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.
(Page 8 of 10)
Most lawyers would acknowledge that he has a point. In one form or another, this is the persistent dilemma of the big firms: conflict of interest. A junior partner at Vinson Elkins candidly admits: "Most of our clients have environmental problems. We can't represent both sides in an environmental lawsuit anymore than we can in any other kind of suit, even if we represent one side for free. If someone wants to handle environmental litigation, he shouldn't come to a big firm." He means, of course, handling environmental work for the plaintiff's side, since the big firms defend such cases for their clients every day; they are happy to latch onto a young lawyer who knows environmental law, provided he wants to use his expertise in behalf of corporate defendants.
But lurking in the background is the realization that conflict of interest is not as final an answer as it seems. There are many environmental cases that even a lawyer in the Big Three could handle without placing himself in direct opposition to one of the firm's clients. What the big firms know, however, is that if one of their lawyers succeeds in winning a tough environmental ruling today in a case that does not involve one of their clients, the law thus made may be used tomorrow as a precedent in a case that does. In this sense, "conflict of interest" is a convenient excuse for refraining from doing anything that would impair the interests of corporate defendants as a class, regardless of whether there is an ethical conflict in a particular case. Critics of the big firms would regard this as a telling example of the way they confuse their own responsibilities as lawyers with the very different interests of the clients they serve.
Still, the Houston firms sense that something new is in the wind, and one suspects that they are preparing for the necessity of allowing pro bono work when and if they have to. Their desire to keep getting the top graduates is ultimately stronger than their distaste for pro bono work; if their favored graduates consistently start going somewhere else in pursuit of the greater personal opportunities that such a program offers, the Big Three will doubtless devise one of their own to win them back—but not until. Meanwhile, Houston managing partners do have fewer illusions than lawyers in other Texas cities about the nature of pro bono work. The graduate who had such difficulty convincing the VE brass that Washington firms actually did require pro bono work recalls: " At least the people in Houston know what the words mean—even if they are damned sure they aren't going to do any of it. At one of the biggest Dallas firms they said, 'You betcha we do pro bono work: one of our senior partners helps run the United Fund campaign every year.'"
Lawyers' Wives: The Loneliness of a Closed Society
MOST WIVES FIND THAT THE firm dominates their lives as well as their husbands'. Emily Lowry (a pseudonym) is attractive, dark-haired, thirtyish. Her husband recently became a partner in one of the Big Three. Seated in the den of their comfortable two-story home in a fashionable neighborhood of Houston, she analyzes their climb.
"The first thing you have to understand about being a lawyer's wife is that it's very similar to being a doctor's wife. The first few years are hard and lonely. He's working long, long, hard hours—twelve to 15 hours is not unusual, for days at a time. You'll raise your family almost single-handedly for a while."
Whatever dreams a law student's wife may have, they probably do not include an image of herself sitting around an empty house day after day as the sun sets, the dinner hour passing unmarked and preschool children wanting to be cared for and entertained, while her husband works on downtown. The young lawyer's wife knows the firm's night number by heart. To combat the inevitable loneliness, the wives seek out others in the same situation. "They'll group together," says Emily. "For instance, they'll go over for a cocktail at 5:30 and pass the time with each other's children until eight or so. But it gets a lot better after awhile."
Social life tends to revolve around the firm—about 50 per cent of the time, Emily estimates. "These are the men your husband is working with, so it's just easier that way." For the first three or four years, young lawyers are expected to shoulder the recruiting burden. When they do this sort of entertaining, whether at home or somewhere else, the firm picks up the check. Emily recalls "one of the more exuberant" parties during her husband's second year with the firm. "We went to the Petroleum Club; there were 30 of us, plus the rushee and his wife. So you see there's an advantage to entertaining—it's a very nice fringe benefit. The disadvantage for the wife, if she's only on her own budget, is that you have to have very nice clothes in order to go places with your rushees."
After the husband becomes a partner, he and his wife begin to entertain the firm's clients instead of prospective associates. For the wife this is often an emotional trial, since she is the one who is expected to see that things go smoothly. The degree of entertaining depends on the type of work her husband does. If he is in real estate, securities, or some other kind of predominantly office practice, the burden may be light. But if he is in trial work, especially insurance trial work, entertaining is a permanent part of their lives. If the wife does not like it—or if she doesn't like the people she is expected to entertain—"that can be a real problem," says Emily. "You will be constantly socializing with insurance people, going to meetings with insurance people, traveling here and there. You just have to say, 'I don't like 'em, but this is my job,' and go out and do it. And that isn't very pleasant, especially if you've had a hard day with six screaming children."
If the husband's line of work requires him to know a wide circle of other lawyers, his wife becomes a useful agent to help him establish and develop contacts. She may be expected to join and participate in a variety of women's clubs, civic projects, or charitable activities. If she balks, his advancement in the firm may be impaired.
When wives are so important to their husband's and the firm's success, it is not surprising that the firm scrutinizes them coldly but inconspicuously during the recruiting process. The associates' wives are often asked for their opinion of a rushee's spouse, although their judgment seems to carry weight in inverse proportion to the prospective young lawyer's grade point average. "If you're talking about a guy with super grades," says Emily, "then he'd have to have a pretty bad wife to lose out." But it does happen. "I remember a Harvard boy who had married an actress from New York, a former prostitute. If she'd been able to cover all this up—not the actress part, but the former prostitute part—then I guess it would have been all right. But she didn't. She came to the firm and was quite loud, fairly obnoxious; and he was not offered a job because of her. They later got divorced."
"A good wife is rather unobtrusive," muses Emily. "She should be someone who can help entertain, to a degree. And yet there are some excellent lawyers whose wives you never see socially"—their husbands, presumably, had super grades. For the rest, feminine subordination to the husband's career is a basic premise of their life together. In the firm's eyes, the wife's activities are his activities, and the same ground rules apply to both. A wife conspicuously active in radical politics, for example, would be an unmitigated disaster for her husband. Life in the big firms is still very much a family affair, and the firm's threshold of embarrassment is low indeed.
An incident that occurred near the end of the interview forcefully (and unexpectedly) drove this point home. The telephone rang, and Emily's precocious seven-year-old daughter answered it. "Mommy's talking to the tape recorder," she told the caller, who turned out to be Daddy. His curiosity metamorphosed into great ire when Mommy told him she had been discussing the life of lawyers' wives. This writer took the phone to reassure him that the interview had begun with an understanding that neither Emily's identity nor the firm's would be disclosed. Unmollified, he insisted that the firm be supplied with a copy of the transcript and allowed to delete anything it did not want printed. He was told that this would be impossible, but that the writer would be happy to clear up any misconceptions about the terms of the interview on his visit to their offices the next day.
A somewhat-shaken Emily returned to the sofa and continued the discussion, but her animated manner was gone. About five minutes later the phone rang again. Daddy's message was unambiguous, ex cathedra: I have told the managing partner what you are doing, and he has ordered you to stop the interview. "I guess you'll have to destroy the tape," said Emily as she sat back down, stunned.
A few minutes of pleasantries were exchanged to save embarrassment all around, but the interview was over. Emily grew visibly unnerved by the occurrence, changing the subject every couple of minutes to say, "I suppose I should have checked with them first, but I never thought. . ." And her voice trailed off. Explanations were offered—"It's just a misunderstanding, we'll straighten it out tomorrow"—but one had the distinct impression of being present at a moment when another person realized for the first time the true extent of her confinement. A man for whom she did not even work, sitting in an office building five miles away, could casually order her to stop talking to someone else about her life. He not only could, he had, without even bothering to ask first what she had been saying. It was a sobering experience, and it spoke volumes about the way the Big Three firms sweep lawyers, wives, and families into their all-encompassing embrace.
Hidden Mandarins: The Law Firms and Political Power
My Library
