B

8

arack Obama was late on day one. I sat in my office on the forty-seventh
floor, waiting and not waiting for him to arrive. Like most first-year lawyers, I
was busy. I put in long hours at Sidley & Austin, often eating both lunch and
dinner at my desk while combating a continuous flow of documents, all of them
written in precise and decorous lawyer-language. I read memos, I wrote memos,
I edited other people’s memos. At this point, I thought of myself basically as
trilingual. I knew the relaxed patois of the South Side and the high-minded
diction of the Ivy League, and now on top of that I spoke Lawyer, too. I’d been
hired into the firm’s marketing and intellectual property practice group, which
was considered internally more freewheeling and creative than other groups, I
suppose because we dealt at least some of the time with advertising. Part of my
job involved poring over scripts for our clients’ TV and radio ads, making sure
they didn’t violate Federal Communications Commission standards. I would later
be awarded the honor of looking after the legal concerns of Barney the Dinosaur.
(Yes, this is what passes for freewheeling in a law firm.)

The problem for me was that as a junior associate my work didn’t involve
much actual interaction with clients and I was a Robinson, raised in the
boisterous scrum of my extended family, molded by my father’s instinctive love
of a crowd. I craved interaction of any sort. To offset the solitude, I joked around
with Lorraine, my assistant, a hyperorganized, good-humored African American
woman several years my senior who sat just outside my office and answered my
phone. I had friendly professional relationships with some of the senior partners
and perked up at any chance I had to chitchat with my fellow associates, but in
general everyone was overloaded with work and careful not to waste one billable