A.Actually, a large part of the job at Klasko is entertaining clients. In a legal market like New York City, there are so many law firms with excellent reputations to choose from, and the idea is that a client hires lawyers they also enjoy spending time with, as the hours required to close a deal are quite long.
Q.How do you socialize with colleagues and clients?
A.What do you mean, “how”? What does anybody do with their friends? What do you do with your friends?
Q.Ms. Vogel, I’m not the one testifying here. What types of activities do you engage in with clients and colleagues outside of the office?
A.Anything. Lunch, dinner, bars. I don’t know. Stuff friends do.
Q.Have you ever been to a strip club with a colleague or client?
A.No.
[Defense counsel confers]
Q.Is there any difference in how you socialize with your friends and with your clients?
A.Aside from the fact that the firm picks up the tab, there is a difference in general topics of conversation. Dinner with clients is professional. We often discuss work.
Q.Is that so? Topics of conversation are relegated to work? And you, what, limit your alcohol intake?
A.Not always, no.
Q.Perhaps it would help if you elaborated on client development endeavors.
Chapter 6
As we shuffled into our weekly Monday-morning first-year training, a bottleneck was forming at the sign-in sheet, and I heard chatter swirling around me:
Fuck! I can never remember my attorney ID number.
Just write your name, they’ll fill it in.
Who is “they”?
They! The firm!
I was so drunk that I gave the cabdriver the address of the office instead of my apartment building.
I’ve done that. Because we fucking live here.
My girlfriend is going to break up with me if I don’t come home before ten o’clock one night this week.
Tell her to chill out. We’ve only just started. When we get paid tonight, buy her Louboutins. The price is nothing if it means no more nagging.
I grabbed a mug, filled it with black coffee, and grabbed a seat in the back row. In our first two sessions, I had only half listened as I busied myself with the flood of Monday-morning emails streaking into my phone. I knew I wouldn’t get in trouble—M&A associates were almost expected to have their phones out during these trainings—but that day my absentee partner mentor, Vivienne White, was presenting. Figuring that she deserved my full attention, I left my phone facedown on the table. Vivienne was small and severe, beautiful with a certain frost that made me want to stare at her from a distance. Everybody was supposed to have lunch with their partner mentors in the first week of work, but I had yet to meet her face-to-face and I was just entering my third month at the firm. I had, however, emailed with her—she had canceled the very lunch dates she had requested on three separate occasions.
I saw the guy to my right checking his email, and managed to resist the urge for a few moments before following suit. Project Hat Trick still hadn’t quite heated to a boil, and I hoped to take full advantage of the simmer. A bunch of us were supposed to celebrate surviving the first couple months of work that Friday, and logistical emails eagerly anticipating our dinner at the end of the workweek, even though it was only Monday, had already begun.
* * *
“To payday!”
Derrick, Jennifer, Kevin, and I clinked the thick, ridged rims of our steins together and dropped our shots of sake into them. I reveled in the familiar sensation of malt on the back of my tongue, which tasted all the better because of my knowledge that it would barely put a dent in the $3,700 that had appeared for the fourth time now in my checking account—my biweekly take-home pay, even after the government took its share and I maxed out my savings contribution.
I wiped at my lip as the steam from the hibachi table hit my cheeks. It was my first time at Benihana, which Jennifer had insisted was the perfect place because none of the tourists infiltrating the midtown branch of the chain would bat an eye if we got too rowdy. I gazed at the couple across the table, the frames of their bodies wavy through the heat as they giggled and groped one another. Derrick followed my stare.
“We should have gone to EMP and blown it all,” Derrick groaned as he watched our chef, in an impossibly tall hat, greet us with a theatrical display of his knife skills.
“You’re the most gluttonous human I’ve ever met!” Jennifer laughed. I had no idea what EMP was, but assumed it was some unbelievably fancy restaurant.
“Are you kidding me? I can barely afford this after taxes!” Kevin complained.
“Right!? Half our paycheck gets stolen from us to pay for a government that does almost nothing I agree with!” Jennifer pouted. To me, complaining about getting half one’s paycheck stolen was an exercise reserved for those people in the highest tax brackets, a group that I was exceedingly grateful to be a member of.
“Where are Roxanne and Carmen?” Kevin asked.
“Roxanne’s stuck in the office, and Carmen’s father is in town,” I said, then took a long sip of my beer.
“From Singapore? Or he was already in the States?” Derrick asked. I shrugged. I knew Carmen had grown up in Los Angeles, but I didn’t know where her parents lived. “You know, he started the Singapore office of Travers Cullen before he moved to LA? Impressive guy. He moved back to Singapore recently. That office needs him.”
Travers Cullen was one of the largest law firms in the world. I had no idea Carmen was from a family so heavily entrenched in BigLaw. But it certainly made sense that she seemed so comfortable in the environment.
“How do you know all this?” Jennifer asked.
“Below the Belt,” Derrick said, taking a sip of his beer. “Not all legal gossip is salacious. There’s plenty of innocent stuff about job moves and stuff.”
Kevin was watching me intently. “What?” He pointed at my furrowed brow. I shook my head, trying to make sense of my own thoughts.
“It’s so weird . . .” I took a long sip of my beer and touched my temple. “Carmen told Matt Jaskel that my whole family went to Harvard and donated a library. Meanwhile, my dad is an oncologist in a small town in Connecticut and my mom volunteers at the library but definitely never donated one. Turns out Carmen is the one with the important family. I just don’t get why she’d say that.”
I looked at my friends’ faces for an explanation, but they all seemed to be looking beyond me.
“Alex! Hi!”
I turned to the voice over my shoulder, realizing where my friends’ gazes had been directed, and looked up at Peter Dunn with a somewhat stupefied expression. “Hi! Peter! What are you doing here?”
“I’m waist-deep in ten-year-olds.” He pointed across the room to a table of children in party hats. “My son’s birthday. What are you doing here?” he asked, a playful flicker in his eye.
“We’re having dinner. Actually, I don’t know if you know everybody, but this is Jennifer Goodman, Kevin Lloyd, and Derrick Stockton. We’re all first-years.” Jennifer and Derrick stared up at Peter, looking slightly bewildered.
“Hysterical,” Peter said. I wondered if he was referring to their expressions or the fact that we were four adults having dinner at Benihana, but I assumed the latter. The embarrassment made me start to sweat, and when Peter put a steady palm on my shoulder and turned to leave, then allowed his hand to linger for a moment behind him, my pulse almost stopped.