Don’t Get Angry. Get Published.

My attorney.  She’s intelligent.  She’s studious.  She has a good memory and she’s thorough.  She has a good presence in the courtroom and command of the law.  Judges respect and/or are beholden to her.  All of these are very fine qualities in a lawyer and have nothing to do with why I hired her.

It’s difficult to describe my attorney without, at some point, using the word battleax, so I’ll just go ahead and use it now.  The woman is a fucking battleax! She is an Amazonian figure in her fifties, with blondish/grey, wavy, unkept-looking thinning hair, not a bit overweight, but certainly not slight.  Nothing about this woman is slight.  She has unremarkable eyes and her light skin is holding up well to that son-of-a-bitch gravity.  She has rather large lips that assist her rather large mouth articulate her words rather distinctly using a rather commanding voice.  She’s not pretty and I doubt she ever was.  She’s not ugly.  She’s not plain.  She’s not exotic.  She’s striking in a - your balls are mine - sort of way.  She’s the Miranda Priestly of the legal world.

The exact opposite of her personality is her taste.  Her restrained, appealing esthetic is the yin to her demanding, brutish yang.  Everything she puts on her body is tasteful, refined, and perfectly suited to her figure and the image she wants to project.  Her clothes, and she only wear pantsuits, are not exquisite, feminine haute couture, but elegant, expensive, and tailored to the centimeter.  The blouses she wears under her suits are a few shades off the color of the suit.  This tonal look is pleasant and soothing.  She wears large pieces of jewelry that never distract, but upon close inspection are impressive.  She always carries a sizable handbag that coordinates to her ensemble, but never blatantly bears a designer logo.  Her shoes are fine and modern.  She does most of her shopping in Paris, I understand, on her yearly buying trip there.  I had never seen, in person, a Hermes Birkin bag until the week I spent with her.  I got to see two.

Her taste in art exceeds her taste in clothes and accessories.  Only her prolific acquisition of it exceeds her taste in it.  She likes contemporary art pieces that have meaning and hold your attention.  Even the whimsical pieces are substantial.  No Yoko Ono da da bullshit on her walls. Every piece of art in her office I would cheerfully have gracing the walls of my house and a select few I would do something really unladylike to have.  Her office is like a gallery that lures the enthusiast around the next corner and the next and the next.  And as with any gallery, the collection is shuffled with each new purchase.  She shuffled three times in the year and a half she represented me. 

It should come as no surprise that she possesses the ego of a man - not a Zen sort of a man dwelling in some Himalayan shanty with a shaved head eschewing meat and sex while spending his days milking his yak and contemplating his naval.  No.  The sort of man whose power is his greatest strength and his need for it is his greatest weakness.  She brazenly procures and wields the three commodities of power: money; information; and people, in an unscrupulous manner.  Yet, when flattered, she is as malleable as she is unaware that the shameless sycophant is up her ass. 

She runs her office like an unforgiving prig of a British sea captain.  No trivial detail is too trivial for her attention and no trivial mistake is too trivial for her wrath.  Fear and golden shackles keep her staff going.  She works hard and everybody around her harder.  Never did I see her frenzied, or even in a hurry.  I never saw her carry anything but her purse.  I never saw her open anything but a file folder.  I never saw her search for a pen or her glasses.  Each time we came back into the courtroom after a recess, a fresh writing pad, pen, and new glass of water awaited her.  The drinking glass, I should mention, is a special glass purchased at a special store brought by her assistant and refilled with special water also brought by her assistant.  A car always drove us to and fro the courthouse.

My favorite part of the day was lunchtime.  It, like no other part of the day, sketched her personality. Upon our arrival at her office, another one of those special glasses was waiting for her on a particular coaster on the right side of her desk next to her phone filled with tea and ice in an exact ice to tea ratio.  You were fucked if you got the ratio wrong or if it had been sitting long enough for the ice to melt and jack up the ratio.  Ten minutes later, someone would come in and set the table, properly I might add, at the back of her office without disturbing her.  On the table went the catered meal of the day and another special glass, again with the exact ice to tea ratio. She would get up from her desk and ask me to join her.  We ate lunch and seemed to enjoy each other’s company.  We may actually have.  We would talk about the hearing, etc., which she used to segue into something of a more particular interest to her, one of those precious power commodities: information - in the form of gossip.  How clever of her to extract this information from such a captive audience.  How clever of me to feign ignorance of her agenda and satisfy a hunger no meal ever could.

After lunch, she would excuse herself.  During which time someone would come in and clear the table.  By the time she came back into her office a fresh special glass of tea and ice in an exact ice to tea ratio would be on her desk, this time accompanied by the following day’s menu choices.  “What would you like tomorrow?”  We would grapple with the lunch decision and exactly ten minutes before we had to leave for the courthouse someone would come in to give us fair warning and take the menu selection.  Ten minutes later someone would appear at her doorway to escort us down the elevator and into her idling car.  This person didn’t drive us or even ride with us.  He merely got us down from the 12^th floor to the 1^st floor and into the car.  In fact, no one rode with us.  Anybody assisting her in court was already at the courthouse.  Oh, and when I say rode, I mean rode all of four blocks.

Her behavior in the courtroom was no less demanding than at any other time.  She dominated.  She interrupted opposing counsel.  She corrected opposing counsel.  She marked on opposing counsel’s exhibits.  She took things off opposing counsel’s table.  She told opposing counsel’s assistant to go get something.  It was astonishing!  The judge allowed all this and so did opposing counsel. 

During recess one day after an embarrassingly aggressive stunt, a woman in the restroom asked me, “Who is that lady?  I think I recognize her.”
I took a deep breath and rolled my eyes.  “Oh, that’s no lady.  That’s my lawyer.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 21st, 2009 at 8:28 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can also trackback from your own site.