so when the economy tanks, it’s the people in school who get screwed first and hardest. Most of us were racking up student loans at $40,000 per year — essentially mortgaging our futures — and there were almost no jobs. Even many of the best students couldn’t find anything. With the debt meter constantly running, many had little or no prospect of ever being able to repay what they owed. Most would be starting their careers in their mid-twenties from the bottom of a deep, deep hole.
And it wasn’t like all would be fixed when the economy rebounded. Sure, law firms would start hiring again, but they would return to their old model, interviewing and hiring students almost two years before they graduated. Those classes that had missed that window would be lost forever. I was one of the lucky ones. Terrified of failure, I studied relentlessly. Jockeying with a few other students for the top position in our class.
At the beginning of my second year of law school I got the nod. I had been summoned to the offices of K&C for a day of interviews with people who laughed and joked and didn’t seem the least bit interested in the law, or what I thought I might do with my career. The only thing they seemed to care about was whether they liked me. I was convinced I’d failed the test, that they could all tell I did not belong there. But almost by magic, a couple of partners took me out to dinner at the end of that long day and offered me a job. I was stunned. These people were considering letting me into their club. I was speechless, but managed to say yes before they could change their mind.
Unlike me, Tom Reilly was the quintessential Kohlberg and Crowley associate. Like most of K&C’s 900 lawyers in its fifteen offices around the world, Reilly graduated from an Ivy League college, where he excelled, and then went on to an Ivy League law school, where he was on law review and finished in the top ten percent of his class. Because of his wealthy family, he finished law school at twenty-five with no student loans or debt of any kind. The first job he ever had was making six figures at K&C.
He exhibited the same casual behavior around wealth and power that I’d noticed in most of the other summer associates. It was a quality gained by attending private schools one’s entire life and growing up in the privileged neighborhoods of America where everyone’s father was a surgeon, lawyer, CEO, investment banker, or, in Los Angeles, a studio executive. Everyone Tom Reilly had ever been around was exactly like him. It was no wonder he felt comfortable at K&C. And merely because he was born five or six year before me, he had graduated from law school when the economy was great. For him, there was no economic downturn. He was completely unaffected by any of it. He was on an elevator headed nowhere but up, and at every floor along the way he would be handed more and more money. Seemingly endless money.
Although I bore little resemblance to Tom, every elite law firm had a few people like me walking the halls. I was a candidate picked for my grit and life experience, picked precisely because I was not like the others. I was blue collar, working class, and had fought to get where I was. That made me hungry and they knew it. I resented Tom Reilly and his Porsche as much as I coveted it.
After two hours of driving, we pulled off the freeway and followed the signs. A few minutes later we dropped over a rise and the prison loomed up out of the desert. It was a collection of gray concrete buildings surrounded by layer after layer of high chain link topped with spiraling razor wire. Beyond the impenetrable rings of fence, there was nothing but wide open space — an expanse of hot desert and low brush — no place for an escapee to hide from searchlights, dogs, or bullets.
I followed Reilly into a front office. We were led down a corridor to a waiting room where we sat for what seemed like an hour. We carried on the kind of stilted and disinterested conversation people engage in when they’re trying to kill time and nothing more. Those were probably the only kinds of conversations that took place inside prisons.