Reboul, MacMurray, Hewitt, Maynard and Kristol:
I joined the local office of this New York City firm in a nice space down in the old Pacific Mutual Building, still on Sixth Street. While my boss was a good New York Democrat, and the two part-time mommy-track associates were fun to work with, all we did were trademark seizures for captive-client Louis Vuitton, and defending Mitsubishi Motors in car crashes, I started losing my hair, getting paunchy, and according to my wife, sounding like a conservative Republican. To reverse the trend, I started taking visits to the Superior Court downtown and watching trials during the afternoon. I was immediately struck by how simple and doable the work seemed. The trial lawyers were ordinary people, who put on their pants one leg at a time. I could do this.
One day while eating pizza and drinking Corona at Lamonica’s across the street from my office, feeling like I was getting fatter, more conservative and more bald every minute, it occurred to me that I had forgotten something. Scratching my head for the answer, it came to me with a start! I had forgotten that I had intended to be a trial lawyer! I had intended to be one of the guys who wring verdicts from juries with impassioned arguments and deadly persuasion. Somewhere along the line, I had literally forgotten this goal under the more-than-sufficient pressures of being a litigator.