Pleading Guilty [antikvár]

Monday, January 23I. MYASSIGÎTMENTThe Management Oversight Committee of our firm, known among the partnership simply as 'the Committee', meets each Monday at 3:00 p.m. Over coffee and chocolate brioche, these three hotshots, the heads of the firm's litigation, transactional, and regulatory departments, decide what's what at Gage & Griswell for another week. Not bad guys really, able lawyers, heady business types looking out for the greatest good for the greatest number at G & G, but since I came here eighteen years ago the Committee and their austere powers, freely delegated under the partnership agreement, have tended to scare me silly. I'm forty-nine, a former copper on the street, a big man with a brave front and a good Irish routine, but in the last few years I've heard many discouraging words from these three. My points have been cut, my office moved to something smaller, my hours and billing described as far too low. Arriving this afternoon, I steadied myself, as ever, for the worst.'Mack,' said Martin Gold, our managing partner, 'Mack, we need yoiu* help. Something serious.' He's a sizable man, Martin, a wrestler at the U three decades ago, a middleweight with a chest broad as the map of America. He has a dark, shrewd face, a httle like those Mongol warriors of Genghis Khan's, and the venerable look of somebody who's mixed it up with life. He is, no question, the best lawyer I know.The other two, Carl Pagnucci and Wash Thale, were eating at the walnut conference table, an antique of Continental origin with the big heavy look of a cuckoo clock.