The University of Texas at Austin

Law in Popular Culture collection

Legal Studies Forum
Volume 25, Number 1 & 2  (2001)
reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum

INTIMATE PAGES: A LAWYER’S NOTEBOOK

LOWELL B. KOMIE

I HAVE A YELLOW APPLICATION ON MY DESK for admission to the Trial Bar of the United States District Court in Chicago. I’ve let it sit for about eight months. You’re required to have participated in four trials to qualify and you’re asked to list the time, place, and result of each trial. There’s something about the procedure that makes me angry. What right do they have to require lawyers to qualify for a Federal trial bar? In 29 years of practice I’ve never had to qualify for a trial bar. I was even admitted to the Bar of the Supreme Court of the United States by sending in $100 along with references of two members. Anyway, who am I supposed to tell about my four trials, another panel of federal administrators? Also, I don’t like the yellow color of the application. It doesn’t fit in with all the other white papers on my desk; the yellow color annoys me. I think I’ll put the application aside again, although I’m about to file a complaint in an age discrimination case, and if I don’t fill the application out, I won’t be able to try the case in Federal court. 
     Today on the way to the office I had a chance at the 7:35, but the only way I could catch it was to crawl under a section of the barbed-wire fence that divides the north- and southbound trains. Maybe ten years ago I would have done it. If you get caught in the barbed wire, though, you take a chance on being crushed against the fence by the next train waiting at the switch down the line. I could see its yellow light in the fog. My fellow commuters were watching me from across the platform. They wanted to see if I’d try the fence. It’s the kind of problem that interests them. One of my college professors once said that becoming educated was really a matter of learning how to choose. I chose not to try to duck under the barbed wire and decided to walk around to the stairs. Of course, I missed my train. When I finally came up the stairs, all the commuters were gone. The problem of choice had been resolved for me. I’d missed the 7:35 and so I waited for the next train. 
     What if I choose not to fill out my Federal trial bar application? Obviously, I won’t be able to try my age discrimination case. I could tell the panel administrators about my first jury trial. I was six months out of law school and it was a murder trial. 

*     *     *    

     The lawyer who had asked me to assist in trying the murder case was a criminal lawyer named Casimir Zymak. We’d become friends because I’d taken a job at a firm where he had an office, and he asked me to sit in on the trial. He was Polish. He had a face like a smooth stone, and tiny eyes that glittered at you like the marbled eyes of a doll. Zymak did look like a doll of sorts—even in his early 60s he had a child’s 

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face, flaxen hair, and high cheekbones. He was a curiously formal man who would always give you a curt little nod before he drank down his shot of cognac. He also had a deep resonant voice that lingers in my memory with a rich Polish accent. “Your Honor, I will have to object. The question is irrelevant.” His eyes would glitter at the jury, and then he would make a slight bow to the judge and another to the jury. I remember him examining a ballistics expert. The ballistics expert was a precise man in his mid-40s, dressed in a business suit. He had a pinched face and a thin moustache. Zymak’s client was accused of murdering his wife. Shooting her in the back five times as she tried to run away from him down the stairs of their second-floor flat. She was a waitress and she’d been having a love affair with one of her customers. The prosecutors had the defendant’s pistol neatly tagged as an exhibit on the huge, varnished counsels’ table. They sat opposite us. Occasionally one of them would pick up the pistol, cock it, and pull the trigger. It would make a “click” sound, and of course the jury heard it. But my friend, Casimir Zymak, never said anything. Instead, later, he picked up the gun and showed it to the ballistics expert. 
     “How many pellets did it contain?” (He always referred to bullets as pellets. I suppose it softened, the verbal impact; a pellet is a softer term than a bullet.) He handed the gun to the witness. 
     The expert put on his glasses and held up the gun gingerly as if he were holding a live lobster. He sniffed. 
     “This gun holds six bullets.” 
     “And what kind of make is it?” Zymak took his glasses off and looked at me with a half smile. 
     “Spanish.” 
     “It is a Spanish gun, not American?” Again the half smile as if implying that the gun being a foreign make could somehow put the blame on the foreign gun and not his client. 
     “It is a foreign gun.” 
     “What is its name?” 
     “Astra.” 
     “Do you know what ‘astra’ means in Spanish?” 
     “No, sir.” 
     “You do not?” 
     “No, sir.” 
     “You are excused.” 
     The expert witness looked confused as Zymak walked over and took the gun from him. 
     “You are excused. Please stand down,” the judge said. 
     Zymak stood at the side of the jury box, holding the gun in his huge hand. “Astra means star,” he said softly. And then as the witness 

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returned to his seat Zymak leaned over to me and whispered, “The man, their expert, he is now defeated.”

*     *     *

     This morning I had a case involving termination of child support. The client had been paying child support for three children for 15 years, and now two children had reached age 18. The decree provided that child support should terminate on “majority.” When the decree was entered, majority in Illinois was 21; now it’s 18. We’ve researched the question and have decided that the lowering of the age of majority allows our client to terminate support at 18, but it must be done by court action with notice to the wife and not unilaterally. The decree will have to be amended. Child Support Court is in a lousy neighborhood at 13th and Michigan. I had no intention of going down there, so I sent my associate. She’s in the hallway waiting for me when I arrive, at the office. It’s a bad way for her to start off the week, and I ask her if she has cab fare. 
     Actually, it made sense to send my young associate down to 13th and Michigan and not to go myself. Instead of wasting the morning down there, it freed me up to draw a trust. When she got back she told me the judge refused to terminate support for the two children. He said there was still a question of “allocation,” how much should be allocated to the third child. (One child is still under 18.) I thought that since our client had been paying $400 monthly for three children, the remaining support for the third child would be $133, but the judge, unfortunately, is also a law professor at one of the law schools downtown. He wants us to give him a memorandum on allocation of child support on partial termination of support. This means more time and more fees for the client. Also another cab ride by my associate down to 13th and Michigan. She said our client was “bummed out” by the judge’s decision, which I suppose means angry. I told her not to worry about it—she didn’t have a magic wand that she could wave over a client’s head and change his life. She answered that everyone should have a magic wand, and that hers was broken into tiny pieces.

*    *    *

     Some of the lawyers on my floor are losing the letters off their doors. Our doors have brass letters and as angry clients leave the lawyers’ offices, they pluck the letters off and stuff them in their pockets. I suppose my name will soon be disappearing. If my client from this morning is really “bummed out,” he might come back and pluck a letter 

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off my door. A few years ago I practiced in an office on LaSalle Street on the 37th floor. There was a new firm on the 15th floor that specialized in personal injury cases and when they opened their office all the lawyers had their names on a wooden board, new shiny letters in brushed aluminum. There were about twelve neatly lettered lines of aluminum names. I noticed as a few months passed that many of the names were missing letters, particularly toward the bottom of the board. The names on the top, though, remained untouched. As more time passed, almost all the names except the top three were decimated, I finally figured it out. The firm’s clientele was mostly Latin and short. The top three names remained only because they were out of reach.

*     *     *

     I remember the defendant at the murder trial, smoking in the holding cell. We’d go back to interview him after each day’s session. Zymak would talk to him through the bars. The man would hunch down. There was no place for him to sit except on the concrete floor, so he crouched down and looked down at the floor while Zymak talked to him. The man was in his mid-30s, narrow faced, tall and thin, a white man from Appalachia. He met his wife in Europe when he was in the army. He married her in Europe and brought her to Chicago. She was the great love of his life, and he was out of work and violently jealous of the new life she’d carved out for herself at the restaurant and the men she’d met there. Zymak tried to talk him into taking the stand. The man had never said anything about the killing. Zymak argued that he should tell the jury he was innocent. The defendant would hunker down as Zymak tried to talk to him. He’d listen with his head down and blow smoke into his cupped hands. His fingers were almost orange with nicotine stains. Still, he wouldn’t say anything. Once he stood up and went over to a urinal at the wall. It was like watching an animal in a zoo. Before his closing argument Zymak pulled a pint from his hip pocket and drank about half of it. The prosecution asked for the electric chair, the two young prosecutors waving the gun and pulling the trigger. Zymak calmly talked about the trial of Christ before Pontius Pilate. He asked the jury to spare his client, to show mercy.
     The jury came in with a verdict of 99 years. Zymak had saved the man’s life. The defendant still didn’t say anything when the bailiff snapped the cuffs on him and led him away. By the time the jury came in it was early evening, and as Zymak and I went down the long stairs of the Criminal Court Building and headed up California Avenue, he was very quiet. He’d fought hard for the man and was drained by the trial. We were going to a tavern where they served a special drink, a 

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cocktail they mixed particularly for him, a cocktail he told me that Polish hunters drank after a hunt in the old country. Finally he turned to me as we talked and in his deep accent said, “If the man had enough courage to shoot his wife in the back five times, he should have had enough courage to get up on the stand and say he didn’t do it.” He shook his head and we continued walking up the street. It was the last time I saw Zymak. A few weeks later he was dead.

*     *     *

     From the bus window each morning I always see lawyers that I know walking to their offices. The lawyers that work at the big firms usually walk with one of their partners, or with a group of partners. There seems to be a definite pecking order. The older lawyers walk slightly ahead, the younger lawyers slightly behind. They’re polite, deferential, smiling at the older lawyers’ remarks. It’s almost like a military order where the senior officers walk ahead of the juniors. At my age, 56, I don’t want to be polite and deferential to anyone. So I watch the tiny phalanxes of lawyers heading for their offices and I’m glad I practice alone.

*     *     *

     This weekend my wife and I went to our son’s graduation at Michigan. At the University of Michigan I sat in the stadium stands in bright sunlight and listened to Walter Cronkite lecture to 4,000 graduates. He said that the United States was founded in revolution and that we had to communicate that to the Third World countries. The graduates didn’t look like revolutionaries to me. You were allowed to go down to the stadium grass so I went down there with our daughter and listened to Cronkite. We sat on the 50-yard line looking up at the graduates. They were all dressed in rented caps and gowns, and I thought at the end of the ceremony that they’d toss their hats down on the field so I told my daughter to get ready to duck. They didn’t throw their hats, though. I was directly underneath the law school section, and one law student poured a bottle of champagne over his head and then shook up the bottle and sprayed everyone around him. Corks were popping, and champagne was spraying everywhere.
     It was a beautiful sunlit day, and after the ceremony, our family walked around the campus. We went over to the Law Quad and stood on the steps of the library. Students were throwing Frisbees in the quadrangle. A quiet young woman with a knapsack peddled up on her bike and met an equally shy bearded young man with whom she left.

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     I could hardly remember being a law student at Michigan. I was, though, probably one of the least interested they ever had. I only went to class for six weeks and spent the rest of the year trying to write a novel. I only completed three pages. I was on the GI Bill and the government was paying for my education, so I thought I had a free ride. I didn’t really want to be a lawyer. I wanted to be a famous novelist or war correspondent. The law school finally inquired as to why I wasn’t coming to class. They sent me a postcard. I was asked to appear for an interview with a professor. I remember he suggested that I check in at the Health Service for some therapy. Instead, I spent all the rest of the year working on the three pages of the novel. So being on the quadrangle at the Michigan Law School brought back old memories. 
     I walked into the library. There was a young man behind me. He was impatient to get around me at the gate. He was dressed in a T-shirt with a Colgate emblem and he wore red shorts, a red knapsack, and red and white sox. I don’t know why he thought he was at Colgate when he really was at Michigan. On the other hand, when I was there, I really thought I was in Paris or Africa, so I shouldn’t be too hard on the kid. At least he was in the library on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. So were several other students and most of them were in shorts and barefoot. I suppose it’s no different than lawyers wearing jeans downtown on Saturday. Most of the young ones do; they carry case bags and wear jeans on Saturdays. You can pretend you’re really a ski bum in Aspen even though you know you’re a LaSalle Street lawyer and you’re downtown working. I also have a friend who wants to retire to Florida and lately he’s been wearing a captain’s hat to court. Another friend is a very successful corporate lawyer and over the years he’s begun to dress like the president of his most prominent corporate client. He’s affected pin-stripe suits and steel-rimmed glasses, black shoes and striped ties, even the same haircut. When I see the corporate president’s picture in the paper he looks exactly like my friend. Unfortunately, the president of the corporation was recently fired, and now I don’t know what my friend will do, because I think he’s beyond the age of being able to retrieve his own identity. He’ll always look like his client. So lawyers do, unfortunately, become cloned. Somerset Maugham once said that powerful men do all begin to look alike because they’ve all been rubbed smooth with power, like stones carried in the same pouch too long.

*     *     *

     When I returned from Ann Arbor I brought my associate a magic wand. I saw a little plastic duck swimming in a pond in a novelty shop and by holding a magic wand over its head you could make it swim 

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furiously. So I bought her the duck kit with the magic wand and gave it to her. Actually, the duck has a magnet in its head, and the wand has a magnet at its tip; when you wave the wand over the duck’s head, the magnetic fields collide and the duck begins to swim. 
     “I don’t really want to be a lawyer,” she said, holding the wand over the duck’s head. She’d put the duck in a cup of water. 
     “Why not?” 
     “I just want to stay home with my kid and take care of her and my plants.” 
     “Why did you go to law school?” 
     “To do something socially redeeming. What I’m doing here isn’t socially redeeming. All I do is worry about making money.” She held out the wand. “This doesn’t even work.”
     “You need a bigger container, like a tray. You can’t put the duck in a cup.” 
     “I don’t know why I became a lawyer, when I want to do something socially redeeming.”
     “Like paying your office rent this month.” 
     “You think everything has to do with money. Lawyers shouldn’t have to be concerned with money. They should be concerned with what’s best for the client, not what’s best for themselves.” 
     Of course she’s right, but then again, she hasn’t  learned yet that many of the clients are crazy and make impossible demands on the lawyer. I’ve had a client call me when I had a 102° fever and demand that I get up and complete a merger agreement. Of course, he never paid his bills on time. The ones that demand the most service seldom pay you promptly, or at all. Another client used to call me from his boat in Acapulco and tell me my check was in the mail. Unfortunately, he posted it by burro; I still haven’t received it. Most people, though, are honest, particularly working people. They’ll pay you in advance of the work. One of the many things law school doesn’t prepare you for is how to make money as a lawyer. It’s pretended that the necessity to make money doesn’t exist, that most of the class will become associates in big law firms and once a week or biweekly, a clerk will bring around a check and drop it on your desk. Unfortunately, that will happen to only a few, and except for those who work for corporations or the government, the rest of the class will be out there with all of us. So, if you want to live decently, you have to gross $5,000 to $6,000 a month. How do you earn $5,000 to $6,000 a month as a general practitioner? That’s a good question and one that most of the general practice lawyers in the country are trying to answer. I just don’t know if you can. You have to be very tough and very shrewd and entirely money-oriented. Unfortunately, those qualities, toughness and shrewdness, quickly 

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overcome and submerge the philosophical notions of being a lawyer. Soon the intellectual challenge of the law and the concept of public service disappear. You become just another businessman. 

*     *     *

     I have another desk on my right, and on it I have a postage-meter, an adding machine, a small stereo, lots of books, legal pads, and a telescope. When I use the scope I can see people crossing Michigan Avenue. I seldom use it, though. I suppose if I did I might even see parts of myself fluttering away in the sunlight. My admission to the Supreme Court is standing in a tube on the same desk beside the telescope. One of these days I’ll take it out of the tube and unroll it and put it in a frame. I received a solicitation already from the Chief Justice to join the Supreme Court Historical Society at $100 annually. I’ll join, when the client whose case I took to the Supreme Court pays me. He still owes me a balance of $1,500 for the case. Before the Court denied his petition for certiorari in a civil case, he slipped my fees in an envelope under the door each month. When his petition was denied, as almost all of them are, he put an envelope under the door without a check and with a note saying he was going “underground.” I suppose that’s his own way of being tough and shrewd. 

*     *     *

     I do enjoy being a lawyer, even if being a solo practitioner means that you spend a great deal of time worrying about money and the letters of your name fluttering out into infinity. So what? If I were in a big firm, I’d have a Mercedes and still worry. If a senior partner wanted me to fly off to Toledo on Saturday morning to review a memorandum on executive compensation at International Ball Bearings, Inc., I’d have to smile and say, Yes sir, I’ll go. Fortunately, since I work for myself, I don’t have to do that, and that’s the best thing about being a lawyer—freedom. You don’t have to take a case. You are relatively free. When I graduated from Northwestern I thought I might lend my considerable talents to the World Court or the United Nations or the State Department. I would have liked to have worn a top hat and striped trousers and argued the Nicaraguan mining case before the World Court. I would have liked to have had my morning coffee on a hotel terrace in Geneva. But gradually, I dropped those ideas and became a lawyer in Chicago with an office on the sixth floor in a glass high-rise building. I can see the reflection of Lake Michigan on the window of the building across the street. I can see people on the street, trees, traffic 

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streaming, colors, sunlight. I can go to concerts over the noon hour or walk in the park or to the Art Institute and look at some of the greatest paintings in the world. I don’t have to worry about spending my career jockeying for a corner office with a view. I already have it, and a coffee pot, and a stereo. In the afternoons, as the work winds down, I often listen to classical music. I have several plants. I like to water them and listen to Mozart. One of these days I’ll take my Supreme Court admission out of the tube and put it in a frame.

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“Intimate Pages: A Lawyer’s Notebook,” first published in 13 (4) Student Lawyer 28 (December 1984).
Lowell B. Komie © [1984]

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