The Last Days of Night(54)

Paul entered the fourth-floor auditorium amid a throng of students. He blended easily into the crowd. If Columbia men could be said to look a type—confident, collected, energetically eager—Paul remained of it. He could smell the carefully applied hair grease in the air as he took a seat in the back of the room.

He’d come to observe Professor Theodore Dwight’s moot court class. Dwight had been more than amenable to helping out a former student in need. To have the most accomplished young attorney in the city back in his classroom would be an honor for both the professor and the sixty-odd students in his care.

Somewhere in the neighborhood of seventy years of age, Professor Dwight had a pure-white muttonchop beard of exceptional plumage. It matched the wig atop his head, and together they gave him a look of indifferent seriousness: indifference toward the fashions of the day, and seriousness toward the work of his life. Shirt collars changed widths and ties adapted to new knots, but the law maintained a deep immutability.

The subject that afternoon was Goodyear v. Hancock, a foundational patent suit from a few decades back concerning the creation of weatherproof rubber. The students had come to get on their feet and litigate the case. Dwight served as judge for the proceedings, while two sets of young men sat on either side of him operating as counsel for the plaintiff and the defendant.

As Paul watched these students engage in their passionate and stakes-less arguing, he took note of four who articulated their points the most clearly. It wasn’t that their legal analysis was the most astute; it was that they knew how to lay out their analysis in a concise narrative. They were storytellers.

Afterward Paul stood beside Professor Dwight as he explained his proposal to the four students he’d selected.

“I’m here to offer you employment,” said Paul to the young men. “The case you’d be working on is Edison v. Westinghouse. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?”

Their faces told him they had. “I will need assistance in all matters,” Paul continued. “Research, drafting briefs, finding and preparing witnesses for deposition. I need a few smart men to assist me.”

“So we’d be attorneys at Carter, Hughes, and Cravath?” asked the most energetic of the students, who introduced himself as Beyer.

“Not exactly,” answered Paul. “You’re still in school, and you’d stay that way while you worked for me, until you graduated.”

“Then you’re offering us clerkships?” suggested another of the students, Bynes. “All of us?”

“No, what I am proposing is not quite that either.”

“If not clerks and not attorneys,” said Beyer, “then what are you suggesting we’ll be?”

“Somewhere in between,” said Paul. “What I’m proposing is both novel and the best opportunity any of you will get to join the race of a law practice at full gallop. Think of your position as that of an…‘associate attorney,’ how about that? We’re going to build a legal factory. Men have arranged themselves into systems that produce every material, mineral, and device under the sun. Why not legal work?”

While all of the students appeared confused, Bynes was the one who spoke for the group.

“Because, and of course without meaning to seem rude or ungrateful, isn’t legal work of a categorically different nature than physical work? A brief is not a steel plank.”

Dwight smiled, proud of his student for taking part in this Socratic dialogue.

Paul was ready with his reply. “If you can arrange a process for producing one, why not a process to produce the other? And here’s the added benefit: I’ll be able to instruct you through a full case. After I graduated from this place, I clerked for Mr. Carter, who is now my partner. It was a tricky business upon being promoted to attorney—I’d never handled a client before, and had to rope them in without any experience of having done so. You won’t be thrown into such a sea of sharks.”

“How are we to get clients, then?” asked one of the students who hadn’t yet spoken. Paul had already forgotten the boy’s name.

“You’ll have mine. Or, to put it more precisely, you’ll have exactly one of mine.”

“Westinghouse,” said Beyer.

“You’ll devote yourself to that case and that case alone, under my guidance. And I’ll sweeten the pot: You’ll be given salaries. Ten dollars a week, which I’ll guarantee for one year, at which point you’ll have finished school and can come on as full lawyers. Or, if you do subpar work, I’ll cut you loose at any point and replace you with other bright young students. But the opportunity is yours to make of what you will, with the only determination of your future success to be the quality of your work.”

Beyer, Bynes, and the other two men turned to one another as they considered Paul’s offer. The legal profession had existed for hundreds of years as a system of protégés and masters, apprentices and artisans. Law firms still ran themselves like cobbler’s shops. What Paul was hoping to do, as he constructed this new phalanx of a legal entity, was to fundamentally alter the shape of the practice.

“What is to be our task?” said Beyer.

“We need to prove that Thomas Edison lied to the public, his investors, and the government of the United States.”

“…Oh,” said Beyer. The students’ eager hopefulness dissipated.