Professional Responsibility

George V. Higgins, Kennedy for the Defense 1-17 (New York: Henry Holt and Company Book, 1980)

<1> Jerry Kennedy takes pride in his work for Teddy Franklin, otherwise known as Cadillac Teddy. Teddy is a car thief who specializes in Cadillacs. Kennedy claims that his client has never done time in prison and he attributes that to the fact that both he and his client are good at what they do. Is Kennedy's success something to brag about?

Teddy claims not to be greedy, a odd claim for a car thief. He is, it seems, a cautious, thinking man's car thief. "I pace myself. I do three cars a week, max. Now and then I take a couple weeks completely off. . . ." [4] If there is anything that might be said to be class among car thieves, then Teddy is a class act. He takes his vacations in the Caribbean and has an intuitive feel for his work: "I don't do no cars when everything doesn't feel exactly and completely right." [4]

The police, according to Teddy, know what kind of work he is in. With this in mind, Teddy drives a Cadillac and trades often; it drives the police a little crazy. [4-5]

While we might take delight in Higgins's description of Cadillac Teddy, isn't this an amusement at the cost of the car owners who've had their cars stolen?

Cadillac Teddy, isn't Jerry Kennedy's only client. Kennedy says of his law practice: "I get a fair number of small-time druggies and pushers, because I do a good job for them at a reasonable rate and word gets around." [49] But some of the clients Kennedy represents, like Captain Midnight, a twenty-year-old, hard-core pimp, who assaults a young prostitute with a monkey wrench, is, says Kennedy, "an animal." [34]. It's this kind of client that leads Mack, Kennedy's wife, to suggest--in Kennedy's presence and with no protest--that he is "the classiest sleazy criminal lawyer in Boston. . . ." [13]

<2> There is often talk about money in lawyer stories. Jerry Kennedy, walking the reader through Boston streets, says of the New Courthouse behind the State House: "The Boston Municipal Court is in there. That is where I make the rent and Gretchen's salary. [Gretchen is Kennedy's secretary.] So is Suffolk Superior, where I make the suit money and the cash for a Grand Prix and Heather's tuition." [Heather is Kennedy's daughter.] [47]

<3> Jerry Kennedy refers to himself as "a working man's stiff." [11] After lunch with a friend, another lawyer, Kennedy says, "we work our asses off trying to get enough money to escape from the supermarket without needing to call a bondsman." [12 [In Kennedy's self-description, we might assume he would have a certain affinity for D.T. Jones, the lawyer in Stephen Greenleaf's The Ditto List (1985)]

What do you think Jerry Kennedy means by referring to himself as "a working man's stiff"? Is the statement related to the kind of clients Kennedy represents? To his own background and upbringing? To his view of the world? To the fact that Kennedy makes a good living from his practice but has not gotten rich as some lawyers do?

Stephen Greenleaf locates D.T. Jones and his walk-in divorce practice, near, but not at the bottom of the professional pecking order. There are, according to Greenleaf and D.T., "lawyers even lower on the professional ladder." [The Ditto List, at 5)]. D.T. spends 30 minutes with a routine divorce client, but knows a lawyer named Randolph Spivey who boasts of having reduced the time he spends with an average client to 72 seconds. Spivey's goal is 45 seconds. Assembly-line justice may be a reality and a good way to make money, but evidently it doesn't do much for one's reputation among lawyers, even in the circles in which D.T. Jones travels.

Other novelists portray upper-echelon lawyers at the top of the professional pecking order. [See, e.g., Louis Auchincloss, Diary of a Yuppie (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1986) (A Law Office Conversation); Louis Auchincloss, The Great World and Timothy Colt (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1987); John Jay Osborn, Jr., The Associates (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1979)]

James B. Stewart, in The Partners: Inside America's Most Powerful Law Firms (New York: Warner Books, 1983), describes elite law firms as having "an aura"

not quite duplicated anywhere else. It makes itself felt in the tastefully conservative, even faintly shabby, office decor; in the oil portraits of the long-dead founding partners; in the prestige addresses; in the polite but cool formality displayed by the lawyers in the firm, who invariably wear dark suits and dignified ties. The firms project an image of unshakable prosperity and security, of tradition and excellence, of permanence. It is the image of the old-line WASP financial establishment, one that is carefully burnished and maintained.

It is a world for which lawyers are well prepared at the country's most prestigious law schools. At nearly all of the elite corporate firms, many of the partners have been educated at Harvard Law School, itself a bastion of the kind of values reflected in the blue chip firms.

* * * *

The elite corporate firms are also old; their traditions have been handed down from one generation of lawyers to another, and they have deep roots in the business and financial communities they serve. Most were founded before the turn of the century, with established clients who took advantage of the boom in the American economy which ensued. No firm founded since the Second World War has managed to enter these elite ranks. . . . [15, 16]

<4> Jerry Kennedy claims to be "a man of few illusions" [11], a condition he relates to his "line of work." What is it about being a lawyer that destroys "illusions"? [Haven't we seen something of a similar sort with Robert Service and D.T. Jones?]

Later Kennedy says of himself:

I am a creature of routine. Several routines, in fact. Chaos, clutter and disorder abound wherever I venture, on the top of my messy desk, in the tangled legal problems that disrupt the already disrupted lives of my troubled clients, in the shambling inefficiency of a court system which is still doing business by Morse code, and wasting everybody's time as though it were still 1872 and we had nothing to worry about between the spring planting and the fall harvest. If I didn't have my routines, I would go nuts.

I do not like surprises, even pleasant ones. When I am surprised, it is because I did not have brains enough to expect that something like that might happen, and prepare myself for it. [39]

<5> It's rather common for lawyers (and law students) to assume that the way to deal with the pressures and ethical concerns of lawyering is to compartmentalize their professional and personal lives. Jerry Kennedy seems to follow this path in the observation: "I go to my office to make a living, not to make a life. My life is at home." [13]

<6> Jerry Kennedy treats clients like Cadillac Ted with affection. Others see a different side of lawyer Kennedy. Consider the following scene in which Kennedy meets Emerson Teller, a potential client. Teller has been charged with homosexual solicitation of a police officer. Teller's first question to Kennedy is whether he thinks Kennedy "can get this cleared up?"

"Get what cleared up, you little cocksucker. What're you charged with Regicide? Treason? Double-parking? Following too close? Molesting a hair-dresser or bothering a beautician? How the fuck do I know if I can get you off? Which is what you mean, in case you didn't know it. I'm a lawyer. I try cases. That's all I do. I don't fix oil burners and I don't do any dowsing if your well runs dry. . . . You're wasting my goddamned time. You're not interviewing me--I'm interviewing you." [65]

Later, in a second interview, Kennedy gives Emerson Teller another speech:

"I don't need you. You need me. If you don't need me, you need somebody like me. . . . If you think you don't [need me], beat it. If you think you do, spare me the haughtiness and let's get down to business." [98]

Emerson tells Kennedy he was framed by the police officer. And Kennedy responds:

"Right. . . . And I was sculpted into my present graceful shape by a maniacal genius of a topiary gardener. Now, I did not haul my ass up here this morning [from my vacation] to hear you tell me how you got framed and you're innocent and so help you God, you are the victim of a malevolent society. I came up here so you can tell me what happened. You tell me what happened. I will tell you whether you were framed, or whether there is some way I think maybe you got a shot at getting off, or whether you should hang down your head and cry and tell the judge that you ain't gonna do it again and you don't know what possessed you, you did it this time. I will also tell you what any one of those things is liable to cost you, and you will give me some money, and I will proceed. Or else you won't, and I won't. Clear?" [98-99]

Later in the interview Emerson starts to tell Kennedy about a Supreme Court case that might apply to his situation, Kennedy responds sharply:

"[P]lease. We need a fair division of labor here. You do the clienting, and I'll do the lawyering. I don't need a lawyer, okay? If you don't need a lawyer, that makes two people out of two, sitting in a law office, which I think is probably a quorum, talking about something that neither one of them needs a lawyer for. And that doesn't make any sense. At least not for the lawyer in the room which happens to be me, and I do my best to be sensible. Okay? You tell me what happened. I will tell you what the law is, if it seems useful to me and useful to you. Otherwise I will not. I will now ask you again: what happened?" [100]

Emerson complains that Kennedy is not being empathetic. Kennedy tells him:

"I'm not. . . . You can get empathy down at the fuckin' juice bar. Or is that a poor choice of words? Doesn't matter. You are not here for empathy. You are here because somebody or other wishes to hoist you on your own petard. You wanna get stroked, get some musk oil and a friend. You wanna get legal advice, start talking to your lawyer." [101]

Notes

George V. Higgins, the author of Kennedy for the Defense, wrote three more novels featuring the lawyer, Jerry Kennedy: Penance for Jerry Kennedy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1985); Defending Billy Ryan (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1992), and Sandra Nichols Found Dead (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1996). Higgins, a former Federal prosecutor and Boston criminal defense lawyer, wrote other novels, and gained prominence with the publication of The Friends of Eddie Coyle: A Novel (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1995) (Amazon.com review: "George V. Higgins's first novel is like a blast of Atlantic air; the Boston prosecutor virtually reinvents the language of the crime novel with his unique ability to breathe life into the dialogue of the smalltime hoodlum and hustler.") Higgins was known for his ability to create wonderful dialogue. Regrettably, Kennedy for the Defense is now out-of-print.

We may assume that lawyers--all lawyers--have an easy go of it financially; the fact suggest otherwise. For fictional accounts of lawyers and their money problems, see The Legal Fiction of Lowell B. Komie, 25 Legal Studies Forum 1-215 (2001).