Law is a calling, help the less fortunate

| Friday May 8, 2009 00:00

REVIEWED BY
SHERIDAN GRISWOLD
Correspondent

The Associate, John Grisham's 27th book, is another legal thriller. It stands on its own, unrelated to any of the other novels. It is another page-turner in the tradition you have come to accept from Grisham. His last one was The Appeal (Mmegi 6 June 2008).  In The Associate there is something for everyone.

The Associate introduces us to its star, Kyle McAvoy, right off. Kyle is one of those young Americans blessed with personality, intelligence and a winning smile, the kind who rises quickly to the top. He is now at Yale Law School and his abilities have been rewarded by making him the editor of the Yale Law Review, a coveted position that goes to the best and the brightest each year. Then he is confronted by a group of strange men. Thus begins his 'miserable life of an unwilling spy' - not just any ordinary spook, but an inside one forced to garner secret information on an amazing law case - he does not even know for sure whose side he is on, though he does know he is acting to save his own skin, and those of his best buddies from undergraduate college days.

When Kyle was a student at Duquesne University in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, he joined a fraternity and moved with a fast crowd. He soon realised that he was drinking so much that he would destroy himself and so became a teetotaler. But it was already too late.

He had allowed an unfortunate happening with three of his closest fraternity brothers to take place in his room during their sophomore year, an event that just does not seem to want to go away.

Now in his final year at Yale Law School he has made a verbal commitment to work for three years at Piedmont Legal Aid in Winchester, Virginia, for $32,000 a year. As the editor of the Yale Law Review he could practically have any job he wanted. Then five men show up, blackmailing him with a cell phone movie he never knew existed showing what happened in his fraternity room five years ago. They offer to keep the record of what happened secret if he will do what they order. They want him to join the biggest law firm in the United States as an associate, a position where he would start earning $200,000 a year, and if he survived and became a partner, in his eighth year he would be grossing one million dollars a year. This is the type of plum position most of the law students dream about - they do not seek out public service law working for a pittance.

Public service law for a low salary is esteemed at Yale; most of his professors, whom Kyle admires, advanced through this route. The other side of the dichotomy is the major leagues of American law in giant corporations where the work is hard and where the big money lies. When Kyle switches and accepts a position, as an associate at the giant firm of Scully & Pershing his friends cannot believe it. He has betrayed his principles and them. Olivia, his girlfriend until then, had already decided to go to Texas and work with an anti-death penalty group. She has no respect for his decision. It is one he cannot  really explain to her, or to his father.

Kyle's father, John McAvoy, is even more dismayed about his son's turnabout. John is a small-town lawyer in York, Pennsylvania, where he has lived and worked for over 30 years, representing 'low-paying clients'. Both Kyle and John had thought they would soon be creating a joint practice - McAvoy and McAvoy. Instead Kyle appears to have sold his soul to the company store. The very nature of blackmail is that you cannot tell anyone about it, not even your girlfriend; never your father. The incident in his fraternity room five years ago has been kept secret. How did his blackmailers find out about it, how did they get their evidence and the cell phone film, and what do they expect Kyle to do for them on Madison Avenue?

His key handler is called 'Bennie Wright', but who is he really and for whom does he work? He has an Eastern European accent, but Kyle can find out little more than this. Mr Wright demands frequent secret meetings with Kyle at odd venues to keep him informed of how Kyle's life and plans are progressing. Kyle discovers that Bennie knows more about him than he does himself-the spooks have had access to all kinds of files that Kyle has never seen.

Kyle, the bright young man that he is, sets out to deceive his handlers, to learn as much as possible about them, and perhaps turn the scam around so it boomerangs on them.

With cameras and bugs in his rooms and around the clock surveillance, strange men following him where ever he goes, how can he appear innocent and at the same time remain on top? How can he cooperate with them yet refrain from breaking the law by never giving them any information of consequence? He has been set up, but can he in turn set them up, so he does not end up the fall guy, with his career ruined, even in jail, while his blackmailers go free? Can Kyle's partners in the crime five years ago be of help to him? His three mates' lives have gone different directions over the years. Alan Strock had vanished into medical school and has moved beyond their mateship. Baxter Tate had delusions of becoming a movie star, something precluded by his love of drugs and booze. This left Joey Bernardo, who is planning to get married, to start a family and who lives in Pittsburgh where he works for a brokerage firm.

What Mr Wright is after, if Kyle can become a full associate after he passes his bar examination and then become one of the few bright boys among the associates who are taken into litigation, is secret information on the biggest defence contract in the history of the United States. Two aerospace firms are at loggerheads and the prize is a contract worth more than 10 billion dollars. Kyle gets sucked into a Document Review, and how this is done and the results are fascinating.

From there he is moved to research, where he spends half a day or more, up to seven days a week, tracking everything he can about a case and related verdicts in a number of states going back 20 years. He looks forward to arriving in the courtroom as a litigator.

But first he must master a litigation support system called 'Jury Box' and a secure system called 'Barrister'. 'His life had quickly become a harried, fatigued mess, but he was determined to look nicer as he stumbled through the day'. He wonders why he chose law school, and 'What fool designed this method of practising law?'

Grisham takes pleasure in exploring the lives of the young associates in a top law firm, how they live and work, the challenges they face and how they either surmount them or fall to the wayside. He is sensitive to the hierarchy of roles in such a mammoth firm and to their practices. One of the key ones is the art of 'billing'.  Billing, billing, billing - that is the name of the game.

If the bills are not questioned, instead are paid, why not? When Kyle can't find a parking space in lower Manhattan and navigates the streets in his superior's $100G new car, he still bills $800 for his two hours circumnavigating in the fancy car. Later he is told to 'estimate his hours'. Oddly, some lawyers in Gaborone are now billing their clients P1,600 for going to Lobatse and back to file a document - something usually done by a messenger. Is this right? Or does it just show the billing game has already hit Botswana?
E-mail:sheridangriswold@yahoo.com