Confessions of a Summer Law Clerk
TERBURI, DAVID
LIFE ON WALL STREET Confessions of a Summer Law Clerk. by David TERBURI On my first morning as a summer clerk at a Wall Street law firm, a gregarious young associate with premature wrinkles...
...The last stop on our tour was the office of the firm's oldest senior partner...
...Upon reaching my destination, I thanked the talking elevator (I subsequently learned the office had named it Hal) and walked into the firm's palatial reception area...
...The person I feared most, however, was the managing partner...
...Nor did my job end when I boarded the subway for home...
...They knew their jobs rested on their ability to project conservative, "white" images...
...How deep is the current of male chauvinism...
...the associates got closet-like rooms, the ventilator shaft and an unpredictable secretarial pool...
...We don't have any room for creativity or literary style...
...they are assigned to the Trusts and Estates Department (referred to with disdain as T and E), where they specialize in dealing with dying rich people...
...Unfortunately, I had not found the partner's joke particularly funny...
...Sensing that he knew what he was doing, I followed with a few preliminary giggles and then a series of my own he-haws and ho-hos...
...Every year they took home a crisp $125,000...
...In Wall Street firms female lawyers are either second-class or nonexistent...
...Do you know the first rule a young lawyer should always remember...
...In the spirit of the occasion each attorney replaced his standard office wear-pin-striped suit, white shirt and plain black shoes-with what was apparently standard outing wear-blue blazer, light-colored pants and top-siders...
...In early August the firm held a bigger social gathering at a Westchester country club-the annual "summer outing...
...I accepted his invitation and we set out on what proved to be a Wall Street introduction marathon...
...Later, during a brief lull in the conversational buzz, the host tinkled his glass and called for our attention...
...The partners had huge, serious offices, views of the harbor and private secretaries...
...People were literally running in nil directions, "hot" radios were being hustled on the corners, and the huge buildings sagged with old dirt...
...Until a few years ago New York's most prestigious firm...
...321 were law firms...
...Not bad, I thought to myself...
...I like to see a nice ass around the office, but those goddam women just can't understand big business...
...Every summer the so-called "national" law schools send the best of their second-year students to work "on the Street...
...Inside, several Jamaican maids were serving Upper-East-Side snacks, and a small buffet with a watermelon sculpture stood in front of the elegant fireplace...
...Of the meager 9 per cent that were not, a good number were corporate giants?Ford, Atlantic Richfield, IBM, and Proctor and Gamble, for example, all sent men in expensive suits to New Haven...
...Many idealistic law students asked the same question...
...We need it to attract law students who haven't excreted their puerile fantasies about doing good...
...The vast majority of my assignments involved looking up minor points of law...
...Cravath, Swaine & Moore, hired only male secretaries, and as recently as last summer many of the Wall Street eating clubs excluded women not simply from membership but from dining on the main floor...
...It soon became apparent, too, that the schools themselves had designed the whole process to meet the special needs and styles of the big firms...
...Maybe Ollie has excreted his puerile fantasies...
...The number of hours you work is not important...
...To my surprise the nouveau office building management had imaginatively wired the elevator with sound...
...Ten-hour day after 10-hour day I sat, busy but bored, in the law firm's library...
...Anxious to escape the street, I bounded into the firm's building, and after pausing briefly to brush my lapels and flatten my hair, entered an empty leather-padded elevator...
...All the other summer clerks started last week right after school ended...
...At the office the attorneys tried to appear responsible, rational and methodical...
...In return for his or her services each student receives a David Terburi, a new contributor, is a student at Yale Law School...
...Like most Wall Street legal establishments, it occupied immense offices, covering three plush-carpeted floors, with an impressive staircase connecting things...
...Six months later I reported for work...
...Oh, we don't really live here," she hastened to explain with a frown...
...I then substituted a tortoise-shell college momento for my wirerim glasses, and invested $5 in a medium-width, tamely striped club tie...
...he warned...
...What's happening in the line of pro bono?', I asked the managing partner...
...From out of nowhere a voice intoned "Floor, please...
...Clearly lacking imagination, officials have titled it "'Employment Interviews...
...In keeping with the atmosphere of the interviewing season, I acquired a costume, discarding my faded jeans and sweater and replacing them with a new pinstriped suit...
...Don't ask about public service work," everyone warned...
...You know that the whole thing is for the sake of show...
...According to the firm's manual, its public affairs program enabled "the summer associates and regular attorneys to undertake civil liberties and legal aid projects on firm time...
...Let's have a show of hands...
...As a final touch, after rejecting the possibility of a conservatively cut wig, I trimmed my hair to what Wall Street considers a tolerable "mod" length...
...I lagged behind, taking note of the signed portrait of John F. Kennedy and mentally practicing a firm handshake...
...Each law interviewer came equipped with a virtually identical "descriptive summary...
...Slick little publications, they invariably opened with a Platonic statement about a firm's interest in general corporate practice, continued with an outline of its four departments (usually corporate, tax...
...Always collect your fee," he blurted...
...You're a professional," he had told me...
...Smiling, I strutted up to the beautiful but on-the-verge-of-aging receptionist and announced my presence...
...After a moment William "Call-me-Bill," ambitious Attorney at Law, arrived wearing a broad grin, a sparkling white shirt and Phi Beta Kappa key...
...When I entered the office, the grey-haired partner rose slowly from behind his huge, tidy walnut desk...
...On the step immediately below were the younger partners, who made a "mere" $40,000...
...Since most of the attorneys were from Ivy League schools and wealthy suburban families, I had difficulty believing they would seriously concern themselves with the petty symbols of status achievement, but I witnessed two weeks of tension over who would receive the new leather waste baskets and who would be stuck with the old aluminum ones...
...I thought about the infamous Oliver Barrett (alias Preppie) who worked at the Wall Street firm of Jonas & Marsh in Erich Segal fantasy-land...
...If you do, the firm will never hire you...
...The representatives later admitted, though, that the environmental law was done for the firm's major client, Consolidated Edison...
...On the top of the status ladder were the four or five oldest partners, whose average age was 65, and whose average working week was 25 hours...
...If I ever thought of myself as a permanent member of the firm, that notion disappeared when I received work assignments on which the supervising partner had carefully blacked out the client's name...
...While I shifted my feet and prepared a suitable answer, the senior partner began to chuckle...
...The treatment of black and female attorneys did not necessarily mean that the firm's members were political conservatives...
...As I swerved to avoid a crippled shoeshine man, a special Wall Street dust whirlwind almost toppled me...
...From a new appearance it was one easy step to a new personality...
...If an associate does $80,000 worth of work while earning only $30,000 -not an uncommon situation-the partners have the very pleasant task of dividing the extra $50,000 among themselves...
...Next on the ladder were the partners in the 45-60-year-old bracket, the top men in the firm's four special departments, with annual earnings in the $50,000-$ 100,000 range...
...Oh," she said deadpan, "you finally made it...
...The first morning is still vivid in my mind...
...There was only one New York outfit that offered any variation: Its descriptive summary noted a concern with problems in "environmental law...
...On one such occasion a pink 45-year-old tax attorney without eyebrows criticized my sentence structure...
...Well Jenny, dream on wherever you are...
...Do the older men go next door...
...My suspicions confirmed, I returned to my office for the last time...
...Wearing red pants and an ascot-yes, an ascot-the partner met me at the train station...
...The partner who had told me he liked (o see ,i nice ass around the office took the role of toastmaster, opening the evening by telling a few jokes about a woman with "big jugs...
...Welcome aboard," he said in what I gathered was his captain's voice...
...One day during my summer exposure an older partner who seldom came into the office asked a female summer associate what she was doing so far away from the secretarial pool...
...or Mrs...
...They learned that underfunded legal aid organizations could not afford the time or money needed for a day of interviewing, and at best would have had only poverty-level summer salaries to offer...
...Relegated to a separate category altogether were the "hourly employes...
...They were the firm's showpieces, its way of saying "look how liberal we are...
...I also learned that I was with a "growing, dynamic firm-one that's on the way up...
...At the outing the style was suave, witty and athletic...
...Glancing in the direction of the firm's three female members, I found them laughing heartily...
...He shook my hand for too long and announced we were going on a grand tour of the firm...
...My suegestion that they call me by my first name elicited the explanation that to do so would cost them their jobs...
...Perhaps not coincidentally, both black lawyers had offices near the main entrance...
...She thought it wonderful that hockey-iock Ollie could "do good and make good at the same time...
...I had seen Wall Street before, but somehow expected it to look happier on my first day of work...
...Where were the legal aid organizations...
...and was immediately disappointed...
...Wall Street remains the financial pinnacle of the American legal profession, but its stratified pettiness is causing many topflight young attorneys to opt for a shingle somewhere in the great hinterland of American private practice...
...They sat on the executive committee and from that position made the big decisions about cutting up the firm's income...
...And since I was then taking the whole procedure seriously, I was delighted when several job offers eventually came my way...
...After a day of golf and tennis everyone filed into the country club dining room for a dinner right out of the annals of the Robber Barons...
...If not, he's suffering from a prickly case of Wall Street constipation...
...This is the very top," the associate whispered as he led the way through a luxurious private reception room...
...On paper we were called "summer associates," but the key word in that classification was the first one...
...To a man they professed a strong, albeit rationally worded, dislike for Richard M. Nixon, once a partner, along with John Mitchell, in the Wall Street firm of Mudge, Rose, Guthrie and Alexander...
...In the next three hours I met 80 individual attorneys, although at one point my bubbling guide apologized that the office was always "empty" on a Monday morning...
...In the days ahead I was to decide that the partners' Johns and the suggestion about Christmas cards symbolized the spirit of the place...
...If the managing partner was not available as a go-between, the other partners themselves would sometimes call me in "to discuss a problem...
...For this the entire professional staff receives a day off...
...On my last day of work I managed to finish my final assignment by noon, and out of departing curious-ity decided to inquire about the office's pro bono activities...
...You've been here all summer," he said...
...The manual added (no doubt because the firm was growing so quickly) that I would not be expected to send seasonal holiday cards to the members...
...I received my best illustration of how the firm's bigwigs viewed the average working man or woman one Saturday, when a senior partner invited me out to his Westchester home...
...I started to answer verbally but came to my senses in time to push the button for the 17th floor...
...Also in a difficult position were the firm's two black attorneys...
...If the gap between the partners and the associates was huge, the gap between the professionals and the nonprofessionals was unfathomable...
...Then he roared with laughter, and the young associate immediately joined him...
...By midsummer I had come to dread my daily trip to the office...
...whopping $300-350 per week, and in 90 per cent of the cases the summer associate can count on an even bigger starting salary one year later...
...It's little wonder that a group of women from Columbia and NYU ended the summer by filing a sex discrimination suit against 10 Wall Street firms...
...One memorable evening a senior partner invited all the summer clerks to a party at his Upper-East-Side apartment...
...Hope you didn't get dirty riding with the laborers and domestics," he laughed...
...He then added that I should keep track of my time to the tenth of the hour and submit my time sheets for review at the end of each week...
...From there the drop went all the way down to the level of associate...
...During the next few months I had the opportunity to hear lots of jokes that were not particularly funny, and to see things that would be amusing only to someone with a fondness for black humor...
...The hawk-eyed receptionist at the main desk recorded my arrival time, when I left for lunch, when I returned, and when I left for the day...
...As is generally the case "on the Street," there were approximately two associates per partner-a nice ratio, for the greater the number of associates, all of whom receive set salaries, the bigger the firm's pie...
...he said, "of all those still interested in poverty law...
...Partners dealt directly with clients, leaving the associates to become intimate with law books...
...One day as I stood at the urinal, he actually tapped me on the shoulder and asked if I could handle a corporate debenture problem...
...The firm's most effective device for separating employes and attorneys was a nonreciprocal system of personal address: While the attorneys called the workers by their first name, the workers called the attorneys Mr...
...Call-me-Bill looked at me with disbelief, then explained that the firm's senior partners of course had their own bathrooms...
...It's just for the middle of the week...
...Here's my opinion of lady lawyers," one of the younger partners said to me...
...The managing partner called himself an "assignment coordinator," but the summer clerks quickly worked their way through that euphemism as he stalked them in the halls, in the library, even in the men's room...
...What kind of projects do the attorneys have going...
...I emerged wide-eyed from the Lexington Avenue subway's Wall Street stop at about 9:00 A.M...
...The summer clerks called him "the grim reaper...
...An important part of the game was attending the assorted parties that the firm held for the not-too-clandestine purpose of "checking out the new people in a social setting...
...Following our tour, Call-me-Bill left me for the rest of the morning with the firm's manual, a beautiful example of lawyers' legalese from which one interesting fact popped out immediately: Senior partners bill their time at a healthy $110 per hour...
...I asked, trying to be funny...
...Each status level, moreover, had subtle and not so subtle distinguishing signposts...
...The jokes a success, the toastmaster said a few lachrymose words about a 41-year-old litigating partner who had died of a heart attack the previous spring...
...The bigwigs all belonged to exclusive eating clubs (The Wall Street Club or The Bankers' Club), while the plebs grabbed a quick, cold hot dog from the non-lawyer on the corner...
...Any conception I might have had of a loose organization of independent professionals was what Kurt Vonnegut would call a "grand falloon"-totally bogus...
...He looked at me and pursed his lips...
...As we finished our sweep of the middle floor, Call-me-Bill pointed to a men's room and said, "Most of the younger attorneys use that lavatory...
...Ollie supposedly accepted the position because Jonas & Marsh was "very civil liberties oriented," and his wife Jenny-showing her Rhode Island, music-major naivete-had soared into ecstasy...
...Because of its size members of the firm were separated into convenient, recognizable subsets, arranged in accordance with a carefully worked out corporate hierarchy...
...And their exemptions sprang from the fact that no one took them seriously...
...When I arrived, I was greeted by his wife, who was wearing a floor-length, wagon-wheel patterned skirt and generous helpings of makeup...
...at present there are 18 in New York with 100-200 members...
...In the course of the summer, the closest I had come to legal work involving the poor was the drafting of several eviction notices...
...It should perhaps be noted that a firm is considered to be "on the Street" not because of its address but because it is part of the law-big business mainstream...
...In six weeks of interviewing I met with representatives of "only" 20 New York firms (some aggressive Yale students went to over 80 interviews...
...Like their clients, such firms are huge...
...Between October 1 and December 19, representatives of 355 organizations and institutions scheduled a day of interviewing at Yale...
...litigation, and estates), tossed in a cheerful assurance that the young attorney could do pro bono work, and wound up with a vague description of an employment program for young attorneys...
...In fact, most of the Wall Street lawyers I met were Javits-Humphrey liberals...
...by David TERBURI On my first morning as a summer clerk at a Wall Street law firm, a gregarious young associate with premature wrinkles radiating from the corners of his pale eyes offered to introduce me to a "few" of the firm's members...
...But unlike the female attorneys, who had to battle for respect, the "legal Oreos" received more than they wanted...
...Like everyone else in the law school, I compared offers, talked about how exciting a summer "in the City" would be, and shortly before Christmas I accepted the most enticing invitation...
...Last summer I left the cozy Gothic confines of the Yale Law School and joined this lucrative seasonal migration...
...Whatever...
...The only group of attorneys exempt from the status scramble were the females-all three of them...
...Thus, what I said to a partner's wife at a Thursday evening reception could be just as important as what I said in my most recent memo on Section 455 of the Federal Savings and Loan Act...
...Everyone chuckled in unison...
...Preparation for my trip had begun the preceding fall...
...Along with almost all of my second-year classmates I exposed my young legal mind and body to Law School U.S.A.'s version of the theater of the absurd-a special annual production that also takes place at Stanford, Harvard, Columbia, Penn, Virginia, Chicago and any other school big law firms are willing to visit...
...Some of the senior partners treated the messenger "boys," library workers and secretaries in a style that would have seemed harsh to Dickens' Bob Cratchit...
...Summer clerks occupied the very bottom rung...
Vol. 55 • August 1972 • No. 16
