Called To The Bar

By David Fitzsimmons

For some reason unknown to me, I have finally happened upon the web page for the law firm in my office building and have taken to browsing through the profiles (their education and practice areas and general interests) of all the lawyers I see every day, the lawyers I eat lunch with in the cafeteria, the lawyers who I have spoken to on occasion, but only to say things (it is always they who speak, never me) such as: I wonder if they are calling for rain? It was a lovely weekend – we have a pool and had some neighbors over. And, on the occasion of an elevator ride I took with a partner and a pizza delivery man: When I was in the White House the Secret Service needed look through the pizza boxes we had delivered!

Lawyers, what a wonderful breed of human being! I envy them, of course. Their diligence in reviewing documents, their training, their moderated but determined dispositions. Surprisingly, they are not an aggressive bunch, at least the ones I know. They rarely flare, except when they show the NCAA Tournament on the drop-down screens in the cafeteria and certain alumni loyalties become apparent, or one memorable time when one lawyer ran to his colleagues at my table, a stack of papers in hand, yelling “We got those sons of bitches!”

Washington is full of lawyers, of course. Lawyers and lobbyists and consultants and spies. But, as I have just found out, their stories are not the ones you might think.

One lawyer I see often, a giant red-faced man who breathes too heavily and will die prematurely, I am certain, from smoking and lack of exercise, works in environmental law, of all things. He sits on the board of the ballet. He did not go to Duke, as I had imagined (I think it was his southern accent – a small thing, but one formulates from little germs) but the University of Kansas.

The tough-as-nails middle-aged redhead who badgers the El Salvadorian checkout girl at the cafeteria, confirming and reconfirming the price of Diet Peach Snapple, is in her free time: an avid cyclist and involves herself in charity races for cystic fibrosis.

Patent law is a big component of the practice. One young associate, who I assumed worked with the real estate team (they are located on my floor and that is where I have seen him most often), recently earned his LLM and studied classical piano as an undergrad at UConn. Another associate worked at the United States Patent Office and, before that, studied art history at USC.

One wonders how they came to the law: If life had not worked out for them the way they had planned, and patent law, which I understand to be a marketable and lucrative practice area, seemed a safer, better option, perhaps even easier than the pursuit and prosecution of art history or classical piano?

People hate lawyers, of course, but I do not hate my building-mates. From what I have seen, they are as pleasant a bunch as say, credit risk managers, charter-school teachers, or not-for-profit aquaculture lobbyists. Of course, the lawyers talk of their work a great deal, but that is usual. They talk also of family, of children, of movies they have seen or are going to see. They are rather polite to me in the elevator; me, who they have no particular reason to be especially polite to.

I don’t buy that lawyers are nasty people, I don’t buy the jokes, but I know that I am the exception and I am naive. Certainly, when they return to their offices, where I do not see them, they might be crazy animals, they might examine their witnesses with malice and derision, they might cleave workers of their pensions, assist in executing unsafe drilling practices in fragile ecosystems, plot, scheme, cajole, harass. They might do any of these things, and perhaps it is even likely. Though again, I wouldn’t know because I have not seen it or do I care to.

Paul Fusco, from RFK Funeral Train Rediscovered, 2008, Danzinger Projects, New York