A very long time ago, I promised a story once I had a real conclusion to it. I finally had enough of a conclusion that I can write it up.
So, for those who may not have read the small novel of the background on this site… I had moved to a new state and set about getting a position at a firm somewhere. Unfortunately it wasn’t going well, one of the benefits of sticking around the city you graduated law school is a bit of nepotism granted by local firms to your school. You graduated from the same place as them, therefore they will give you a shot as a little bit of ‘giving back’ to the school, as well as a slight bond of common experience. I can’t tell you how many times I talked to someone who graduated from my school many years prior and we’d both laugh that we both had the same contracts professor… because he was seemingly immortal and had been working there as long as nearly anyone could remember. Anyway, once you move, you lose that link and actually end up behind the curve, because you are now fighting that nepotistic impulse from whatever law school is local.
In my new city I was having zero luck getting a position, I had sworn to never work in personal injury when I started law school, but it is amazing what needing money can do to a person. I ended up applying to literally ONE personal injury firm. And fate being the cruel and ironic mistress that she is… I was hired… at a pretty good salary too. I quite literally had no reason to say no. Unfortunately it turned out to be a horrible situation, for a huge number of reasons. So I started to try to escape. About 5 months in I had reached a fever pitch of applying to literally anything to get out. My addiction to food kept me working there, but there was no day I didn’t think about just walking out and never coming back.
But before I get to the fun part, I have to fill in some of the back story. The firm originally had a compliance attorney. I had never met him in person as they had quit probably 6 months before I ever started working there. Their legacy however was still felt… everyone there remembered the guy and he was universally despised; the attorneys would damn near spit on the ground after saying his name. But then there was a reprieve… he quit and hadn’t been replaced. In truth, it had seemed like the firm owner had gone MIA for an extended period of time and just hadn’t been keeping track of things. That changed quite suddenly one day and the named owner was suddenly in everyone’s business overnight. Several attorneys hypothesized his bank account had gotten lower than he was happy with and was now very involved again to try to fill the coffers to allow him to go on some more extended absences again.
The reprieve from the compliance attorney was apparently only a brief respite as the managing attorney eventually got around to hiring a new one, the previously mentioned Rainman, in fact shortly after hiring Rainman they hired several more compliance attorneys… it seemed odd that they went from one to none to half a dozen overnight… I’m sure there’s a story somewhere there but I don’t know it.
Shortly after Rainman was hired, he was making the rounds of the office and came to speak with me. It’s always a ‘great‘ sign when someone walks into your office and closes the door because they need to talk. Rainman wandered in and shut the door and sat down across from me in my tiny office. He then stated in a colorful euphemism that ‘they’ were looking to fire my boss in the near term. This drew a disinterested grunt from me. At the time I was of very mixed feelings about my boss. Apparently, this was not the reaction that Rainman had hoped for and after about 5-10 minutes of chatting he left. An even more abbreviated version of the conversation happened a few days later with similar results. Honestly, I don’t understand what the guy was fishing for… I had nothing to offer and hadn’t been there all that long myself. Shortly thereafter though is when the petty and irritating harassment started.
The first salvo I noticed was that our lit group’s emails started being intercepted / copied to the compliance attorney (we found out however because someone forgot to remove the old compliance attys email address from the compliance@lawfirm.com generic email… and every single email that was copied to Rainman sent back a reply to me stating “old-compliance -attorney@lawfirm.com is not a valid email address.”) The short lesson is, don’t try to be sneaky with tech if you don’t know how to use tech. Eventually someone fixed the error so I have no idea how long they continued monitoring our email, probably until the end is my guess.
Every single one of our files got audited, which involved poring over paperwork to make sure no random pages were missing and ultimately taking up at least half the day sitting in a conference room defending decisions which were made on the file to the compliance attorney… who was not a litigation attorney and not from the same state — so Rainman had no real basis for criticizing, but that of course didn’t stop him from doing so, or offering his sparkling commentary which further showed he had no worthwhile advice to share. These audits also meant you weren’t able to work on your usual work either, so it created work, and prevented you from doing your current work, with the added benefit of irritating the fuck out of you.
In a multitude of ways, our group started to become isolated and harassed. Other employees didn’t want to associate with us because apparently we had become marked. Normal business expenses started being denied… but only for us. The firm started making esoteric rules, that only applied to us and no one else. Keep in mind, I had been hired and assigned to this attorney, I had no choice in the matter but now I was persona non-gratis. I had started to become friends with my boss and honestly all of the harassment just made our whole group stick closer.
My boss despised Rainman. Rightfully so. And eventually he apparently decided the best course of action was to avoid him. It was absolutely hilarious to watch. Rainman would walk over and demand to know where my boss was, I would look up from whatever I was working on and just say “I don’t know…” because why the hell should I be keeping tabs on my boss. That’s a weird thing to expect from a subordinate. Rainman would chastise me and say I should always know where my boss was. He then turned on his heel and confronted the paralegal with the same question.
She on the other hand, handled Rainman in a much more amusing manner. Our paralegal didn’t put up with people’s shit. Rainman had made several racist and sexist remarks directed toward this paralegal and at a certain point I think she just gave up being civil to him (there was one incident where I thought she was actually going to throw a punch at him before I intervened… But I digress). He asked her where our boss was, and she would always point him down the hallway with wonderful statements like:
- He just walked down there, I bet if you hurry you can catch him.
- (whipping her head in the direction Rainman had just come from…) He literally just walked down there, I don’t know how you could have missed him.
- At lunch
- He went to go have a quick meeting with XX Attorney. (this was made all the more fun because we would call up our boss afterward and he would make sure to show up and talk to Attorney XX just to fuck with Rainman).
In effect, every time Rainman walked away from us, we would text our boss that Mr. Creepy had been looking for him and our boss would make sure to show his face to the right people around the office just so there was a verifiable trail that he had been doing what we said he was doing when Rainman inevitably followed up. I recall at least once my boss left a physical note on Rainman’s desk when he knew he wouldn’t be there that said “hey I heard you were looking for me, we must have just missed each other.” It drove Rainman insane. I’ll also admit, watching this happen was poetry in motion; I am not ashamed to admit it gave me no small satisfaction to watch and, in small ways participate.
Eventually, Rainman gave up on harassing our boss and turned his attention on me and the paralegals. His opinion was that if my boss wasn’t there, then he would do the next best thing and attack his support staff.
If my boss wasn’t there I would be forced to sit for file audits and the compliance attorney would pepper me with questions about why decisions were made one way or another in the handling of the cases. Many of which had not been active in the time while I had been working there. Plus, as an associate at this firm, I didn’t decide the litigation direction of the cases. So when asked why do this as opposed to this other thing… I usually just shrugged and said I don’t know I had nothing to do with that decision. Sometimes the audits were done on a moments notice, surprise audits. A couple times I had been at lunch when this happened (likely it was done this way on purpose) and Rainman would drag the two paralegals into the audit to complain to them about the file. Which made no sense, because now you are talking to non-lawyers about the file and what was going on in the case.
This continued on for a few months. It had turned out Rainman had been tasked with attempting to get my boss / his staff to quit; because if you quit, in theory, it was volitional on your end and therefore no employment issues (I guess?). The alternative was to collect some evidence on my boss to legitimize firing him. There were many things that happened which were just as grievous as the above, but the above gives a good flavor without getting lost in the weeds. There is a whole other side story about the firm tapping phones and keeping tabs on people through the work cell phones which had RATs installed.
One afternoon, I was out at lunch with my boss and one of the paralegals. At some point while we were eating in an exasperated sigh, he said to no one in particular, “I don’t know why they are doing this…”
I was busy eating my sandwich, but between bites I said, “Because they are trying to fire you.” I wasn’t looking up, so I didn’t see his face. I do know that he got very quiet. And then he said “why do you say that?” I recognized I’d said something notable at that point. But, seriously… how could he not know? Everything that was going on, all the crap pointed right at him with both barrels. It was so obvious for so many reasons, but there he was with a quiet rage across his face as if the concept had never even crossed his mind.
In a sort of offhand manner I replied, “Because Rainman told me…”
I swear if our table hadn’t been bolted to the floor I think he would have flipped it. I had inadvertently lit a powder keg. Once he stepped back and looked at the situation, the obviousness of it washed over him. He had been in full freak out mode, and after a few minutes of this, he became calm and said he was taking the afternoon off because he had a few calls to make. You could see the gears in motion. He was planning out his next ten moves and counter-moves like an expert chess player.