad leaving his soulmates behind.” Peter smiled and nodded. He didn’t have the heart to correct the old man, but he knew that associate, and he was fairly sure the word had been “cellmates.”
Morgan Siler became an immensely profitable firm. Peter’s compensation passed the point at which it could be called ample. Still he drove himself hard, acquiring just enough gray hair to prove he wasn’t dyeing it. And still he felt twinges of inadequacy when he read about the bankers and the arbitrageurs. In a way, he thought, he had inherited his father’s fixation.
Then law exacted its revenge on banking. Rudy Giuliani and the SEC took out the princes of Wall Street with the ruthless zeal of a Mafia hit. Boesky and Milken went to jail; the takeover shops closed. Law stepped further into the world of finance, with Morgan Siler and Wallace Finn leading the way. Junk bonds, Milken’s great dream, had been a way of providing access to the capital markets for less established companies, of letting them borrow even if they were poor credit risks. Securitization achieved the same end, but it was law through and through, intellect over economics.
Peter Morgan savored his triumph briefly, one eye always open for the new challengers. In the nineties they came again, this time in the form of the tech companies. Once more rivals siphoned off legal talent, exerted upward pressure on associate salaries. Worse, law firms started relaxing their dress codes to match the upstarts. Morgan Siler offered more money but refused to bend on the suits.
Technology suffused the firms. Computerized research became the norm. The library still had no doors, but now the desks and tables stood empty, where once harried associates had pored over treatises and case reporters. Peter snorted at the claims of increased productivity. He had devoted years to fine-tuning the work environment. The associates might be quicker at looking up cases, but they weren’t billing any more hours.
Peter hated the tech companies and he was glad to see them die. The economic downturn hurt the corporate and finance practice groups, but litigation chugged steadily along. Worse times for business meant more things going wrong, more lawsuits. Suits against the failed Internet companies, in particular; suits against the brokers who’d recommended their stock. Once again, law was wreaking its vengeance on the pretenders. And bankruptcy was booming. Morgan Stevens would have staggered, but Morgan Siler thrived. Law was winning, as it had before, as it always would.
Peter Morgan smoothed the front of his shirt and buttoned his cuffs. He was too restrained to smile at himself in the mirror, but he caught the eye of his reflection and winked. I know what you’re thinking.
Mark Clayton was furious. He’d driven back to D.C. that afternoon, ignoring a message from Anne Brownlee at the Capital Defenders Office. At the firm he’d found messages he couldn’t ignore, from a partner named Lawrence Angstrom wanting to know where he was on the interrogatories he’d been drafting. Mark had been doing no such thing; as he’d explained to Angstrom when the assignment first floated his way, the trip to Virginia had filled his schedule to the point that he couldn’t take on more work. “That’s fine,” Angstrom had said soothingly, meaning, as it now turned out, that it would be fine for Mark to write the interrogatories anyway.
The case was a medical malpractice suit, and Mark was supposed to be writing questions to be submitted to the plaintiff. These were designed to elicit damaging admissions, but since they would be answered by the plaintiff’s lawyer, this was unlikely. Instead they would get back a large number of unexplained denials and an equal number of assertions that their client was concealing the information necessary to answer the questions. Mark had done the work hastily, struggling to identify the key issues in the complaint. Who are the medical practitioners (name, address
, and telephone number) with whom you consulted subsequent to your treatment by Doctor Vogel? he had written. What diagnoses did you receive? Which, if any, medical report a) suggested any present medical complaint is related to the liposuction performed by Doctor Vogel; b) suggested that any treatment is indicated for any present medical complaint; or c) suggested that any aspect of Doctor Vogel’s treatment failed to con form to prevailing standards of professional medical care?
At six o’clock, Angstrom had stopped by his office, toting a copiously annotated copy of Mark’s questions. “I made some comments on these,” he said.
“Okay,” Mark answered. He extended his hand for the papers.
Angstrom pulled them away. “But maybe it’s not really worth it to go through them one by one. Could you redraft the whole thing with more of an emphasis on assumption of risk? I know it’s kind of a fire drill, but it would be good if we could get these whipped into shape for tomorrow.”
Mark wondered whether an explosion of physical violence would adequately convey his sentiments about this proposal. “Okay,” he said.
“Hope to see you at Peter’s,” said Angstrom, loping off.
Did you sign the medical release form provided to you by Doctor Vogel? Mark wrote. Did you read the medical release form? Do you think you’re making Doctor Vogel suffer for your botched cosmetic surgery? Do you realize he has malpractice insurance? Do you know that the insurance company has a duty to defend this claim? Do you know which law firm the insurance company employs? Do you know who ends up spending his nights writing these inane and pointless questions to inflate the bill submitted to the insurance company? What did I ever do to you? Can’t we all get along? Why me, why me, why me?
“Is something wrong?” Katja asked.
Mark lifted his head from the desk in surprise. If crying for no apparent reason counts as something wrong, he thought, then yes. But his innate optimism reasserted itself. After all, hadn’t he plenty of reasons to cry? There was his professional incompetence, which seemed only to be increasing with each new challenge. There was the impossibility of finding more than a few hours a night to sleep, and the growing inability to sleep even when the hours presented themselves. There was the tightness in the back of his throat, like the beginning of a cold or the intimation of nausea, which at first had come on only when he talked to partners but was now so constant he almost didn’t notice it. There was the chronic and
unexplained pain in the small of his back, near what he supposed was his liver, or a kidney, or some other vital internal organ. Those would justify buckets. And the weepiness hadn’t hampered him in his work. Usually he found that he could talk to someone else for ten minutes or so before the tears started, and most conversations didn’t last that long. Soon, surely, it would all be over. People didn’t just go on and on in jobs that made them feel this way. This was a painful apprenticeship, a distasteful learning experience, but soon it would be over and his real life would start. The real life in which he … did something else. As usual, it was at this point that Mark’s imagination failed him. “No,” he said. “Nothing’s wrong.”
Katja frowned and inclined her head. “I was just heading out to the associate dinner,” she said. “I wanted to check if you were going.”
“What?” Mark asked. Katja stood in the hallway, one slender hand on the door frame, a tangible suggestion of the alternative worlds that existed outside his office. Worlds he might someday encounter, if he could simply get up and walk over to them. It didn’t seem that should be so hard. But student loans bound him to the job, and within the job, assignments bound him to his desk. “Oh, yeah,” he said, striving for a casual tone. “I might make it. I have some stuff to get finished here.”
“Okay,” said Katja. She lingered for a moment in the doorway. “Well, hope to see you there.”
Mark nodded. I’m paralyzed, he thought. When he looked in the mirror these days he was always shocked at how young he appeared. In part this was a consequence of spending so much time with middle-aged lawyers, who now set his expectation of what people looked like. But more, it was the psychological effects of the job, the feeling he’d been there for an eternity already. The physical effects could not be far behind. Mark had learned the distinctive physiognomies of the law firm: the solid litigators, big in the shoulders and the belly; the corporate types, who had only the belly; the tax attorneys, rail-thin and burning with intellect. He would become one of them, if he lasted long enough. He wrote out another interrogatory. Did anyone explain to you the risks inherent in the surgery you elected? Did you know what you were getting yourself into? Well, I didn’t either.
Disdaining the doorbell, Walker Eliot let fall the brass knocker. He smiled generously as the door opened before him, and stepped into the
foyer. “Nice,” he said appreciatively. The dinner was meant to be impressive, a demonstration to the young associates of what they were working for, what could be theirs. To Walker it was old hat. The firms had shown him everything they could during the recruiting phase, and when you go all the way in the courtship, there’s not much room left for surprise. He had taken advantage of them; he was the first to admit it. All his fellow Supreme Court clerks had received similar attention, but he enjoyed it the most, flirting with the firms, pirouetting from event to event. His lunches cost a hundred dollars, his dinners triple that. Still they crowded around; he ate out four nights a week, sometimes five, ordering caviar canapes and hundred-dollar bottles of wine.
The firms accepted this, absorbing the costs with their recruiting budgets. Things would be different, they knew, once he was theirs. There had been a lot of suitors, each with their distinct personality, their selling points. Straus and Ellman, an old and established firm, with a quiet self-confidence suggesting that they didn’t need to pursue him, that of course he’d conclude there was no better place. That had almost done it for Walker, the restrained dignity of the partners, the refined grace of the single terminal s. Shaw, Morrison, and Blocker, a little insecure, willing to spend more on the dinners, eager to talk about how much he’d make. They’d had no chance. Belknap and Woods, talking down their past conquests to make him feel special: Of course most of the associates won’t make partner. We’re highly leveraged. But that makes it exceptionally profitable for those who do. And you, of course, you’re just the kind of lawyer we’re looking for. Sweatshop, Walker thought. And Sullivan Post, the firm where Walker had spent the summer after his second year, like a childhood sweetheart, reminding him of their innocent past. “We still use that memo you wrote about piercing the corporate veil,” an associate told him. Juvenilia, thought Walker, youthful love poems, initials carved in an oak. I never promised you I’d come back. He was a Supreme Court clerk now, and prices had gone up. Walker smiled his radiant winner’s smile. You can buy my time, he thought. You can have my body. But you will never touch my soul.
“Walker, isn’t it?” said Peter Morgan, stepping across the foyer to greet him. “Glad you could make it. I’m hearing great things about the work you’re doing. We’re very happy you decided to join us.”
“Thanks,” said Walker. He smiled faintly. He’d settled on Morgan Siler fairly quickly, much more quickly than he’d let on. They were
doing well; they had smart lawyers and an interesting caseload; and, most important, they gave him the impression that they’d leave him alone. Reaching a decision had not stopped him from dining with other firms, nor from taking more meals with Morgan Siler to work out the precise details of their offer.
Somewhere in the third week of his protracted negotiations with the firm, he’d met the man himself, lunch at a downtown power restaurant, other diners coming over to the table to shake Peter’s hand as if he were a mob boss or the Pope. There were three partners and one associate waiting for Walker when he arrived. A nice gesture, he thought, calculating the intensity of their desire. The lunch would cost the firm a couple of thousand dollars in lost billing time just to start with. Not quite that much, as it turned out. Justice Arlen was out of town, and Walker’s casual dress didn’t meet the restaurant’s requirements. At a nod from one of the partners, the associate surrendered his suit jacket and tie and went back to work.
“Order whatever you want,” Peter Morgan said, and Walker felt a sudden echoing unease. He’d had a sledding accident as a child, steered his Flexible Flyer into a car and opened a deep cut beside his right eye. His mother had taken him to the hospital for stitches and afterward, shaking with relief and what might have been, told him he could have whatever he wanted for dinner. Walker, who’d received a home-cooked meal every night of his life, could think of nothing more exotic than a Hungry Man TV dinner.
Walker looked around the restaurant, the white-damasked tables, the dark-paneled walls, the golden bottles arrayed behind the bar. “Whatever you want,” he said to himself softly. How cheaply purchased, he thought, how infinitely dear, are the dreams of childhood. Now he heard those words from lawyers, and his tastes were more expensive. What bright unreal path has led me here? “Let me take a look at their whiskies,” he answered.
Can he possibly be worth it? Peter Morgan asked himself, following Walker’s appreciative eyes around the polished splendor of his house. He could tell already that Walker wasn’t a biller. Not for him the dusty hours in the mine, laboring under an invisible whip, hacking the stubborn earth, and sending nuggets of gold to the world above. That was where
the money lay. Time, so elusive, was the ultimate currency. And what Peter Morgan sold his clients was his employees’ lives.
Walker offered little from that perspective. Some of the clerks did; those who’d made it through dogged determination and were too used to hard work to rest on their laurels. But Walker wasn’t that sort, and the firm would be lucky if it made even a small profit on his hours. Even that was a loss, from the proper perspective. Someone else could be filling up that office, someone from a second-tier law school, hungry and with something to prove. But clients liked hearing that there were Supreme Court clerks working on their cases, and it was worth some money to make the client happy. And possibly, Peter allowed, Walker was good enough that he could make a difference somewhere. That too made clients happy. The firm didn’t reap the full benefits from winning cases it should have lost; clients didn’t usually understand enough to know what should happen with their cases. But they liked winning, and it was possible that Walker would let the firm give them a few more wins than they’d have had otherwise.
Walker wasn’t a first-year; he’d come in as a lateral hire, which was also a good thing. It meant that they could bill him out at a higher rate and wouldn’t have to spend so much time teaching him law. The partners complained regularly in meetings about associates who’d learned nothing in law school. Peter Morgan let them grumble. The students hadn’t been taught the rules, not at the top-tier schools, but they’d been prepared for the firm. They’d been taught the value system, and not to question it. They had learned hierarchy. Courts above courts in an ascending chain of being, infallible at the top simply because no further appeal existed. And likewise at the firm, the senior associates over the junior ones, then the partners, and then Peter Morgan above them all.
This was the service the law schools gave, witting or no, that they taught their students to follow authority and to believe in a legal reasoning that supplanted their intuitions about justice. To use that reasoning in the service of any cause, to argue for positions they despised, which had the inevitable result of cutting them loose from the positions they loved. Act and it shall produce unbelief. The firms provided the training; the firms taught the law. Law school just made students ready to accept it.
“Come out back,” said Peter, placing a hand on Walker’s shoulder. “The oysters are marvelous.” Together they crossed the marble floor toward the garden.