look at, but very capable. She knows a lot of law and has a tendency to give advice, especially to the newer attorneys. It’ll be up to you to keep her in place. If you can’t get along with her, we’ll move her.”
“Where’s my office?”
“Second floor, down the hall from Avery. The interior woman will be here this afternoon to pick out the desk and furnishings. As much as possible, follow her advice.”
Lamar was also on the second floor, and at the moment that thought was comforting. He thought of him sitting by the pool, soaking wet, crying and mumbling incoherently.
McKnight spoke. “Mitch, I’m afraid I neglected to cover something that should’ve been discussed during the first visit here.”
He waited, and finally said, “Okay, what is it?”
The partners watched McKnight intently. “We’ve never allowed an associate to begin his career burdened with student loans. We prefer that you find other things to worry about, and other ways to spend your money. How much do you owe?”
Mitch sipped his coffee and thought rapidly. “Almost twenty-three thousand.”
“Have the documents on Louise’s desk first thing in the morning.”
“You, uh, mean the firm satisfies the loans?”
“That’s our policy. Unless you object.”
“No objection. I don’t quite know what to say.”
“You don’t have to say anything. We’ve done it for every associate for the past fifteen years. Just get the paperwork to Louise.”
“That’s very generous, Mr. McKnight.”
“Yes, it is.”
_____________
Avery Tolar talked incessantly as the limo moved slowly through the noontime traffic. Mitch reminded him of himself, he said. A poor kid from a broken home, raised by foster families throughout southwest Texas, then put on the streets after high school. He worked the night shift in a shoe factory to finance junior college. An academic scholarship to UTEP opened the door. He graduated with honors, applied to eleven law schools and chose Stanford. He finished number two in his class and turned down offers from every big firm on the West Coast. He wanted to do tax work, nothing but tax work. Oliver Lambert had recruited him sixteen years ago, back when the firm had fewer than thirty lawyers.
He had a wife and two kids, but said little about the family. He talked about money. His passion, he called it. The first million was in the bank. The second was two years away. At four hundred thousand a year gross, it wouldn’t take long. His specialty was forming partnerships to purchase supertankers. He was the premier specialist in his field and worked at three hundred an hour, sixty, sometimes seventy hours a week.
Mitch would start at a hundred bucks an hour, at least five hours a day until he passed the bar and got his license. Then eight hours a day would be expected, at one-fifty an hour. Billing was the lifeblood of the firm. Everything revolved around it. Promotions, raises, bonuses, survival, success, everything revolved around how well one was billing. Especially the new guys. The quickest route to a reprimand was to neglect the daily billing records. Avery could not remember such a reprimand. It was simply unheard of for a member of the firm to ignore his billing.
The average for associates was one-seventy-five per hour. For partners, three hundred. Milligan got four hundred an hour from a couple of his clients, and Nathan Locke once got five hundred an hour for some tax work that involved swapping assets in several foreign countries. Five hundred bucks an hour! Avery relished the thought, and computed five hundred per hour by fifty hours per week at fifty weeks per year. One million two hundred fifty thousand a year! That’s how you make money in this business. You get a bunch of lawyers working by the hour and you build a dynasty. The more lawyers you get, the more money the partners make.
Don’t ignore the billing, he warned. That’s the first rule of survival. If there were no files to bill on,
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