all partners.
Trying to help remedy the imbalance, I pushed for us to consider law
students coming from other state schools and from historically black colleges like
Howard University. When the recruiting team gathered in a conference room in
Chicago with a pile of student résumés to review, I objected anytime a student
was automatically dismissed for having a B on a transcript or for having gone to a
less prestigious undergraduate program. If we were serious about bringing in
minority lawyers, I asserted, we’d have to look more holistically at candidates.
We’d need to think about how they’d used whatever opportunities life had
afforded them rather than measuring them simply by how far they’d made it up
an elitist academic ladder. The point wasn’t to lower the firm’s high standards: It
was to realize that by sticking with the most rigid and old-school way of
evaluating a new lawyer’s potential, we were overlooking all sorts of people who
could contribute to the firm’s success. We needed to interview more students, in
other words, before writing them off.
For this reason, I loved making recruiting trips to Cambridge, because it
gave me some influence in which Harvard students got chosen for an interview.
It also, of course, gave me an excuse to see Barack. The first time I visited, he
picked me up in his car, a snub-nosed, banana-yellow Datsun he’d bought used
on his loan-strapped student budget. When he turned the key, the engine revved
and the car spasmed violently before settling into a loud, sustained juddering that
shook us in our seats. I looked at Barack in disbelief.
“You drive this thing?” I said, raising my voice over the noise.
He flashed me the impish, I-got-this-covered grin that melted me every time.
“Just give it a minute or two,” he said, shifting the car into gear. “It goes away.”
After another few minutes, having steered us onto a busy road, he added, “Also,
maybe don’t look down.”
I’d already spotted what he wanted me to avoid—a rusted-out, four-inch
hole in the floor of his car, through which I could see the pavement rushing
beneath us.
Life with Barack would never be dull. I knew it even then. It would be
some version of banana yellow and slightly hair-raising. It occurred to me, too,
that quite possibly the man would never make any money.
He was living in a spartan one-bedroom apartment in Somerville, but during
my recruiting trips Sidley put me up at the luxe Charles Hotel adjacent to
campus, where we slept on smooth high-quality sheets and Barack, rarely one to