Shitlaw Primer, Part I: Life of a Coder

In a couple short weeks, a new wave of hapless lemmings will crack open the shrinkwrap on those heinously overpriced casebooks, boot up their laptops for some heated note-taking, and commence their voyage down the road of America’s most overrated, miserable, and saturated industry: the practice of law. A pompous, overpaid professor will saunter in and begin blathering and bullying them about some obscure case, reveling in her power like a college calculus student picking on the 4^th grade arithmetic class. So begins another bumper crop in this endless harvest of shame.

 Remember those days? The boundless excitement at joining an “elite” profession, envisioning oneself captivating jurors with soaring oratory and seating “surprise’ witnesses like Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird? Or maybe flexing those legal muscles as a powerful DA a la Jack McCoy, cruising around crime scenes and picking up spent shell casings with a pencil tip? Sending rapists and murdering scum up the river and then meeting “the boys” for a well-earned victory beer before firing up the Ferrari to head home?

Sadly, for most incoming One L’s that isn’t how this dreadful mistake will play out, despite propaganda to the contrary in those glossy admissions brochures. Instead, most will cold-send bales of resumes into a dead chasm of silence, eventually scrounging for document review temp-work at rates lower than a truck driver, bricklayer, or garbage man earns. Or there’s the “networking” farce, where you print reams of resumes on that creamy, ivory cotton-weave Staples resume paper and shove them in the face of every gray-haired loser at an alumni cocktail reception. I attended one of these once, and the first older-looking guy on the scene was gang-rushed and sent to the hospital as a horde of recent grads bum-rushed him with an avalanche of cover letters! I believe he was pronounced dead shortly thereafter, having choked on a peel-and-eat shrimp during the melee. I later learned he wasn’t even a lawyer, but instead a catering director merely there to inspect the buffet. Such are the risks one runs when overseeing events for desperate law school grads.  Just posting a craigslist ad for an entry-level lawyer is like strolling into Ethiopia with a box of Dunkin’ Dounuts and saying: “Hey, anyone here got the munchies?” 

In NYC as I write, the rates for most temp projects are $28 an hour straight time for admitted attorneys, with no health benefits, no paid leave, and zero opportunity for advancement. Packed elbow to elbow in stifling broom closets and windowless backrooms, these “losers” (many of whom are laid-off graduates of so-called “elite” schools) stare into the alkaline glow of their monitors and click thru reams of the dullest, driest, most pointless shitpaper mankind has ever produced. Many arrive home at night with their eyes weeping blood. The fun quickly wears off after the twelfth hour of scanning a Global Broker-Dealer Bilateral Sub-Agreement to see if Paragraph 14(b)9vii contains the word “if” as opposed to “shall.” Picking fly shit out of black pepper would be a more intellectually stimulating (and probably better paying) job.

 Juvenile and petty rules, often arbitrarily applied, dominate these projects. Internet access is strictly forbidden, with most case managers disabling the web browsers. Cell phone use and textingare limited to emergencies only. Of late, even talking to one’s neighbor is taboo, since clients are getting more cost-conscious and every second of billable time is haggled over and hard fought. The desks are littered with rotting Chinese take-out containers, festering cups of day old instant coffee, Ramen noodle styrofoams, and the other sundry cuisines of the dirt-poor.

 Most law grads are little more than over-leveraged liberal arts losers, who compounded the mistake of a worthless bachelor’s degree withan equally worthless (and much more expensive) JD. Often paying half (or more) of their after-tax income in student loans, I’ve witnessed the utter desperation and hopelessness that many are suffering: single moms stealing milk from the coffee fridge to take home for their children, working 80 to 90 hours a week when bone-tired to make the rent on a shithole studio in Queens, enduring endless degradation and abuse by the sociopathic, greed-fueled scum who operate these modern day sweatshops, and the occasional outburst of pent-up anger that ends in security escorting one off the property. The project’s over- for you! Quickly replaced, there is an endless supply of desperately indebted losers just dying to take these miserable jobs, since no alternatives exist.

 Hell, even craigslist ads for paralegals and secretaries are now expressly stating “No JD’s need apply.” Gee whiz, Wally, why would a lawyer apply for a paralegal job?  Here’s a hint: how many nurse or paramedic ads do you see that state “no licensed physicians please?” How many stewardess jobs warn “no pilots need apply?” The AMA and other legitimate professions are experts on the iron laws of supply and demand, and regulate their professions accordingly.

 Bad as they are, these temp jobs (even with the recent plunge in rates and overtime) still pay far better than small ambulance-chaser firms, many of whom have cut salaries into the low 30s (annually) in this gruesome bear market. The supply of lawyers outstrips the number of available jobs by an absurd ratio, and this problem continues unabated since the ABA will accredit anyone who opens up a lawschool in the spare bay of his garage. Did you hear about Philly’s new “Drexel School of Law?” What the hell is a “Drexel,” anyway? Wasn’t he the younger brother of Screech on Saved by the Bell? And then there’s the infamous Thomas M. Cooley Law School in Michigan, who received accreditation for having more “O’s” in their name than any existing law school. But I digress.

 At Paul Weiss, for example, they crammed 120 people into a basement room that NYC  fire code rated for 80. This was in 2005. Like steerage passengers on the Titanic, we labored in the bowels of the building, right alongside the boilers and HVAC equipment. Lacking air conditioning and adequate ventilation, many came down with colds that went untreated due to the lack of health insurance. A cockroach problem soon erupted due to the crumbs and food garbage strewn about the cellar floor, which was treated with multiple Raid roach fogger bombs. The morning after the exterminators finished, dead roaches littered our keyboards and even crawled, stunted but still living, from the floppy drives and servers!

 We were paid $21 an hour, straight time, and required to work from 9 am to 11 pm seven days a week. Forbidden to use the firm’s lavish upstairs restrooms, they had all 120 of us split a pair of airplane sized-bathrooms that were on the Concourse level under the Rock Center, open to the public and a favorite bathing spot for the homeless. One affable homeless chap named “Bones” would use the lone toilet in there as a foot bidet, rinsing his diabetic ulcer in the excrement-caked shitpot and yelling “I’m in here motherfucker!”every time one of us coders needed to relieve himself. Most of us just went next door and used the Heartland Brewery’s bathroom (did I mention that restroom breaks of over six minutes had to be deducted from one’s timesheet? As a coder, bowel movements can quickly cut into the bottom line).

 Paul Weiss also blocked the fire exits with box upon box of the corporate shit-paper that arrived daily by the truckload like grist to a mill. Had a fire broken out, we would no doubt have burned to death in a modern day Triangle Shirtwaist incident, engulfed in flames while helplessly beating on box-blocked doorways. To work there was to truly feel expendable, utterly worthless and really just downright sub-human. The partners should all be ashamed of themselves.

 As an aside, the few partners we met were decidedly unimpressive. An assortment of combed-over, potbellied schmucks and used-up old broads with skin like an alligator’s neck, they’d occasionally summon us coders upstairs for an ass-reaming. The “gals” were mostly snarling old chain smokers; voices like sandpaper of a single-digit grit. Nicotine oozed from their iron-gray hair. The men were milquetoast and gutless, too socially inept for sales and clearly too stupid for a serious profession like medicine. Most probably never spoke to a woman without first forking over their credit card number (did I mention Eliot Spitzer once worked here? Enough said). Hence they masqueraded as “elitists” in the also-ran world of make-work paper pushing that is law. One used-up old partner who looked like that guy from Jake & the Fatman once read to us verbatim for 3.5 hours straight from the training manual, probably assuming that as second-tier grads we were all functionally illiterate.  His breath smelled like hot garbage.

 To be sure, there were some good times down in the gulag. Romances bloomed, and occasionally one would enter the box-stacks to find sweaty limbs tangled in flagrante delicto. Working 14 hour days, it wasn’t long before many donned the “coder goggles” and began to pile-fuck people they wouldn’t havemade eyes with in the outside world. There were also some fascinating characters who this temp will never forget. One coder whom I’ll call “J”. soon earned the affectionate nickname “fade out.” A 40-something Yale Law grad, he had apparently suffered some kind of nervous breakdown at another Biglaw shop, and shortly found himself  broke, blacklisted, and eternally condemned to the doc review circuit with the rest of us losers. He was eccentrically intelligent, speaking in bizarre philosopher jive like Jack Kerouac coming off a hard bender on acid. He’d launch into some long-winded dissertation and then, realizing that his audience (as it were) had long since departed, would simply mumble “right, right, that’s right” while nodding incoherently and returning to face his monitor. Hence the nickname “fade out:” like a song without a proper ending, he wound down as if an engineer simply lowered his volume until he’d exhausted his supply of words. This would happen like 20 times a day. I often wondered whatever became of the poor bastard. The last time we spoke he was washing his tube socks in the break-room sink and saying that “Big Cotton” was solely responsible for the assassination of JFK.  

 The next stop on my vagabond coding career was Sullivan & Cromwell, that whitest of the white shoe firms. This dump has three levels of sunless, underground bunkers where the temp attorneys and their documents are warehoused, far away from the skyline corner offices where the serious shitpaper gets pushed. It’s like those alternative communities of urban legend that one reads about online: the subway’s “mole people” and such. You are instructed by your temp agency pimp to meet in the lobby of 125 Broad Street at 9 am sharp, where you assemble as a group to be marched upstairs and “processed” like that busload of inmates from The Shawshank Redemption. Told to dress in a “suit and tie” for the first day, they soon march you downstairs to the dungeon where the “coders for life” toil in pajamas and sweatpants, chanting “new fish, fresh fish, we got new fish today” at the suit –clad newbies who are starting the first day of the rest of their lives. Many start openly weeping into their spiffy leather Perry Ellis portfolios, some even freshly monogrammed as recent law school graduation gifts. Many start bleating mindlessly for the mothers, returning to an infantile state as the overwhelming sadness and abject disappointment slowly seeps in. As I said, welcome ye to the first day of the rest of your life!

 It’s not too bad there, after you get “on the beam,” as they say in prison. Sullivan is to disorganization, chaos, and complete systemic dysfunction what Elvis was to rock n’ roll: the original master. It’s a bit like that old Cold War joke: An American and a Russian are killed together and both go to Hell. The devil greets them fiendishly and says “Gentlemen, you have two choices. You can either go to American hell or Russian hell.” Curious, the American asks the Devil what the difference is. “In American hell,” says the Devil “you have to eat one shovel full of shit each day.”

“What about the Russian hell?,’ queries the Russian in his thick accent.. The Devil replies, “Comrade, in the Russian hell you have to eat two shovelfuls of shit each day.”

The American naturally chooses the American hell; yet tellingly, the Russian opts for the Russian hell. Two years later, they cross paths and begin sharing their experiences in eternal damnation.

“Comrade, you really screwed up big-time,” says the American. “In my hell I eat my shovel of shit first thing each morning, and do whatever I want to the rest of the day.” Satisfied, he gloats and scoffs at the hapless Ruskie, who replies: “My dear friend, it is you who choose poorly. In our Russian hell, half the time there’s no shovel, and the other half the time there’s no shit!”

 So goes a document review project at Sullivan. Due to their colossal ineptitude, complete lack of common sense, and probably outright billing fraud, squads of coders arrive for the mandatory 14 hour “workdays” only to be kept idly waiting for hour upon endless hour as documents are loaded, clarifications are sought, software is configured, the moon rises in Taurus and Capricorn descends into autumn, etc. It’s rare to squeeze more than 45 minutes of actual coding time into a 14 hour day. Not knowing the Sullivan drill, many newbie coders turn down Sullivan gigs because the long mandatory hours rightly terrify them. But us veterans know the old “Clownshop” (as the temps call it) all too well. The waiting coders nap, play cards, vandalize the workstations and so on while waiting for documents and instructions that rarely arrive. Some even operate wire fraud scams and lotteries on the S&C computers, thus “double dipping” and making real bank. A cool Nigerian coder even once used the break-room hot plate to cook us all an authentic African ox-tail stew, which ended with a dessert course provided by raiding the partner’s pantry freezer and ripping off a case of ice-cream sandwiches that were meant for some lame Merrill Lynch client meeting or whatever.

 Of course, the clients are billed regardless, since firms of this caliber are as immune to the ethics rules as Typhoid Mary was to disease. It’s always some solo ambulance chaser who ends up disbarred for screwing up a $1500 fender bender whiplash case, while Sullivan and the other white-shoe thieves rip off Fortune 500 client’s cash by the wheelbarrow load with time-wasting make-work and pointless re-reviews of the same irrelevant documents. A few weeks at this place really removes any doubt about what the “practice of law” has devolved into circa 2009: a soulless, money-grubbing scam that is socially toxic, utterly pointless, and rife with insecurity and adolescent pettiness. Did I mention that licensed attorneys below the associate level are not even referred to as “attorneys” by the insecure dolts who run this glorified sewer? The sub-associate level lawyers are called “case analysts” and are essentially perma-temps, installed to babysit the coders and squeal on them like the “straw bosses” of 19^thcentury coal mines. Chosen more for their ass-kissing and willingness to rat out slackers than any legal ability, some of these folks are notorious on temp message boards, like the dreaded geek “Clovester” and well-fed “Big Mama.” Keep an eye out for them. Another SullCromscam is to fill the temp ranks with minority lawyers, thus tooting the “diversity” trumpet and looking good on paper to their corporate, hand-wringing whore-masters. Naturally, the partner-level ranks are as white as a wedding dress soaked in Clorox.  

 The true gutter “temps” pimped there by the staffing agencies are officially called “JD Temporary Document Coders” and you are warned at S&C’s orientation that it’s strictly forbidden to list the firm’s name on your resume. Instead, you must write only the name of your pimp-daddy temp agency and the term “Temporary JD Document Coder” even if you’re admitted to the New York State Bar. Name, rank and coder number! God forbid some hapless future shitlaw employer would mistakenly think that a Tier 2 grad was actually an “associate” at the Sullivan & Cromwell! The horror!

 Our corporate “laws” are written by almost exclusively by ex-Biglaw partners, and purposely “drafted” as byzantine, ungrammatical, ill-considered  and generally downright incomprehensible as possible,  hence maximizing Biglaw billable hours.  It’s a bit like a dentist handing out saltwater taffy and boxes of Bubble-Yum to drum up root canal business. (By the way, I’ve always loved the pompous word “drafted” when referring to legal cut n’ paste shitpaper, as if this stilted dreck was akin to naval architecture or some other worthwhile feat of engineering).  If the oafish dolts at the NY Times and other media whores saw the true breadth and depth of the Biglaw farce the way the coders do, barrels of ink would be spilled writing about it and “blowing the whistle.”  New York’s also-ran diploma mills like Brooklyn, Cardozo (called Car-Bozo by employers), Pace,  St. John’s, Hofstra, Touro, and the infamous New York Law School (whose motto is a chagrined “no, we’re not NYU”), are essentially fathering a new breed of white-collar underclass: heavily indebted, sporadically employed, poorly paid, bereft of health insurance and stuck in dead-end temp jobs that pay lower hourly rates (after student loans are deducted from salary) than many unskilled day laborers earn. These “schools” charge Lamborghini prices for a clapped-out Yugo with 4 flat tires and sawdust in the gearbox.  Talk about cash for clunkers! When you push these “jalopy” JD’s into the traffic of this employment market, be prepared to get run off the road.

 Ah, how I tire. Age. Do we die all at once, or a little each day?  The clock creeps all too slowly on these temp projects, though. Crawls. It’s sometimes as if time itself were submerged underwater, with minutes dragging on for days as if mired in quicksand. After all, we’re doomed to tedious and mindless make-work akin to Sisyphus of yore rolling his boulder up the perpetual hill. The terminally ill, I’ve often argued, could easily add “phantom” years to their doomed lives just by showing up on a document review gig, where an hour of “coding time” equals approximately four decades in the “outside world.” A three-week project would to them equal a virtual second life.

 Of course, it’s pointless to point this unvarnished state of affairs out to the bright eyed lemmings who in two weeks will be enthralled by Pierson v. Post (that old fox-chase chestnut), and the other antiquated dreck that constitute the overpriced, pseudo-intellectual farce that is American law school. On a forum called Top Law Schools there are children entering Cardozo’s class of 2012 and already trying to decide whether to go right into Skadden Arps or stop off at a Second Circuit clerkship first! Decisions, decisions!

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