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interesting?”
“God, no. It’s mostly back-and-forth negotiating the contracts, which are endless. Boring as hell.”
“I get the feeling you’re not enjoying your time at our law firm,” Duncan said.
Neil looked away. “It’s just the whole cog-in-the-wheel thing,” he said. “And most of our cases—it’s not that we’re repping the bad guy; it’s just that the whole thing seems sort of pointless. We’re just a small part of some huge business strategy. We have no idea what’s really going on.”
“You remind me of myself,” Duncan said. “Back when I didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about.”
3
G OOD NEWS in the mail: a court order granting the motion to dismiss that Duncan had filed on behalf of his pro bono clients. In reality the motion was little more than a stall: the summons and complaint hadn’t been personally served on his clients, but just left wedged in their apartment door. The dismissal based on this technicality was without prejudice, so that all the city had to do was refile with proper service.
In addition to buying his clients some time, the motion had been intended as a warning shot, a way of letting the Housing Authority know that he’d be fighting the eviction every step of the way. The hope was that the city would decide that kicking the Nazarios out of their home was more trouble than it was worth. Sometimes simply showing a willingness to outwork the other side was the difference maker in a case. It was hardly an ideal strategy, but Duncan didn’t have a way to win on the merits.
Duncan was still a little surprised to find himself defending the Nazarios at all. Blake and Wolcott generally had more work than its lawyers could handle, meaning not only that associates routinely billed between twenty-five hundred and three thousand hours a year, but also that it lagged far behind more established firms when it came to areas like pro bono. But in the last six months the firm had created a pro bono committee and put a partner in charge of reaching out to various legal service organizations, the goal being that every lawyer would do at least a little free legal work for the disadvantaged.
It wasn’t exactly a secret that this sudden interest in pro bono arose not out of the goodness of the partners’ hearts, but rather as a concession to a series of blows to Blake and Wolcott’s once sterling reputation. In its first years of existence, in the late nineties, the firm had received a cascade of good press as it piled up high-profile victories, much of it focused on Steven Blake. For a couple of years it’d seemed like every big corporate case in the country had Blake on the winning side. He’d been profiled not just in trade magazines, but in Time and Newsweek as well.
But all that attention, and the firm’s exponential growth, had unsurprisingly brought about a backlash. As was inevitable, Blake had lost a couple of cases, tarnishing the myth of his invincibility, and the press that had been so eager to deify him now reported instead on a gender-discrimination suit brought by a female former associate who’d been passed over for partner. The firm had then landed near the very bottom of The American Lawyer ’s associate satisfaction survey, which in turn had led to a series of increasingly snarky articles on The Wall Street Journal ’s blog covering the legal profession. All of it inevitable schadenfreude bullshit, sure, but there was no denying that such things hurt recruitment, taking the firm down a peg or two from its former perch as the place all the Harvard and Yale hotshots wanted to spend their 2L summers.
While Duncan had been a little surprised to thus find himself taking on a run-of-the-mill eviction case, let alone doing it for free rather than the $450 an hour the firm normally charged for his time, he made a point of bringing the same perfectionism to his work on it as he did any other case. Despite his cynicism about the practice of law (a