Final Exam: A Legal Thriller (7 page)

Megan groaned as Ben began describing the facts in some detail and squirmed uncomfortably to his right while he continued.
 
After a few moments of this, Greenfield turned to
Meg
and asked a follow-up question.
 

Without hesitating and before she could speak, Ben cut in and began to answer.
 
Greenfield stopped him.
 
“I’m sorry Mr.
Lohmeier
, I meant that question for Ms. Rand, but since you’ve already started, why don’t you go ahead and finish.”
 
Megan sighed in relief.
 
Ben finished his answer and continued to answer all of the questions Greenfield posed until they were done with the case.
 
Greenfield did not turn his attention back to Meg until the next case, one largely devoid of lurid details.
 

From that date on, the friendship between Benjamin
Lohmeier
and Megan Rand was set in stone.
 
Ben’s performance that day not only got Megan off the hook, but also had the unforeseen benefit of inoculating them somewhat from these kinds of cases.
 
Because he realized that Ben could handle a case like this without any difficulty and throw whatever he dished out right back at him, Professor Greenfield tended to shy away from them in situations like this.
 
Instead, he preferred to give them cases with more difficult legal issues, not more prurient fact patterns.
 
And Megan Rand couldn’t have been more grateful.

7

When Ben dragged himself out of bed on Wednesday morning, he peered through the blinds of his bedroom and saw a smattering of snow flurries falling harmlessly from the sky.
 
By the time he left his house and headed for Court, more than two inches of fresh snow covered the driveway.
 
It was twenty-five minutes past eight and he had to be in Wheaton by nine.
 
“God damn it,” he said to himself as he pulled out of the driveway.
 
He knew there was no way he would make it on time.
 

Ben arrived at the Courthouse twenty minutes late, but managed to take care of his two status calls without serious difficulty.
 
His route back to the office took him down Bloomingdale Road, past the former house of Senior Partner Jim Schulte.
 
He checked his speed as he headed down the hill toward Schulte’s house because he knew that the Ithaca police often hid on the side streets off Bloomingdale Road in order to catch unsuspecting drivers who had not slowed sufficiently as they cruised toward downtown.
 
As he passed Schulte’s old house, once known as the Pig Farm, he saw a handful of Schulte’s old plastic pigs dotted throughout the front yard, partially obscured by the falling snow.
 
He eased his way into downtown, circled around Usher Park and turned left at the Tree Top Pizza Inn and coasted back toward the office.
 

Irving Park Road is a highly trafficked thoroughfare bisecting downtown Ithaca.
 
The office was set back off the road west of and slightly behind the pizza place and its adjoining tavern.
 
Further up Irving Park Road to the west stood the Ithaca Train Station, where commuters would take the forty minute trip to downtown Chicago.
 
The train tracks angled behind the office and its parking lot and were so close that they could make telephone conversations difficult when the numerous commuter and freight trains rumbled by.
 
The office also sat smack dab in the landing pattern for O’Hare Airport to the east and jumbo jets flew deafeningly low over the building all day long.
 

The original part of the office was a white frame Victorian house built in the 1890’s.
 
To this structure, some twenty or so years before, Jim Schulte had attached a storefront grocery store originally found around the corner in downtown Ithaca.
 
The grocery store served as the main entrance to the building.
 
On the other side of the grocery store, Schulte built a two-story addition, which housed additional offices for both the firm and for a handful of renters, primarily other lawyers.
 
Facing the railroad tracks, Schulte built a structure that appeared to be a modest-sized garage, complete with an old gas pump on the east side and what appeared to be the entrance to a barbershop on the west.
 
The garage served as the building’s library and conference room.
 

Clients coming to the office for the first time would turn off of Irving Park Road onto First Street and drive back behind the tavern, where they would encounter the new addition on the east side of the building flanked by a row of parking spaces.
 
Continuing back, they would come to the garage and the gas pump jutting out from the main entrance of the building at a right angle toward the railroad tracks.
 
If there were no parking spaces on the east side of the building, clients would circle around the garage, where they would find a back entrance to the building and four more parking spaces.
 
Proceeding around the corner of the white frame house, six or eight more parking spaces ended at a sidewalk that paralleled Irving Park Road.
 
A short walk down this sidewalk across Walnut Avenue brought the commuters to the Ithaca train station.
   

Finding no parking spaces near the main entrance, Ben pulled around the garage and found an open space next to the back entrance at the corner of the house.
 
Ben grabbed his briefcase and shuffled through the snow, past a telephone box and a small stone fountain, and up the six wooden steps to the back entrance of the building located in a small porch.
 
He kicked the snow off his shoes as he entered a small hallway, which housed the restrooms.
 
At its end, a doorway led down a couple of steps into a hallway and out to the garage.
 
To his right, the bookkeeper’s office sat opposite the copy room.
  

Ben walked through the copy room and stuck his head into a small, oddly-shaped office where he had spent the first couple of years of his time with the firm and Dan Conlon now called home.
 
The office had a large window which looked across the open yard to the pizza place and tavern beyond.
 
Conlon was on the phone and Ben gave him a quick nod before heading left toward the lobby and dropping his briefcase and coat on a long, wooden church pew against the wall on the right.
 
The main entrance to the building under the Matt’s Grocery sign stood opposite the church pew.
 
There was no identification for the law firm or any of its tenants anywhere.
 

The lobby also contained a large wooden reception desk, fax machine, and two rocking chairs flanking a small table.
 
One corner opposite the door held a large wooden credenza complete with book shelves, while the other contained an open icebox dating from the 1940’s with artificial food inside adding to the rustic country feel of the room.
 
A rustic chandelier hung from a white, ornate trey ceiling made of faux plaster.
 
Beyond the lobby and a stairway filled with political posters and photographs, a perpendicular hallway formed the new part of the building, a two-story structure with a row of offices on each floor.
 

Behind the church pew and opposite the main entry was the kitchen.
 
A modest room with a wooden table, sink, microwave and refrigerator to go with a small amount of counter space and a few cabinets, the kitchen was largely a tribute to Jim Schulte’s late father, an assistant fire chief in a small town in Wisconsin.
 
The walls were ordained with framed newspaper clippings, photographs celebrating his career and even his fire axe and helmet.
 
A sense of casualness permeated the atmosphere of the office, where lawyers seldom wore suits unless a Court appearance or formal meeting required it.
   

James Schulte came to Ithaca in the 1970’s when most lawyers still practiced in downtown Chicago and
DuPage
County was wide open and there for the taking.
 
He and a handful of others established a foothold in
DuPage
County, where they could bridge the gap between the silk stocking practices of downtown Chicago and the more rural collar counties.
 
His firm broke apart in the early 1990’s, with several of his more senior people leaving to set up their own firm in Ithaca and taking some of Schulte’s business with them, without much of a protest.
 
Phillip
Luckenbill
, then
an associate only four or five years
out of law school, decided to stay and was named a partner in the new firm, Schulte &
Luckenbill
.
 

Thereafter, Schulte became even less interested in practicing law, ceding much of the management duties of the firm to
Luckenbill
, and spending increasing amounts of time at a rustic home he was building on a large piece of property outside of Hayward in northern Wisconsin.
 
By mid-1997, he more or less quit the practice of law, giving away all his suits save for one and even renting out his own personal office in the building.
 
Within two years, the Pig Farm on Bloomingdale Road was also on the market and he was spending essentially all of his time in Hayward.
 
He would come back occasionally to handle the odd matter or two, but for the most part, Jim Schulte’s large ego and unusual presence were largely confined to the north woods, where, among other things, he raised buffalo.
 

Law firms, particularly small and mid-sized ones, are often oddly managed enterprises, for some of the best lawyers are also the worst businessmen.
 
It is not uncommon for small and mid-sized law firms to operate both fiscally and otherwise as little more than the alter egos of their founders.
 
This typically results in a chaotic and often despotic management structure.
 
Within the confines of Schulte &
Luckenbill
, Ben defined the management structure with something he liked to call the Pie Chart of Power.

The Pie Chart was really very simple.
 
It was a traditional pie chart, where the size of an individual’s slice of the pie corresponded with his or her degree of power within the hierarchy of the firm.
 
The size of the pieces of pie might vary from time to time and according to the particular issue involved, but generally speaking, Phil
Luckenbill
possessed approximately sixty percent of the pie, while Jim Schulte’s share had dwindled to twenty percent.
 

The remaining twenty percent was divvied up in what at first glance would be unusual proportions.
 
Nancy Schulte, the secretary to both Phil
Luckenbill
and Benjamin
Lohmeier
, held about seven percent of the pie, reflecting her longtime status as the firm’s gatekeeper and a major power behind the scenes.
 
Newly-minted Senior Associate Casey Gardner also held seven percent.
 
Dianne Reynolds, Jim Schulte’s secretary and the firm’s office manager, had seen her share shrink to three percent with her boss’s semi-retirement.
 
The remaining support staff members combined for approximately two percent.
 
That left a meager one percent share of the pie for all the remaining attorneys in the firm combined.
 

Unusual though this may seem on the surface, small firms often see the support staff possessing much more power and control over the operation of the firm than even the vast majority of the lawyers themselves.
 
Several factors explain this reality.
 
First is longevity.
 
Support staff members typically stay with the firm for many years, so long that they accumulate increasing levels of autonomy and control.
 
Conversely, many young lawyers move around a lot in their early years trying to find a niche that best suits their skills, interests and temperament.
 
Moreover, autocratic senior partners view new lawyers as somewhat fungible commodities.
 
They can always move mid-level attorneys out, or make them want to leave, and replace them with newer graduates who make less money and suffer fewer expectations.
 
Finally, and most significantly, it is a matter of control.
 
Senior partners do not want to share power with the underlings.
 
This is, after all, not a democracy.
 
No, this is a dictatorship with one, or maybe a couple of occasionally benevolent despots.
 
One means of ensuring this control is to empower the support staff and use them against the younger lawyers.
 
Because senior partners typically have great demands placed on their time, they are frequently unable to efficiently keep an eye on things themselves.
 

In the case of Schulte &
Luckenbill
, this is why Casey Gardner had been named the Senior Associate for the firm.
 
His job, among other things, was to handle some of the more routine decision-making and provide an element of management and control over the other attorneys during Phil
Luckenbill’s
frequent absences.
 
Luckenbill
also utilized the support staff as a kind of mini-intelligence service, not unlike the CIA, who would keep him informed of events in the firm when he was away.
 
Some might call this
spying
, and they’d be right.
 
Others might call this keeping in touch with your employees, and to some extent, they would be right too.
 
Whatever you called it, however, it served to frequently drive a wedge between the attorneys and the staff members who were supposed to support them.
 
Nancy Schulte probably handled these issues better than most.
 
Even though she was at all times aware that her loyalties to Phil
Luckenbill
superceded
all others, she didn’t tell him everything,
only
those things he truly needed or really wanted to know.