Two Job Interviews

October 26
(Monday)

I had a busy day planned. First, I would meet with the Compadre Club at The Avenue Hotel at nine o’clock. The interview would last twenty minutes. Then I would drive downtown to the offices of Hanssen, Hess for an eleven o’clock interview. I would have just enough time to change before going to B.E. at one o’clock.

I’d had high hopes for the Compadre Club interview, but it just came and went. Nothing. It turned out to be completely ordinary, and sick­eningly so. These ordinary interviews were beginning to bother me. I was going into one interview after another with the sole intention of not making mistakes. The questions I was being asked, simple questions about my background, made me feel like a contestant in a beauty pag­eant. I could smile and laugh but it would only go so far.

I was interviewed by Shannon Jackson, the managing partner. Her credentials had certainly impressed me. Only recently had I come to understand how significant it was to be selected to the Order of the Coif. It meant that the student not only maintained excellent grades, but also impressed the faculty on a daily basis. This was an achievement. Such a student has both the ability to put the course together as a whole, as well as the ability to understand and articulate the subtle arguments that come up day-to-day but simply cannot be tested in a three-hour exam. Such a person could see both the forest and the trees. Such a per­son would be an excellent lawyer, and, I thought, a good person to work with and learn from. Besides, it was the Compadre Club. It would drive my uncle crazy.

Shannon Jackson could have spent her career as a partner for any law firm in the city but she had chosen to work in the public interest. I tried to figure out what made her tick. Was she really interested in the environment? Was she interested in a nine-to-five job? Was she fed up with the rat race, the clients, the billing, the politics? Was she worried about her soul? I gambled on the fact that she was finally doing what she had always wanted to do—and doing it with a vengeance. She referred to Muder with obvious affection. I pegged her as the dedicated environ­mentalist, and I was ready for the march. When she asked me about my work at Simoneaux, Troy & Walters over the previous summer, I told her, “I’m a competitor.... I like to win.” I had waited for a chance to say it, and I said it. Now we just looked at each other, both startled by the sudden noise.

—Can he be serious?

—Didn’t she want to heat hell out of corporate America?

—How is being competitive supposed to set him apart from half the stu­dents in law school? Would he stop at nothing? Was he putting down the more relaxed members of the Environmental Law Journal? What exactly is he trying to say?

—What exactly am I trying to say?

And the interview went on from there—suspicion on her part, uncertainty on mine.

But I wanted to work for the Compadre Club. And I was competitive. I made one more attempt.

“You do press releases, I assume,” I said. This was my second plan of attack, to stress my journalism background.

“We have one going out today,” she said.

“I did a lot of that sort of work as an undergraduate. I’d be interested in helping wherever I could to put together press releases. I think that would be a good way to use my legal training. In fact, that’s the only way I’m convinced real change will come about, in changing public atti­tudes, making people aware how different laws affect them. I enjoy put­ting the law in those terms.”

Her reply, although several questions later, came when she told me that the Compadre Club had only two positions available.

I shook my head in bewilderment. “That’s amazing,” I said. “I didn’t know these jobs were so hard to come by. I guess I’m lucky to even have an interview.”

“It means something,” she said. “I looked at a number of very impressive resumes.”

—She means Tommy; he has the science background.

—There was that guy who taught high school biology.

What she was saying was true, getting the interview was something.

But getting the interview just wasn’t enough.

***

“To what,” the interviewer said, “do you attribute your success?” It was an awkwardly worded sentence, forced out after a pause. I was in a conference room of the offices of Hanssen, Hess, on the 14th floor of an office tower on the edge of the Central Business District, a short walk from the Superdome. The interviewer was a young man, about my age, with thick black hair. He was stocky, but his gray suit hung as if he had just lost twenty pounds. He was impressed that last spring I’d had a 3.47 G.P.A., ranking me for the semester near the top ten percent of my class.

“I never saw three-point,” he admitted.

I was surprised. Here was a guy, about my age, a couple of years out of law school, making good money working in a high rise building, and he had never seen three-point. The city had to be filled with Urbane graduates who never saw three-point. I was probably being interviewed by them all the time.

“While others studied,” he said, “I went out.”

I mumbled agreement, still trying to figure out how he had gotten the job never having seen three-point. I knew his father was a partner at Malone, Swope. He told me as much at the start of the interview.

“Did you interview with Malone, Swope?” he had asked.

“Yes.”

“I thought so,” he said. “My father is with Malone. He said he thought you interviewed with them.”

“Did your father do the interview?”

He shook his head. That was something in my favor, I figured. I tried to remember the interview with Malone, Swope. I thought it might have been the one that ended with me trying to explain the relevance of ERISA to environmental law. Then again, it might have been the one to which I had arrived late. At any rate, Malone, Swope was a very good firm. I wondered how my name had come up. Perhaps over dinner the night before. The kid still went to his parents’ house for dinner. Perhaps he still lived with them. Or perhaps he had spoken with his father over the phone that morning. Hanssen was letting him do an interview. That was news worth passing along.

—Say, I’m interviewing a summer clerk candidate tomorrow.

—Yeah, do you have a name?

—A guy named, let me see, I have the name right here: Kenneth Westphal.

—Oh, I know that name, he interviewed with us

I finally decided he was just making small talk. The fact that I had gotten an interview with Malone said something about my credentials. Perhaps there was no sense to the statement, an awkward attempt to put me at ease. But when he said he had never seen three-point, it occurred to me that having a father as a partner at one of the city’s largest law firms might not hurt a legal career. The family would have connections. There might be uncles, neighbors, law school buddies. There might be business tossed his way when conflicts of interest arose.

To what did I attribute my success? Hard work. Common sense. Luck. Good writing skills. The ability to write fast, to write legibly. I could have said a number of things, given him a number of modest explanations. How did a guy who scored 159 on the LSAT, better than three-quarters of those who took the test but scarcely average among those enrolling at Urbane, get spring semester grades better than almost 90 percent of his class?

“I got the hang of taking law school tests, I guess,” I said.

He gave an understanding smile.

“You realize after taking a few of these things,” I went on, “that there are really few surprises. You know what they’re going to ask. If you study the Dormant Commerce Clause for two weeks, you know there’s going to be a Dormant Commerce Clause question on the exam. You know it. Once I figured that out it became ... sort of ... easy.”

I saw immediately I had gone too far. I had uttered a bad word. He was unable to stop me. No one could have stopped me. I looked up to see how bad the situation was. He was blushing. I don’t know what I said next. It didn’t matter. He gave me a tour of their offices. It was the quietest law firm I had ever been in. We went from door to door. Almost everyone was out to lunch. When an attorney was in, we would shake hands. I would say something about how nice it was to meet them. They would say it was nice to meet me. At one point, noting how pleasant it was to meet at a law firm rather than in a hotel, I joked that during my last interview I took a wrong turn and was grilled for twenty minutes by tourists. The woman behind the desk just looked at me ...

Back out in the lobby, I couldn’t think of a single reason why this guy would ever want to work with me. He wouldn’t be tortured for long. I would be gone soon enough. He would make sure that I wouldn’t be back. I would walk out of the office and onto the street and he would go back to his well-paying job and his view of the Superdome. He would complete a summary of our interview, dictate a rejection letter, and fid­dle with some files that had been on his desk a little too long. That night, over dinner, he’d tell his father that he enjoyed filling in for Charles Roudeax. He just might enjoy being a member of the firm’s Hiring Committee, he would say. It was fun, a nice break, work he thought he would enjoy. He would be good at it, too. Real good. It all just sort of came easy to him.

I was at Hanssen much longer than I had planned. By the time the interview was over, I had twenty minutes to get home, change clothes, drive to school, park, and get to class. I thought I could make it, but with fifteen minutes to go, I began to consider cutting corners, even wearing my suit to class. Others wore their suits to school during inter­view season. Some had jobs after class. I could take off my jacket and tie easy enough.

By the time I was at my apartment and running up the stairs, I had almost decided to wear the suit. Twelve minutes. High gear. I could change and make it. I threw on pants, shoes, shirt. I had to use the bath­room. I shouldn’t have had that soft drink at the interview. Ten minutes. My heart sank. I had never made it to class in ten minutes, and Tarenzella went crazy when the classroom door opened and interrupted her train of thought. I had already used up my quota of late days. As far as I was concerned, she had no right to stop class the first time a person was late, but perhaps the second, the third ... that was a different story. She had the idea, and she may have been right, that such behavior was just plain rude.

Nine minutes. I was in the car. There was always the chance. I found a parking place with two minutes to go. From where I parked, I still had a five-minute walk. But it wasn’t one o’clock yet. I started to run. First a few awkward churns, then a trot. Running across campus is one of the most degrading things a student can do. A friend of mine growing up once claimed that he never ran to class. He just wouldn’t do it. It didn’t matter how late he was. His motivating words came back to me as I trot­ted to class, trying to ignore the occasional gawker. I was almost to the law school. I looked at my watch. One o’clock on the nose. I’d be late. I made an effort to run again. I took the stairs two at a time with enough force to knock someone down. The stairway was empty. The hallway was empty. At the end of the hall, I could see the door to B.E. was shut. I was walking now, breathing hard. Class was in session. What a waste. I glanced through the window in the door as I passed. Tommy and Francis had their attention directed to the front of the room. Things were going on without me. I looked again at my watch. Two minutes past. Sheeze. I stood in the hall wondering if someone else would be late. We could go in together. But no one was coming. No one cared. I didn’t care. I began to feel stupid waiting around.

I walked outside with remote, sullen steps. People were learning, and I was falling farther and farther behind. On the way to my car, I passed the site of the new chemistry building, a big hole in the ground sur­rounded by barbed-wire fence. Men in white hard hats on giant machinery maneuvered sewage pipes wide enough for a car to pass through. We lived and worked in big beautiful buildings, walked on paved streets, and beneath us flowed a river of sewage.

I tried to make myself feel better. At least I could treat myself to lunch. Lunch would be a nice treat. After all, I told myself, the interviews hadn’t gone that badly.

Excerpted from LAW SCHOOL RED INK WHITE COLLAR BLUES
By Kenneth David Westphal
Copyright by First Part Press Ltd
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Any use, in whole or in part, without express written consent, is prohibited