Anonymous Lawyer

My favorite interviewing story is the time I made the law student totally break down. He was a law review kid, from either Columbia or NYU, I think. He asked me what my favorite thing about the firm was. I told him it was the way everyone was so nice to me after my nervous breakdown. I explained that I'd been in the office for a week straight, doing due diligence on a really important case, as a first-year associate, and the partner I was working for came in and just started screaming at me, throwing things, telling me he was going to throw me right through the window if I didn't get my act together and start earning my salary. So I started crying, and he took the picture frame from my desk, and slammed it into the ground, and glass went everywhere, and I just lost it, and had to be sent away to the hospital to recover for a few days. But when I got back, I explained, everyone was really nice about it. They only made me work 6 days that week, and even let me grab a quick lunch that Friday. So I could tell this kid didn't want to believe anything I was saying, but I kept a straight face through it all. And he asked if I was telling the truth, and I told him I could show him the picture frame to prove it -- that I had the broken picture frame in my drawer, all this time. And I reached for the drawer, to open it, and he quickly said of course he believed me, and wanted to know if things were really that bad. I was the last interview before he went out to lunch with two associates, and when they filed their reports they said he was a mess, couldn't stop shaking and fidgeting, asked all these lifestyle questions, and went to the bathroom right after the main course, and they thought he might have vomited it all up. This is power. Making law students vomit. This is why I like being a lawyer.