Life is full of surprises, some of them pleasant. Even while you are engaged in routine business, the past can reach out and tap you on the shoulder to remind you of something pleasant among the shards of discarded memories.
This week’s pleasant surprise began over a decade ago. I have been working at raising funds to provide free legal services for those that cannot afford them for at least that long. But I suppose it really began this past October 1 when this year’s Campaign for Equal Justice was begun and I was assigned the task of soliciting the law firm where I began my career – the law firm I have previously described as dysfunctional at the time of my departure. Based upon this week’s events, it is apparent that such a condition no longer exists there.
I reached out to the firm’s current managing partner at the start of the Campaign, and we began a long series of email exchanges and had one long telephone call that broke the ice formed from years of no communication. He easily understood the societal need for which I was seeking funds, but wasn’t certain there was anything in their budget this year for such a thing. But he didn’t say yes or no to me, and I am nothing if not a persistent cuss, so we kept up the conversation despite his obvious hesitancy. Emboldened by his unwillingness to say no and end the discussion, I began to worry the matter in the way that a puppy worries a once-favorite old shoe discovered in the back of his owner’s closet.
We scheduled lunch for last Tuesday to catch up and to settle up. After all, I had been managing partner of the same firm 30 years ago and had been the person to extend an offer of employment to him. His undergraduate grades had been – to say the least – unfortunate, yet he was second in his University of Washington Law School graduating class. When I asked him what had happened during his undergraduate years in the initial hiring interview, he gave me the best response ever given to me by a candidate because of its inherent candor: “Wine, women and song not necessarily in that order, and far too much of them.” After undergraduate graduation he had joined the Navy and seen some of the world, and while sailing had acquired the maturity that powered him through law school.
The main reason for our lunch was to catch up, but I inquired early about my request for a donation since I didn’t want the possibility of a charitable gift to become the elephant in the restaurant. He said yes they would contribute, and the conversation, following my thanks, immediately turned to the past. I haven’t spent much time of late thinking about the first 16 years of my legal career, all of which were spent with his firm. For one thing, the period was formative and my leaving did not sit well with many of the partners at the time, and, for another, I don’t typically spend much time thinking about the past – even if it has been much on my mind for the last couple of years while I’ve been writing a book based upon events which happened to me while growing up and going to law school.
Finding good things to discuss with a former colleague is difficult when the totality of your own portion of the mutual experience was negative. But this is where a sense of humor comes in handy, because there are always memories to laugh about even when they are founded in events which were the subject of personal unhappiness or despair. We found those common blessings of mirth, and began sharing the good memories and laughing aloud. The other patrons in the restaurant looked our way once or twice as we gave way to the occasional belly laugh.
Perhaps the richest mine of humor was one of the two named partners of his firm. That partner was a contrarian by nature of the sort that leaves his mark not only on a firm but upon all of the local members of a profession. When his name comes up with Seattle trial lawyers of a certain age – especially with those who never worked in the same firm – they remember him vividly and have their own stories to share of working on the opposite of a case with him. He was known as a great trial lawyer, but was difficult to work with because he was focused only on winning and would do whatever it took to prevail. This should not imply that he was unethical or shady. He was never either of those things, but he was always the stalking prizefighter searching for a knockout punch in the early rounds.
He was also the person who was managing the firm at the time I joined. Notice that I didn’t call him the managing partner. There was no such concept in 1970 in Seattle. Law firms were collections of individuals who shared office space and little else; the concept of collective work sharing was still in the future. One of our senior partners became chair of the ABA’s Law Office Management Committee – the name of the Committee said it all: how do you manage the shared environment so that the lawyers can work their individual practices in order for the firm to turn a profit? The senior partner in question knew nothing of firm management, or, for that matter, of the management of the collective interests of those engaged in individual practices while sharing the same office space.
Hugh, the senior partner whose stories we shared at lunch, had tried, in his tenure managing the firm, to get the other partners to understand the value of a collective practice. Without any training in the subject but with a good deal of common sense, he took the first grudging steps toward a shared practice with the other partners straining hard against his pull at each step of the way. He did his best to look out for others – especially us young lawyers – and in the process left a lot of what should have come to him on the table. The other partners were all too willing to let him do so. And, naturally, he became discouraged and more than a bit resentful, and eventually left management to others.
When I became managing partner, I viewed him in a different light than the other partners did. We always had fun together, even while I hated trial work and he gloried in it. He had been the person who said yes when I waltzed in one day right after being made partner in my fourth year of practice and announced I would no longer try cases but would gather up everyone’s business clients and make a meal of them on the firm’s behalf. In retrospect, the audacity of my announcement is stunning, and his ready acceptance of it equally so. He saw the same need I did, and could see past my apparent selfishness to the firm’s need to come together.
Bringing a bunch of sole practitioners together was not an easy chore, and it wore me out as managing partner in the end. During my tenure, Hugh was both my biggest supporter and my nemesis. He was bitter over his treatment by the time I assumed the reins, and one of my main jobs was to keep him happy as he was the biggest single producer in the firm. Suffering the aftereffects of some long forgotten administrative snafu caused by Hugh, I once stormed into his office, slammed the door, stood at the front of his desk with my hands on its surface, and announced: “Hugh, I swear to God that you have taken Sherman’s march to the sea as your strategy for survival.” He merely smiled in response and quietly replied: “What took you so long to figure that out?” He completely disarmed me and made me laugh as he always did when I was in a state of high dudgeon, and through my tears of mirth I told him to cut it out as I was trying to be angry.
So, at lunch my former colleague and I told stories about Hugh. And near the end, I asked my luncheon partner if he knew where Hugh presently was. The answer, to my surprise, was Hawaii. Hugh and Sharon, his wife, had left Hawaii 25 years earlier to live near Sun Valley, but they had recently returned. Hugh, now 88, had returned to the warmth since he no longer skied, hiked Bald Mountain, or fished its rivers.
Following the lunch, I emailed my thanks to my former colleague for his firm’s contribution and finally remembered to ask for Hugh’s contact information. Yesterday, he followed up with the contact information, including an email address, telephone number, and mailing address. He warned me that Jan – Hugh’s former secretary who remains with the firm after 51 years (longer than either Hugh or I were there) – said that I should use snail mail since neither Sharon nor Hugh used email very much. I promptly ignored Jan’s warning as I am wont to do when such things are said to me, and sent an email into the ether.
Three hours later, following dinner, the phone rang and Helen answered. When she handed me the phone, she said that she didn’t know who it was as she didn’t recognize the voice and whoever it was hadn’t identified himself. I said hello hesitantly fearing the usual salesman ignoring the No Call List, and heard an obviously older voice ask “Steve, how the hell are you?” The timbre wasn’t right, so I didn’t catch on immediately, but when he announced it was Hugh and that Sharon had just handed him a printed copy of my email I began to hear his real voice through the strain of the years. We talked for several minutes, and at the call’s conclusion he urged me to come to Hawaii to visit. During the call we shared a few of our mutual stories of recollection, and laughed together a good deal.
As remarkable as the lunch and the call were, my real surprise came afterward as I described the content of Hugh’s call to Helen and we began to share our own memories of the firm. You see, Helen and I first met there. She was a secretary there on the day I first started work, subsequently left to go elsewhere, and came back to work at the firm again during the period when I was its managing partner. When she returned, I was recovering from divorce. Helen and I had long been friends by that time, but only friends. It took another partner’s wife – Helen’s best friend in life – to let her know that I was unattached and suggest we ought to get together. In those long gone days, men and women who worked together sometimes did form romantic relationships; Sharon, after all, had once been Hugh’s secretary. And while Helen was never my secretary during her second turn at the firm (she had been during the first), our mutual banter and joking soon blossomed into dating, then marriage, and then children. Now, after more than 30 years together, we share the third state of married life – the companionship of the empty nest.
As Helen and I began sharing stories and laughing together, I realized that my memories of my first firm should not all be residents of the black hole to which I have assigned them due to my subsequent attainment of far more interesting and pleasant legal experiences than I ever enjoyed there. My first surprise of the evening was the realization that a large number of the tall tales that I, in my frequent guise of Garrulous Old Coot, often relate are from that period and that many of them feature Hugh. My second surprise was the surfacing of my memories of Helen’s and my first fumbling attempts at becoming in love – all of which derive from my last few years with the firm.
Ultimately, Helen opened the door to my departure from the firm. After we were married and after Peter’s arrival, she said one day in response to my depression over the firm’s dysfunctional state: “Just quit!” The idea was stunning. Helen has never lacked courage and is often bold. When I objected that I didn’t have a job, she told me she wasn’t worried because she knew I would quickly find one if I quit, but that I must quit in order to find other work because I was too loyal to look while employed. Six months later I finally acknowledged the truth of her words, took them at face value, and abruptly quit. I had nowhere else to go at the moment of my announcement – nowhere for my career, that is, but up, although I was unaware of that fact at the time. That same day I made the call that began the rest of my career, and two days later I was an incipient partner in the firm described in my earlier blog piece entitled “Once Upon A Time….”
As Helen and I talked last night, our nest seemed all the warmer and empty only of the chicks which once filled it. Last evening was proof that their absence has been replaced by the joys of shared memory and the warmth of a life-long love affair.
A lot of joy came this week out of the far off black hole that was the cradle of my birth as a lawyer. I realized this morning that my experience of it has taught me many things: how to practice, how to manage others, how to laugh in the teeth of adverse conditions, how to be successful at the hard work of marriage. All of those lessons have stood me well, and now I am able to give thanks.
It seems that the work of asking for charitable donations is not the grim task that so many deem it to be.
