Mistress of Justice Read Free Page A

An hour of a partner’s time could hit $650 and in big transactions a premium (referred to by associates as a no-fuck-up bonus) of perhaps $500,000 would be added to the client’s final tab.
    Twenty-five-year-old associates fresh out of law school made around $100,000 a year.
    The firm had moved from sooty limestone into glass and metal and now occupied four floors in a skyscraper near the World Trade Center. An interior designer had been paid a million dollars to awe clients with dramatic understatement. The theme was lavender and burgundy and sea blue, rich stone, smoky glass, brushed metal and dark oak. Spiral marble staircases connected the floors, and the library was a three-story atrium with fifty-foot windows offering a stunning view of New York Harbor. The firm’s art collection was appraised at close to fifty million dollars.
    Within this combination MOMA and
Interior Design
centerfold, Conference Room 16–2 was the only one large enough to hold all of the partners of the firm. This Tuesday morning, though, only two men were sitting here, at the end of a U-shaped conference table surfaced with dark red marble and edged in rosewood.
    Amid an aroma of baseboard heat and brewing coffee they together read a single sheet of paper, gazing at it like next of kin identifying a body.
    “Lord, I can’t believe this.” Donald Burdick, the man pinning the sheet to the table, had been the head of the firm’s executive committee for the past eight years. At sixty-seven he was lean and had sleek gray hair trimmed short by a barber who visited Burdick’s office fortnightly, the old Italian brought to the firm in the partner’s Rolls Royce—“fetched,” as Burdick said.
    People often described the partner as dapper but this was offered only by those who didn’t know him well. “Dapper” suggested weakness and a lack of grit and DonaldBurdick was a powerful man, more powerful than his remarkable resemblance to Laurence Olivier and his suede-glove manners suggested.
    His was a power that could not be wholly quantified—it was an amalgam of old money and old friends in strategic places and old favors owed. One aspect of his power, however, did lend itself to calculation: the enigmatic formula of partnership interest in Hubbard, White & Willis. Which was not in fact so mysterious at all if you remembered that the votes you got to cast and the income you took home varied according to the number of clients you brought to the firm and how much they paid in fees.
    Donald Burdick’s salary was close to five million dollars a year. (And augmented—often doubled—by a complicated network of other “investments,” to use his preferred euphemism.)
    “My Lord,” he muttered again, pushing the sheet toward William Winston Stanley. Sixty-five years old, Stanley was stout, ruddy, grim. You could easily picture him in Pilgrim garb, cheeks puffing out steam on a frigid New England morning as he read an indictment to a witch.
    Burdick was Dartmouth and Harvard Law; Stanley had gone to Fordham Law School at night while working in the Hubbard, White mailroom. By a crafty mix of charm, bluntness and natural brilliance for business he’d fought his way up through a firm of men with addresses (Locust Valley and Westport) as foreign to him as his (Canarsie in Brooklyn) was to them. His saving grace among the society-minded partners was membership in an Episcopalian church.
    Burdick asked, “How can this be accurate?”
    Stanley gazed at the list. He shrugged.
    “How on earth did Clayton do it?” Burdick muttered. “How did he get this many in his camp without our hearing?”
    Stanley laughed in a thick rasp. “We just
have
heard.”
    The names contained on the list had been compiled by one of Burdick’s spies—a young partner who was not particularly talented at practicing law but was a whiz kid atgetting supposedly secret information out of people at the firm. The list showed how many partners were planning on voting in favor