Future Forum: Guilt, Innocence, and the Death Penalty 
HOUSTON LAW
HOUSTON LAW
Three of the nation's largest law firms are in Houston. They have kept their awesome power, their pervasive influence, and their closed societies out of the public eye. Until now.
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Even more burdensome to the self-respect of some proud associates is the knowledge that they are virtually forbidden to discuss their work—the major portion of their life—with their best friends outside the firm. It is not a matter of disclosing professional secrets or confidential client relationships; no reputable lawyer will do that. They know that the censorship imposed on them is broader; if they are observed talking about even the most innocuous matters, like the leadership of the firm or its history, their trustworthiness is made suspect and their advancement threatened.
This writer has interviewed political dissenters in Czechoslovakia and "banned" African revolutionaries in South Africa, meeting them in obscure cafes and parked cars to avoid detection. By all odds, associates in Houston's Big Three are more reticent and fearful than either. One old friend who did talk (but not about his firm) was obviously distressed by his sudden loss of freedom to discuss his work; he kept returning to the subject, trying to explain his predicament as the inexorable consequence of choosing to go to work there—like volunteering for the Army (a recurring image). "You obey orders in the Army," he said, "even if you're told to paint the tanks pink. You can question them logically, but if you're told to go ahead, you do it. The whole training of a lawyer in the big firms is to know your place in the organization—to avoid being presumptuous. One shines in one's work—not in extracurricular things. You don't talk about the firm unless you've been authorized to do it, any more than you allow a default judgment to be entered against your client. At all costs you have to avoid whatever can be seen as indiscreet."
Other young lawyers who come in contact with their friends at the big firms wonder out loud why they don't mutiny. "Why do they put up with it?" asks one. "Why don't they go on strike, why don't they get the hell out? I've never understood it."
The answer, not surprisingly, is the alluring promised land of a partnership. "Make partner" and your income almost doubles right away—suddenly you're a sixty-thousand-dollar-a-year man, and right at Christmastime, too. It is delicious. Who would risk taking a chance at losing that, especially when the firm is ominously dotted with graying 50-year-old relics who were judged a little too rambunctious in their day and were therefore kept as permanent associates, pour encourager les autres? When the alternative is finding yourself on the street, deprived of the monthly check and forced to develop a private practice or drown, most associates shudder, hurriedly clamp the lid on the abyss, and return to the warm glow of their respective firms. They are hooked. Predictable rationalizations ensue: their overworked existence is no longer thought of as exploitation, but rather as a prudent system of "forced savings," a way of depositing in the bosom of the firm a comfortable income for their future years, a kind of upper-middle-class Social Security.
Left unspoken to themselves and their families is the recognition that, like Social Security, the system depends upon steady, even increasing, contributions by the associates who succeed them; that it is premised on an ever-expanding economy and law business which may or may not materialize. Thus their fears become the same as those of their elders who hold them down: what if, when I become a partner, the associates demand their share at once? At that point, cynics say, they are ready for a partnership.
With so much riding on a partnership, there is agony as the time approaches. There is no appointed hour, just a minimum number of years (it varies from firm to firm) below which no one will be considered. But once that time passes, an associate begins to get the message. A year or two later, it is obvious to all that he is in trouble. He can pack and go, or stick around and take his chances. The firm has very little incentive to kick him out: after all, he has eight or nine years' experience, he is bringing them perhaps a hundred thousand dollars in billings, and his replacement would be an inexperienced fellow fresh from law school. "Maybe he will improve." For those who remain, the suspense often becomes almost unbearable. One lawyer from a small firm vividly remembers the tension he has witnessed. "A fine young attorney at Baker & Botts got passed over when he should have made partner two years ago. His friends took him to lunch to console him, but he got sick. Next year the same thing happened, only this time he passed out in the street. Soon afterwards he moved to Dallas."
Merit is the main criterion for promotion, and the continuing quality of the big firms' work over the years indicates that their executive committees (whose list is almost never overruled by the full partnership) know what they are doing. Still, there is a measure of truth to the saying that "the only way you get to be a general is by not offending the generals." Every firm has those senior associates who have paid for their independence.
An element of caprice also enters in. In some firms, an associate is assigned to work with a particular lawyer; his advancement is sometimes unjustly affected by how highly the other partners regard his supervisor. In other cases the partner decides how many billing hours he will credit to himself and how many to his associates, when they have worked on a project together. "How many billing hours I get to show depends on how good a guy he is," says an associate. "And yet his decision rules my career."
The high degree of specialization in the Big Three gives some associates a running head start on others." At Fulbright Crooker, the patent section is the way to dusty death," says a former associate there. Baker & Botts is dominated by the trial and corporate departments, whose strength is demonstrated at promotion and profit-sharing time. Says a disgruntled associate: "If they make a trial man a partner, they almost have to make a corporate man a partner. If you're in, say, oil & gas, your partners may be fighting for you, but they just don't have the same clout."
Ironically, a partner's life often turns out to be more of the same. The trappings change—they sell their homes in West University and Southgate to associates and move to Tanglewood or River Oaks—but they find themselves working harder than ever. Ingrained habits are hard to change. Some new partners tend to relax and coast, but most don't; they identify themselves completely with their firms. Partnership brings its own set of competitions for rank and power.
Alcoholism and the divorce rate are both high among the middle-aged partners, evidence of discontent and frustration that will not go away. In the Big Three, a partner finds that unless he sits on the firm's executive committee, he is still not likely to have much voice in its policies. "It would be very unusual for the partnership not to go along with the management," says Leon Jaworski, "but it can happen." For those so inclined, a struggle for influence within the firm replaces the struggle for promotion.
Why then do people do it? What do the big firms have to offer that make worthwhile the struggle to win a niche in a giant organization and the loss of personal independence it entails? Part of the reason is the excitement and exhilaration of the big firms' type of law practice; there are those who are happier—professionally happier—in a big firm than they could ever be outside. For most, however, it is money, security, and social prestige. Money, because there are few Houston lawyers who make more than the top partners of the big firms, and those that do won their stripes in a very risky world where the losers outnumber the winners. Security, because a partnership carries with it a lifetime relief from fears of financial reversal. Social prestige, because those who have not previously moved in establishment society find the big firms an irresistibly easy path to acceptance and status.
These insights are not lost on the recruiters who leave the big firms each year and fan out to law school campuses in search of the ablest legal talent they can find. They know their winning cards.
Students on Pedestals: The Dazzle of Bigtime Law Recruiting
AS RECENTLY AS TEN YEARS ago, a law student who aspired to work for one of the Big Three went to their office, credentials in hand. All that has changed. Active recruiting now occupies a considerable portion of several partners' time, year-in, year-out. With more law business than they have lawyers to handle it, the big firms find themselves engaged in a bruising, escalating competition for top law graduates. And like college football stars at the height of the old AFL-NFL rivalry, the graduates love it.
The University of Texas Law School in Austin is the principal battleground for capturing this legal talent. While the old Texas prejudice against Ivy Leaguers has largely faded (each of the Big Three sends a recruiting team to Harvard), the old Ivy League prejudice against Texas hasn't, with the result that these sallies to New England are not notably successful. The big firms persist in showing an icy indifference to most graduates of other Texas law schools, including Baylor, the University of Houston, and to a lesser extent, SMU. But almost any second- or third-year law student in the top ten per cent of his class at U.T. can, if he wants, savor the opulent delights of big-time law recruiting.
There is a round of parties in the fall, timed to coincide with a football weekend, and another in the spring, to coincide with the Law Review Banquet. These are nothing if not lavish, and Vinson Elkins (which started it all) is universally regarded as the most lavish of all.
A third-year law student who was invited to one of VE's early parties this fall was numbed by the experience. "There was this giant buffet at Green Pastures [a mansion-style restaurant in Austin]," he said. "It was huge—spread out through two or three rooms. And an incredible amount of liquor: I've never seen anything like it. An open bar beforehand, they kept filling your drinks while you ate, then Irish coffee. Amazing! Then they invited you up to their suite for after-dinner drinks! I never knew lawyers could drink that much." A moment later he added pensively, "You know, I don't think people today are as impressed by that sort of thing as they were a couple of years ago."
Like the Russian army mobilizing for war, Vinson Elkins sometimes sends as many as 30 young associates, partners, and their wives to Austin for a recruiting weekend. Each is fully briefed in advance on the salient details of the four or five law students for whom they have assumed particular responsibility. At a "structured" party, each couple may be assigned a specific prospect to entertain and shepherd around, usually without the prospect's prior knowledge. The atmosphere is reminiscent of fraternity rush—in some ways it is simply a continuation of fraternity rush—and in unguarded moments members of the big firms frequently slip back into the Greek terminology (rushee, rush party) until, grinning sheepishly at the outsider, they catch themselves.
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