The Gall of A Southern Lawyer

At my first law firm, as you know if you read the post dated September 15, 2019, I was a total screwup. It’s not my fault; law school didn’t tell me that I needed to be detail oriented, and it sure didn’t tell you how to deal with nit-picky things like filing pleadings.

A mid-level partner, who did mainly corporate work and schmoozing, gave me my reviews the first two years. Let’s call him Thomas, or Tommy, which everyone called him, as his father, a named partner, was Thomas. Think what that means to the son, whose father also didn’t hesitate to order him around. Tommy was of medium height, a little chunky, hair receding, but he kept his mustache. Many of the members of this firm had been in the Navy, and some kept their facial hair. Can anyone tell me what a mustache signifies if you’re ex-Navy? I hope it’s sexual.

During my reviews, Tommy maintained that I was doing “just fantastic”—the latter being his favorite word. There was never a discouraging word, and the skies etc.

Then in my third year, a criminal lawyer handled my review. Being someone who specialized in telling human beings exactly what they were in for (“it hurts just a little when another inmate shoves in the shiv”), he was generously frank: I had big shortcomings. The main corporate partner thought I ought to read business magazines. Another guy, probably the real estate partner who shouted so loudly at bankers that I could hear him two doors down, questioned my maturity. But there was some dispute: a tax guy said I was his favorite associate. Another guy wouldn’t go to court without me. To hear the criminal lawyer tell it, the meeting ended not in the usual consensus but with shocking language and shivs.

One of my many failings in life is that while I’m not a perfectionist in my work, I desire people to think that I’m close to perfection. This review sealed my decision to get out; by the spring of 1988, Nancy had already left her Greensboro firm for the now long-deceased Burroughs-Wellcome. Jobs were easier in those days, and I had a new job not many months later, at SAS Institute, Inc., a software company in Research Triangle Park. It went well at first.

One day in the next year or two, I went to a continuing legal education seminar in Durham, and there I saw Tommy himself. He greeted me, and he turned his head away from me and down flirtatiously, and said, in a seductively low voice and with a sly smile, “I miss your good work.” We exchanged a few more words and parted.

Fast forward to 1990. The new job didn’t work out; I had to quit to avoid being fired. More on that earlier and later. Worse, after being assured by a couple of Raleigh firms that I could go to work there, a recession blew up, a bad one. There was no work for anyone.

I was even turned down for a job at UNC Hospitals suing poor people over their unpaid hospital bills. Can you imagine a job like that? At my first firm, I sued people in bankruptcy to seize their mobile homes, so maybe this was slightly not as bad. But it’s probably good I didn’t get that one. Nancy had good work and we paid the bills, but 1991 was frantic for me. I cried so hard one day that Miss Marple, the dog who was devoted only to Nancy, actually jumped on me in sympathy.

I kept in touch with the fellow I helped try cases at that first firm, a wonderful man named Joe Moss. He had been a Duke fullback, and he tried cases like one, bulling forward, but with some subtlety and humor and an awful lot of quick-footedness. He gave me far more credit for our success than I deserved. We won the largest jury verdict in the history of the firm, and he told everyone that it was all due to me. About five minutes after the jury verdict came in, he was driving to the beach (I won’t even bet anyone that he had a girl going with him; even I don’t take money that easy.) I don’t like people much, but I always loved Joe Moss. (I think he’s due a blog post.)

So one day I called him and flat out begged: “Joe, I can’t find any work. There are no jobs. I need to make some money. Could you think of a way to send me some brief to do on contract?”

“Hell,” he roared, “I’d do that in a second. I’d love to work with you again. Let me see what I have, and I’ll call you back.”

The next part is fuzzy, it’s been those 30 years—30 years!—but somehow I ended up on the phone with Tommy. I suspect that Joe said I’d have to go through him. I asked him if I could do contract work for Joe.

“It wouldn’t be appropriate,” he said.

“Why, Tommy? Why not?” I begged.

“It wouldn’t be appropriate,” he repeated, and we hung up soon after. I didn’t have the nerve to remind him that he missed my good work.

To quote the peasant in “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” who claimed that a witch had turned him into a newt, I got better. We moved to Delaware for Nancy’s job, and, by the mid to

ate 90’s, I was Associate General Counsel at AIG, the heir apparent to the General Counsel. It was fortunate that events worked out so that I didn’t have to take THAT nightmare job. I would have been such a failure that they would have rightfully tied me to a woodpile and burned me. As a failed witch.

One day my phone rang, and I picked it up and announced myself.

“George! It’s Tommy!” I caught his light-hearted, southern fraternity boy laughing tone: suddenly we’re all best friends again. “How are you? How are you doing? How’s Nancy?”

I was so surprised to hear from him that I have no memory of how I answered. How did he know I was at AIG? How did he remember my name? He went on, “Being in Wilmington, I wonder if you have any contact with the lawyers at DuPont that you could put me in touch with?”

After wincing at how he had just inaccurately placed himself in Delaware through a misplaced modifier, I decided to let him have it: “Tommy, you know, I don’t work with anyone in Delaware. My practice is pretty much national.” This was a nasty, petty point that the work at Tommy’s firm was solidly North Carolina oriented. “I don’t know anyone at DuPont. There’d be no reason for it. The local bar isn’t like it is in North Carolina. Hell, I don’t even have to belong to the Delaware bar. I don’t know any of those people.” And another gratuitous shot: “And the DuPont lawyers probably don’t belong to the state bar either,” an assertion for which I lacked any evidence, “so we’d just never run into each other.”

We hung up shortly thereafter.

I’ve marveled about the relationship I had with Tommy ever after. First he fudges my standing in the firm, giving me an entirely false sense of security. Then, at a CLE, he makes this gratuitous lie about how much he misses my good work—I’ll be the first to admit that he spent a little time digging me out from my mistakes. And then he refuses to give the OK for a partner who liked me to fling me a lifeline when I was out of work and seriously desperate about it; I’d never been so upset, and never have been again. Then, THEN, he has the nerve to call me and ask me to send him work from DuPont.

Someone might argue that anyone, not just a southerner, could act like this. But once I started work at AIG, the subterfuges were purely by the business people to evade the regulations of the several states. The lawyers all treated me fair and square. On the west coast, no one is quite as direct, but no one fucks you over either. This is, I submit, a southern thing. What is amazing is that I’m sure that Tommy believed that he was simply being who he was and doing what he does. What he would call that I have no idea, and I have even less idea how he justifies it to himself. Maybe—and I think this is the real answer—he just lacks any self-awareness. I’m afraid that it’s a common state of affairs there.