New Client

A partner sent me into a meeting with a potential "new client" today. While ostensibly trying to help me "make contacts" in the community, I've been here long enough to know that any "new client" handed off to me comes from the reject pile. You know, the friend of a friend of a friend of a partner, whom they know has no case. These jewels of headaches, nightmares, and daily frustration come down the sanitary pipeline so the partners can look good to the public, while ensuring their associates spend endless hours swimming in muck, working on cases with no value so the firm doesn't have to pay their bonus at the end of the year.

Well, Mr. X comes in with a tale of woe and agony. He has been mistreated, maligned, his reputation besmirched and impugned, and he is angrier than a bull getting its testicles squeezed. After I sort through the wonderful web of woe he has fashioned, I am able to divine that he is upset because someone is threatening to sue him over a contract he signed. I then proceed to ask the obligatory question to which I know I will receive a negative response, to wit: Did you read the contract before you signed it?

After prolonging the matter for another 1/2 hour, I tell him I need to look into it before I can take the case and then tell the potential client he owes me $150 for my hour of time. He protests that he thought the initial consult was free. He then has the nerve to be offended when I ask him if he has been physically harmed in some gruesome fashion or otherwise has some potential jackpot of a case that I can take on as a contingency fee.

I send the poor man on his way after getting his phone number. I then give the contract another looksee and open up one webrowser to loislaw and another one to e-bay. My college furniture has finally bit the dust, and as much as I hate to get rid of uncle Joe's plaid hole-ridden coach, it is time to part ways. The fair maiden I entertained last evening was not impressed when the slipcover from Bed Bath and Beyond was inadvertently moved and revealed this time capsule from the days of arena rock.

After an hour of looking for a new couch to no avail, I call Mr. X and ask him to come back in this afternoon. I then sit down with him and segue into a fifteen minute monologue of legal jargon, run-on sentences, and deliberately obscure explanation of why he is screwed. Hey, that C I got in contracts at least makes it sound like I know what I am talking about.

I then ask for my $450 dollars, and you would think I asked for his first virgin daughter. Protestations, rants of indignity, and explicatives about lawyers flow from his mouth faster than the wildfires in California. After patiently enduring this nonsense, I explain to him that he has to pay a doctor if his arm hurts and the doc tells him it is not broken. He has to pay the plumber who can't find the source of the clunking noise under the sink. Why am I any different? Obviously I was not getting through to this man, so I explained what a small claims complaint was and directed him to our collections department.

If I am lucky the business manager will put a crowbar to his wallet and I can go shopping tonight.