TO WIT: MY FAVORITE LAWYER
I am the proud possessor of a nifty little office number, and speak here of the telephone and not the receptionist. Mine is especially nifty, consisting of the local prefix and four repeating digits. It has the dual advantages of being easy for any client to remember while enabling those of my colleagues who are so inclined to communicate with me by the movement of only one finger.
Before it belonged to me, it had belonged to the local mental health clinic, and immediately after I acquired it, I detected a dramatic upswing in the number of bizarre calls I was getting. At the time, I attributed it merely as the result of my growing reputation as a lawyer.
All of this is my way of telling you that I am more than used to strange telephone calls. Yet nothing in my experience had prepared me for the call I received a few days ago.
“You were fantastic, just fantastic,” gurgled the as yet unidentified caller, “worth every penny,” and my first impulse was to advise her that she had reached a law office by mistake. Before I could do so, however, she went on. “And just how is my favorite lawyer today?”
I ruled out my mother as the caller at once. She always complains about the size of my bills. In fact, I quickly eliminated every female relative down to and including third cousins twice removed and was about to make the leap to the European side of the family when my caller identified herself as a current client, a category that simply had not occurred to me at all.
She had that very morning received in the mail an opinion from the judge in front of whom I had defended her in a non-jury trial. I too had received the opinion some days before but I hadn’t opened it. I was very leery of the result, in part because the evidence did not go in all that well, in part because precedent was at best skimpy, and in part because, as I stood to sum up at the conclusion of a week-long trial, the judge asked me to identify myself.
My client however was particularly effusive and I drew the only possible conclusion: Having read the opinion, she mistakenly assumed she was the Plaintiff. As she then announced she was on her way to the mailbox with a check for me, I could find no reason to detain her further with such a slim technicality but rather I wished her Godspeed and reached for the opinion.
There were multiple parties in this case, one plaintiff, several original defendants, including my client, a couple of additional defendants, and an awful lot of counterclaim and crossclaim parties. I didn’t have a great grasp of this case to begin with, and somewhere between the counterclaim defendant’s crossclaim against the additional defendant and the additional defendant’s counterclaim against the crossclaim plaintiff, I got completely lost. Therefore, during trial, I joined in all motions made by any counsel whose tie or skirt was a complementary color to my socks and I opposed all motions made by any counsel whose last name contained an odd number of letters or more than one “z”. Each time I sat back down, I turned to my client with the smuggest smile I could find, the better by which to convey the illusion of security and comprehension.
As far as I could finally determine, at least fourteen different theories of the case were put forth, and I think three of them were mine. The judge ignored them all and issued an opinion which, mirable dictu!, contained one all his own. Except for the part that said “for the Defendant”, I didn’t understand a word, but given the result, I am willing to concede that his rationale was far beyond reproach.
So here I sit, taking credit where credit is not due and isn’t that a wonderful turn of events? Why, it seems like only yesterday that, while representing a Plaintiff in a personal injury case, I turned an almost certain non-suit into a modest verdict, only to have my client, unhappy with the amount of the recovery, blame the result on the fat juror seated in the 6th and 7th seats. He filed a complaint with the Disciplinary Committee for my failure to strike that juror and I might have been in serious trouble had the Committee not balked at the complainant’s request to interview the juror in question by going on a view.
It is all too common for a client to be unable to recognize a praiseworthy performance and that is at least as much a problem of the profession as it is the practitioners. Therefor, I shall be troubled not a whit if, on this particular occasion, I have snatched praise from the lips of calumny quite by happenstance. This is a complex enough business without the added burden of having to explain to clients whether or not I have done them good service. I have sufficient trouble figuring that out for myself. Besides, in this cruel and oft-times heartbreaking world, everyone needs something to believe in, and if for my client, that something happens to be me, who am I to shatter her dreams?
© 1984 – S. Sponte, Esq.