Not the cops. Not even the prosecutors. Sitting in the back, awaiting the judge to take the bench, I found myself next to a lawyer I had known for more than 20 years, even tried a case with years ago, but who I never really talked to. We weren’t buddies. He was the competition.

While we both served the same community, in the sense of the clientele of criminal defense lawyers coming from the same community of people charged with crimes, we were on opposite ends of the spectrum. He was the high volume guy, the one who had twenty-something “paragelegals,” assuming you can call anyone with a GED you hire a paralegal, with calendars that rivaled the court’s.  They ran from courtroom to courtroom, assuring clients their lawyer would be there as soon as possible, and asking the court officers to hold the case until the lawyer got there.

He had a “price list” for crimes.  It wasn’t exactly cheap, but was far from expensive. And it was far less than I would charge.  Far, far less.  And when contrasting prices, a great many defendants saw no reason to go high when they could go low and see what happened.  I would regularly get calls from defendants who went there first, in the hope that the case would be quickly tossed, because they were “sure” how serious the case was.  If it was serious, then it was worth the expense, but why spend it until you know for sure.

It’s not that the lawyer wasn’t good.  He was actually quite good, as I learned while trying a case with him. When he took the time and put in the effort, he was a heck of a lawyer.  It’s just that he rarely had the time. How could he, with 20 cases on the calendar every day?  If he could plead out the cases, he did. If he had to try them, he did, and took the financial hit.  But he did everything he could to make sure they didn’t go to trial. 

For the most part, his clients knew what he was doing. They could do the math, and realized that at the fees he was charging, there was only so much time he could dedicate to their case.  His papers weren’t bad, but they were “change the name” forms, with good content left in from 100 cases ago, whether relevant to the case at hand or not.  That the new cases needed new arguments couldn’t be helped.

Sitting next to me in the courtroom, he started musing about the old days.  We fought each other over the same clients, him trying to keep them and me asking to send over the file when the client realized he needed more. It used to make me nuts to see the file, what hadn’t been done in the case that I would have done, and was now gone with the wind. This was the part clients never understood, that there was one chance to do something right. If it wasn’t done, or wasn’t done well, it was gone.

He was beat. He had been in the rat race a long time, and it takes its toll.  He had enough. “Well,” I said to him, “at least you can walk away a rich man.”

All these years, I assumed he made a bundle doing volume work.  I did the math, say an average of 10 cases a day, at $500 per appearance, he was taking in $5,000 a day, $25,000 a week, $1,250,000 a year even with two week’s vacation.  He has expenses, but not that much. The high school drop-outs couldn’t cost him that much, and his office had no marble in sight.  He should have been clearing a cool mil a year, almost all cash mind you.  And these numbers were conservative, taking into account the deadbeats and problem cases.

“I don’t know where it all went, but it went,” he told me.  I didn’t press him.

It wasn’t an easy life by any means. He ran from courtroom to courtroom, sometimes courthouse to courthouse, trying hard to remember names. He would call them out in the courtroom, because he couldn’t put faces to them. He signed them up in the evenings, assuring them that he would make their problems go away and taking whatever they had in their pockets. No one walked.

Others tried to do this, but couldn’t take the pressure. One lawyer, whose flame burned brightly for a few years, burned out one day. losing his family and some of his sanity. Another crawled into a bottle the first chance he got. No, this was a tough life. But the money was supposed to make it all worthwhile.

There was no doubt in my mind that he wouldn’t go hungry in the years to come. There were probably bundles of twenty dollar bills, with a rubber band at either end, stacked high in the safe, waiting for the day they saw light again.  There was probably a very nice house in the suburbs, and kids who finished college and grad school with no debt whatsoever. He made it through the maze having fulfilled his self-imposed duty to his family of providing them with all the things the family of a successful lawyer should have.

And I suspect that there are many former defendants walking around who were very happy that they hired him, having saved their money and been satisfied with the outcome.  There are also many defendants who weren’t happy, learning the hard way that the friendly handshake on the night they retained him didn’t mean they could ever get him on the phone after that.  And found out the hard way that assurances that everything will be alright don’t always happen. 

We all make a choice as to how we approach our future as a lawyer, whether we want to run from courtroom to courtroom, file generic motions and pray we get a quick and decent plea offer or not.  Having had this chat, I was happy about the choice I made.