[Klein Legal, Flatiron — April 23, 2012, 9:02 AM]
The first letter came in at 9:02 AM. The second came in at 9:04.
I had been at the desk since seven, working through the back end of a Palmer matter — the next live thing he had handed me ten days ago, a regulatory advisory on a biosimilar pathway that would have been routine in October and was no longer routine in any month — and the email pings landed close enough together that I almost mistook them for a calendar sync.
I read the first one twice.
Then I read the second one.
I did not stand up. Standing up would have been a response, and there was nothing in either email that required a response from me at 9:04 AM.
Dear Mr. Klein,
After careful internal review, Palmer Pharmaceuticals will be transitioning its outside counsel engagement to Pearson Darby effective May 15, 2012, to better align with our expanded service needs across our domestic and international operations. We are deeply grateful for your work on our behalf and...
The second letter was from Resnick Construction. It used the same phrase. Expanded service needs. Mid-size, family-owned, three generations old, the kind of client who once told me he hired me because his father told him to find a lawyer who wore the same shirt twice in a week and didn't pretend it was a different shirt.
Expanded service needs.
I read the phrase a third time. I appreciated the efficiency. There was something almost respectful about it. Pearson Darby had not bothered with two different paragraphs. They had drafted one paragraph and changed the letterhead. Two clients had received the same script. Both had signed it.
I closed the laptop.
I walked through the door of my office into the bullpen, and Harold was already standing at the client board with a marker uncapped in his hand.
He had read them too. He had seen them on his screen the same minute I had. He had not said anything in the time it took me to get from my desk to the doorway, which meant he had spent that time deciding what to do with his hands.
He looked at me.
I nodded once.
Harold turned to the board. He uncapped the marker the rest of the way. He looked at the line under Palmer Pharma, and then he did not erase it. He drew a horizontal line through the name. A clean line, ruler-straight, even though there was no ruler in his hand. He did the same to Resnick Construction.
He capped the marker.
He stood there for a second looking at the two crossed-out names. The remaining four names sat above and below them like teeth in a mouth that had just lost two of its own.
"We have four clients," he said.
"We have four clients."
"What do you want me to do."
"Get Sarah on the Palmer file transition. They get every document on a clean handoff schedule, no holdbacks, no theatrical delay. We are not going to give Pearson Darby a story they can use about how we got difficult on the way out."
"And Resnick."
"Same. Clean."
"They were my client."
It was the first thing he had said that was about him. Not about the firm. About him.
Resnick had been Harold's. He had brought them in eight months ago through a contact at his father's accounting firm. He had run their compliance personally. He had eaten lunch with the operations director four times to figure out what a construction company actually needed from outside counsel versus what construction companies were told they needed, and he had built a fee structure that reflected the difference.
I did not soften the answer. He would have known it was softened.
"They are not your client now."
He nodded. He looked at the board for another beat. Then he turned and walked back toward his office, and I watched him go without saying anything else, because anything else would have been worse.
He shut his door.
It clicked closed.
The bullpen was quiet for ten seconds.
Then Sarah looked up from her desk, registered the closed door and the two horizontal lines on the board, and went back to her screen without comment, which was the most professional thing she had done since I hired her.
The Library offered, unprompted, a list of client retention tag chains.
I did not authorize it.
Not yet.
---
[Klein Legal, Don's office — same day, 2:14 PM]
The Harlan Cross meeting was tomorrow at PD.
I had found out about it on Friday — not from Cross, not from anyone at PD — from a courthouse clerk who had mentioned, in the casual way clerks sometimes mention things to lawyers they think are owed a courtesy, that Cross's name had been on a visitor's slip at Pearson Darby's reception desk the previous Wednesday. The clerk thought I'd already know. I had not let on that I didn't.
Cross built infrastructure. Bridges, mostly, and the regulatory environments around them. He was a third-generation civil contractor with a Yale MBA and a London office his grandfather would not have known what to do with. He had been my client for six months. He had two daughters and a labrador and a tendency to over-tip cab drivers, and he had been on the heist list one slot below Palmer because his work was clean and his fees were on time and he was exactly the kind of client a transatlantic firm could pitch in their sleep.
I called him at 2:14 PM. I had picked the time deliberately. Post-lunch, pre-afternoon-coffee, the window in which executives are most likely to answer their own phones.
He answered his own phone.
"Don. I was going to call you."
"I know you were, Harlan."
A pause.
"You know."
"I know you have a meeting with Pearson Darby tomorrow."
The pause this time was longer. I let it run. Detection: he was not surprised I knew. He was working out whether to be embarrassed about the not-telling.
"Don. It is a courtesy meeting."
"I know it is a courtesy meeting. I am not calling about the meeting. I am calling because we have a London deal coming in July and I want to talk to you about whether Klein Legal is the right firm for that deal."
He was quiet for a second.
"That is not the call I thought you were making."
"It is the call I am making."
"You are not going to ask me to cancel the meeting."
"I am not going to ask you to cancel the meeting. You should take the meeting. They are a serious firm. They will make you a serious pitch and the pitch will sound good and parts of it will be good. You should know what they offer."
"And then?"
"And then you come to me at the end of the week and you tell me what they said. We have a meeting on Friday at five — I will buy you a drink — and we go through their pitch like a brief. Every clause, what it actually means, what it actually costs, what they're not telling you. I will not bid against them. I will not match their international reach because I do not have their international reach. What I will do is tell you exactly what hiring them means in practice on your specific portfolio, and you make a decision from there."
"You are pitching me."
"I am offering you due diligence on the firm trying to pitch you. Free of charge."
He laughed. Detection ran the laugh — clean, no edge, no calibration. He was tired. He had been carrying the meeting all week and had not wanted to make the call to me. The call I had made had taken something off him.
"Don. You are an unusual lawyer."
"I have heard that."
"Friday at five."
"Friday at five."
"...You know I might still go with them."
"I know you might. That is your decision. I am not asking you to make it before you take the meeting. I am asking you to make it after."
"I appreciate that."
"Take the meeting, Harlan. Listen carefully. Don't sign anything tomorrow. We talk Friday."
"Yeah."
"Yeah."
He hung up.
I sat for a second with my hand on the receiver. I had bought thirty days, maybe twenty-three — Friday to whenever PD's actual proposal landed and Cross had to decide. I had not bought him. I had bought time. Time was not the same thing as a client. Time was the thing you bought when you couldn't afford the client.
The Library, on its own, lit a green tag. Hold secured. Conversion probability: 41%.
Forty-one percent was not high. Forty-one percent was nine points above coin flip. Nine points was what I had purchased.
I stood up. I walked to the doorway. Harold's office door was still closed. The two horizontal lines were still on the board. The four remaining names sat there, four names where there had been six at 9:01 AM, four names where there had been eight at the start of the year if you counted the two we had picked up and then lost in the spring shuffle.
I put my hand on the doorframe.
The Library, quieter now, surfaced a tag I had not asked for. It was a blue tag, the subject color, and the text under it read Composite Strategy: client retention — locked. Underneath that, in smaller text: LP requirement: 25. Current LP: 5.2.
Twenty-five LP I did not have. Five point two I did.
The unlock would come when it came. There was no other path. The Library did not negotiate.
I did not go to Harold's door. He needed the closed door for another hour, maybe two. He needed it the way I needed the scotch glass on the corner of my desk — not the drink, the glass — the sight of a thing you owned that was on your desk because you put it there.
I walked back to my office. I sat down. I opened the laptop. The Palmer file was still on the screen. The handoff documentation was going to need a clean schedule by end of day if Sarah was going to run the transition without anything getting flagged.
I picked up a pen. I uncapped it.
I started writing the schedule.
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