me would have become worse over the coming weeks and then I’d have had no hope of anyone working with me to turn this section around.”
“But I should never have said the things I said to you this morning.”
“It was indiscreet, Alex,” he reproached. “But in the circumstances of this morning I’ll forgive you just this once if you forgive me for not telling you who I was. Do you think I had any impact this morning, with the staff I mean?”
Alex hesitated, stunned that he was asking for her point of view. “I think you’ve got them wondering.”
“What does that mean?”
“Well before you arrived they would have preferred Jack the Ripper as new litigation partner. But since your talk this morning you’ve been raised up a notch to about Charles Manson level.”
JP laughed. “Okay, quite some way to go then but what should I do to get them on side—you know them better than I do?”
Alex felt a warm tingling in her cheeks. Her new boss was asking her opinion about a management issue—she couldn’t quite believe it.
“Why don’t you organise something the whole litigation section can join in on—where everyone has to work together as a team—I don’t know … a footy match, something like that.”
JP nodded thoughtfully, his mind clearly ticking over at her suggestion.
“How did you get such a bad name as a boss anyhow?” Alex asked as she felt the wine begin to ease the tension out of her taut and tired muscles.
“Maybe because I don’t suffer fools,” he declared suddenly, reverting back to command role. “But I suspect the truth is that someone who’s fared badly with me in the past has spread some exaggerated rumours. Regardless though, I have a job to do here and I intend to do it. I’m not here to work on my popularity rating. By the way, where’s my other PA?” He glanced towards the door as though Vera Boyd might suddenly materialise there.
“Vera’s on two weeks leave. She gets back the day after tomorrow.”
“I see. How do you two split the work up?”
‘Vera splits things up and I get the dregs’, was what Alex wanted to say. “Um, we just split it up between us, depending on how busy things are.”
“Aye, right,” JP replied and looked doubtful. All over again Alex felt her hopes sink as she remembered the firm’s policy—no more than one PA per lawyer. Just because he wasn’t going to fire her for spreading malicious gossip about him to perfect strangers in the street didn’t mean her job was secure indefinitely.
“What do you do if Vera’s covering the workload?”
“I work on precedents during the quiet times,” Alex explained, hoping that wouldn’t damage her prospects of holding onto her job. He could very well decide that a PA with enough time on her hands to create useless precedents was a PA he didn’t need to waste a wage on.
“Precedents! What are you talking about?” JP asked with a sudden flare up of irritation. “I was told this section didn’t have any precedents apart from out of date court documents.”
“I started preparing them at the beginning of the year,” Alex replied, convinced she’d just signed her own job’s death warrant. “Vera was handling all of David’s work on her own so I had time.”
“Let me see them.”
“What, now?”
“Aye, now.”
Alex sat down in front of JP’s computer and her fingers began to move across the keyboard as he stood behind her so that he could watch the screen.
“Here they are,” she said finally. “We have a high turnover of junior lawyers who wander around the office looking for precedents they can use and I thought it would be helpful to put some standard documents together for them in plain English.”
“I see,” he murmured and leaned over her shoulder to read through the list. “Letter advising on mediation, containing Calderbank offer, proposing settlement conference, service of process, categories of documents for discovery, undertakings as to damages.”
On and on he read, occasionally asking her to bring up a document so that he could skim its contents. He wanted to see everything, from documents in support of bankruptcy and winding-up proceedings to the various deeds of settlement and releases.
“Where did you get these from?”
“I kept an eye out for the good ones which came through David’s office. Some came from the lawyers in this section. The rest I had to beg, borrow or steal from other sections.”
“Has anyone approved these?”
“Not yet,” Alex replied, remembering the various times she’d asked David