I kept hearing vague mentions of the people who had been in my position before me. Associate-X really wasn’t very good at his job. He never did any work… It took him days and days to write a single letter… I don’t know how he passed the bar. We fired him cause he vividly threatened to kill his paralegal.
Wait. Huh?
Yeah, I was replacing a guy who was a returning vet with PTSD and had threatened to kill not one… but two paralegals. In separate and distinct encounters. In point of fact, I had been told the story once with no mention of the parties involved. And then a second time by one of the paralegals I worked with daily who told me they were the one who was threatened. Being the subtle person I am, I blurted out far too loudly, “THAT WAS YOU?” then, realizing volume… I leaned in and quietly said… “that was you?”
It was relatively remarkable because the paralegal was a really nice person, except that she swore like a sailor, which honestly merely added to the charm. I constantly hear some light profanity wafting by my office door. It really is highly amusing.
The conversation at some point spiraled into the ‘other’ attorney everyone knew about. Apparently this one had been disbarred in one jurisdiction due to mental issues involving schizophrenia. They had then moved into my current jurisdiction, applied to the bar and been accepted (?). She had been working as a paralegal until the bar came through for them, so the standard background sweep done on attorneys wasn’t really done on her, because laziness and stuff I suppose.
All anyone knows is that at some point, she stopped taking her meds. Then somehow they found her kill list. Yes. She had a list of people she was going to kill at the firm. And it was published online. Interestingly it had people on it at the firm who had never met her. The Frat Attorney was on the list and he had apparently never laid eyes on her. His recollection of the whole event was getting a phone call early in the morning and being told “don’t come into work today.” He said no one even told him why until the next day when he found out they had to get the police to take her to the psych ward from the firm.
I apparently had big shoes to fill.