The Associate Read Free Page B

the documents this evening. She claims that she forgot, but I know she did it on purpose.” Susan leaned closer and spoke conspiratorially. “She is jealous of any woman Arthur works with. That is a fact. Anyway, since you’re done, I was wondering if you could finish the document review?”
    Daniel was exhausted and hungry. He’d been looking forward to going home.
    “Gee, I don’t know. I still have some more work on this memo and I’m pretty beat.”
    “I’ll make it up to you, I promise. And there’s not that much to do. Just a couple of boxes and you’d only have to give the papers a cursory review. You know, check for attorney work product or privileged stuff. It would mean a lot to me.”
    Susan looked desperate. He was almost done, and there wasn’t anything he was going to do tonight. Maybe finish a book he’d been reading, if he wasn’t too tired, or watch some TV. What the hell, it never hurt to do a good deed.
    “Okay.” He sighed. “I’ll save you.”
    Susan reached across the desk and laid her hand on top of his.
    “Thank you, Daniel. I owe you.”
    “Big time,” he said, already feeling like a sucker. “Now go and have fun.”
    Susan stood up. “The boxes are in the small conference room near the copying machine. Make sure they get to Flynn’s office by eight in the morning. And thanks again.”
    Susan was gone so quickly her disappearance seemed magical. Daniel stood and stretched. He was going to take a break anyway, so he decided to see what he’d let himself in for. He walked down the hall to the conference room and turned on the light. Five banker’s boxes covered the table. He opened one. It was packed with paperwork. Daniel did a quick calculation and came up with a ballpark figure of three to five thousand pages per box. This would take all night, if he was lucky. This was impossible. He’d never get home.
    Daniel hurried into the hall to see if he could catch Susan, but she was gone.
     
     
     

THREE
     
     
    The Insufort case had started with the Moffitts. Lillian Moffitt worked as a dental hygienist and her husband, Alan, was an officer in the loan department of a bank. The day they found out that Lillian was pregnant was one of the happiest days of their lives. But Toby Moffitt was born with severe birth defects and their happiness turned to heartache. Alan and Lillian tried to convince themselves that Toby’s bad fortune was part of God’s mysterious plan, but they wondered what part of this plan could include heaping such misery on their little boy. All became clear to Lillian on the day she went to her neighborhood grocery store and saw a headline in a supermarket tabloid about Insufort, which called it the “Son of Thalidomide.”
    Thalidomide was one of the great horror stories of the mid–twentieth century. Women who used it during pregnancy bore babies with dolphinlike flippers instead of normal limbs. The article in the tabloid claimed that Insufort was as harmful as Thalidomide and that women who took the drug were giving birth to monsters. While she was pregnant Lillian had taken Insufort.
    The night that the Moffitts read the article about Insufort they prayed for guidance. The next morning they called Aaron Flynn. The Moffitts had seen Aaron Flynn’s television ads and they had read about the flamboyant Irishman’s multimillion-dollar judgments against a major auto company and the manufacturer of a defective birth control device. “Could Mr. Flynn help Toby?” they asked. “You bet,” he told them.
    Soon after the Moffitts hired him, Flynn ran newspaper and television ads informing other mothers who had used Insufort that he was there to help them. Then he posted information about his case on corporate protest sites on the Internet. He also alerted friends in the media that Toby Moffitt’s case was the tip of a product liability iceberg. This strategy brought in more clients.
    One of the first things that Flynn did after filing
Moffitt
v.
Geller