- Alexander Hamilton, Publius Letter, I, 16 October 1778
Diary of My Disastrous Law Career: From Harvard to Heaven Help Me
Chapter 9
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| An unexpected personal treasure: when I quit Lawyer Job 4 (as described in the previous installment of these memoirs), a lawyer there whose job was apparently to help people transition out of the firm (but it was no one's job to help make it a place you'd want to work?) gave me one of the best books ever written, Stephen Covey's The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I first read it in 2001, between Lawyer Jobs 4 and 5. Every time I read this book, it is fresher and deeper and life-changing again. The book was first published in 1989, and today over 25 million copies have been sold. Were the people I worked with not among the book's millions of devotees? Or maybe some of them read the book but did not implement its principles such as *Think Win-Win,* or *Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood?* I snapped this picture of my original paperback earlier this year, 2019 -- with some Southwest Airlines pretzels and my own Dick Taylor Chocolate -- as I was commuting by plane from my home in Chicago to Los Angeles weekly or so to teach business law at UCLA Extension; I wanted to share lessons from the book with my students. By the way, commuting to LA this past winter was not the original plan -- having stable local housing was the original plan -- but that is a story for another day. Indeed, I sat down this spring to write about my adventures and experiences during that 3-month winter teaching and commuting (and chocolate-themed) project, and instead these lawyer memoirs from 20 years ago are what started tumbling out. |
Welcome to this installment of my disastrous career as a lawyer!
I quit being a lawyer to save my life. I also quit to avoid compromising my values. What would you do if you had a boss who threatened to make your life miserable if you didn't break the law? Welcome to my Lawyer Job 5! In this installment, I'll share with you my experiences in that situation.
Spoiler alert: I didn't break the law, and the boss made my life miserable.
Double spoiler: this happened alongside the context of one of the largest corporate fraud scandals up to that time, the Enron scandal, which went even beyond billions of dollars in corporate fraud into callous actions which cost innocent people not only their life savings but their lives, when for example people couldn't get electricity during an Enron-induced energy crisis, to drive up prices, during a heatwave. Andersen, where I worked, helped Enron commit fraud. I didn't work on any Enron matters or know they were a client. The work I did see involved law-breaking; Enron is just where the firm was caught. See Enron Scandal Facts for kids for quick info; how's that for a title.
If you've been following these memoirs, you may have noticed that I've avoided mentioning the names of prior firms where I worked. There's really no way around mentioning the firm's name here: Lawyer Job 5 was at Andersen. Nor is there any reason not to mention it, even though I do not include Lawyer Job 5 (or Lawyer Job 4) on my resume because I never wanted to have my name associated with acts committed there.
Here is what happened:
Lawyer Job 5: Chicago
After gravely negative experiences at every law firm at which I had worked, I decided to change tactics and become an in-house lawyer. This means that I would be employed by a company and it would be my job to look out for that company's interests, making sure it followed the law, and helping business people within the company with contracts between our company and companies we did business with. In-house lawyers sometimes sent work out to law firms, meaning that the in-house team could have shorter hours closer to the 9-to-5 standard (already a trap you might say, suffused with its own misery and misogyny as shown in the 9-to-5 movie and song), and greater work-life balance. That was the theory. The reality was different. Or maybe I just chose the wrong company.
Arthur Andersen was a large and prestigious Chicago-based accounting and auditing firm, known for its ethics. Then it crashed under its own greed and lawlessness when it lost those ethics. Apparently when the firm added consulting to its accounting and auditing work, greed increased, recklessness grew, and the end drew nearer. The firm broke laws and internal rules designed to protect shareholders, the public, and the company itself. I started working there in 2001, saw immediately that the firm was a disaster, and quit six months later because in refusing to break the law I saw that there was no place for me there. Soon after that, the firm was indicted, and shut down in 2002, and 88,000 people worldwide who didn't quit lost their jobs anyway.
You may have heard about or remember the Enron scandal, one of the biggest corporate scandals of all time, in which the 5th largest company in America went bankrupt after rampant fraud was brought to light, resulting in losses of $76 billion, actual prison time for executives, and lost pensions, savings, and jobs for tens of thousands of people, even lost lives in some cases.
The Andersen firm was at the heart of the Enron scandal, approving false financial documents and later being convicted for shredding evidence. For example, as Andersen was apparently allowing Enron to hide financial losses and publish false financial reports that made the company look healthy when it wasn't, Enron executives encouraged their own employees to buy Enron stock, while these same executives sold their own Enron stock for millions of dollars, knowing the company would crash and their employees would lose their life savings which the Enron execs stole. Click here for the Fun With Dick and Jane movie trailer (2005), which spoofs parts of the scandal and depicts how ordinary people were harmed by it and what they (fictionally) did next.
I didn't even know Enron was a client when I worked at Andersen. The work I saw Andersen employees and leaders do for other clients was often in violation of laws and regulations. Enron is just where they were found out, when Enron went bankrupt.
On top of that: Bullying. Retaliation. Misery. Plain old stress and overwork on boring projects. Those sociopaths you seem to run into in corporate America. And of course that ever-present misogyny.
For example:
This is not a test
On my first day at Andersen, at the downtown Chicago headquarters, I began a week of orientation classes, and I was excited! As always, I took detailed notes. I was eager to learn everything I needed to know to start in my role as a lawyer supporting the Business Process Outsourcing team of consultants, basically an IT consulting team of Andersen consultants. Their job was to provide the right technology to clients for their accounting, payroll, or other needs, and my job was to make sure they were doing this in a way that protected Andersen such as by using proper contracts. You might think the interests of the team and the team's lawyers would be generally aligned: the team would want to do things in a way that keeps Andersen operating long term, that makes sure Andersen gets paid, and that makes sure Andersen doesn't break any of the laws that it had to follow as a public accounting and audit firm. Right? (Spoiler alert: Wrong.)
During orientation, I learned details of how to apply relevant laws and regulations from the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission, which protects investors and the public where stocks are involved, and oversees accounting and auditing firms like Andersen) and the IRS (Internal Revenue Service, which has rules about how to handle payroll taxes for example). Maybe this wasn't riveting stuff in terms of being super interesting or meaningful to me at a deep level -- all of my lawyer jobs were basically about fine print -- but I was determined to perform my new job and every job to the highest standards.
Armed with this new knowledge plus existing legal knowledge, I opened the first of the five files that my boss's boss, our group leader within the legal department, had given me. Side note: This was not a law firm where there were junior and senior associates, and junior and senior partners, and it was clear who did what. This was corporate America, with seemingly endless levels of hierarchy. My boss, a lawyer like me, oversaw 3 or so lawyers including me, while the leader of our group within the legal department, also a lawyer, was his boss and oversaw approximately 30 of us. My boss's boss also had a boss, who had a boss, etc., until after numerous layers you got to the head of Andersen Worldwide. To me, many of these layers just seemed like a way to give out titles and add needless complexity and politics while thwarting efficiency, but that's my opinion. Basically, my boss's boss -- the group lead -- was my boss; that's where I got my work. It wasn't clear what my ostensible boss -- the one who oversaw 3 of us -- really did, except read the newspaper and cause trouble; more on that to come.
In any event, I opened the first of my five new projects. This is odd, I thought: this project is structured in exactly a way I learned in orientation not to structure a project, because this structure violates SEC rules. Goodness, what an awful mistake somebody made, I thought; it's a good thing I caught it! I easily re-drafted the documents to comply with the law, set that file aside, and opened the next one.
The second of my five new projects was structured in a way that I learned in orientation violated an IRS regulation. Good heavens, how can this be, I thought; and how easy it is to restructure this project too, so that we are not jeopardizing the firm which might have to pay fines and receive negative publicity and lose clients if these deals were structured improperly. I set that file aside, and opened the next one.
At this point, you will not be surprised to learn that all five of my first five projects contained violations of the law or of internal Andersen policies. I couldn't believe it. Then I thought: maybe this is a test, to see if I paid attention during orientation! Oh how naive I still was. How was I this naive?
I went to my boss's boss, our group lead, and told him, expecting he would give me a gold star or an employee-of-the-month award or something: I've finished going through my first five projects, and the good news is that I found the SEC, IRS, or internal rule violations in each one, fixed them, and the projects are ready to move forward in compliance with law and policy. There was a pause. Instead of praising my work in passing the test or saving the firm from itself, the group lead looked right at me and said: Valerie, we do things here a certain way, and if you don't follow along, we will make your life miserable.
I was flabbergasted. People at this firm were breaking the law on purpose. They were knowingly putting their own firm in danger. What was wrong with them? What was I doing here? I believed this job was my hope at finding my way as a lawyer, after four previous lawyer jobs filled with misery. Instead, I was in the worst job of all.
After I regained control of my mouth and eyes which had opened wide in shock, I said to the boss: Are you kidding? He was not. I refused to break the law -- not only was it wrong, in violation of my oath as a lawyer and my personal values, but why should I endanger my standing as a lawyer for people who didn't seem to care about me or any other employee as they were risking the firm's standing to book cheap deals? I told the boss I wouldn't break the law. I lived up to my word, and he lived up to his word to make my life miserable if I lived up to my word.
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| Obviously, my job did not fulfill my ikigai, my personal mission. |
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Dial F for Fraud, or B for Bullies?
After the shocking episode at the start of my new job where the boss told me if I didn't break the law he'd make my life miserable, I tried to do my job and to see if there were any allies and if this job was salvageable. Spoiler alert: it was not.
Every week, I would have conference calls with my internal clients, most of whom were based in Dallas, to discuss new projects they were bringing in. Under Andersen policy, they had to fill out a sheet explaining what each new project was, and showing the risk level of that project based on Andersen's own method of calculating this. For instance, if the project involved an external client known for not paying on time, this would increase the risk, as would starting work on a project before a contract was in place. Internal clients got mad when I pointed out their own calculations showed that project after project was significantly above the acceptable risk level as set by the firm. They bullied me, but I wouldn't back down. They ignored me and their own Andersen policies. Apparently they got bonuses based on new projects brought in, whether the external client ever paid for the work or not. Finally, they removed the risk calculation from the project form altogether, so that now they were not indicating risk level at all. I received no support from my bosses, just ridicule on calls with the internal clients, who would laugh at me, interrupt me, and criticize me, for trying to protect the firm from them. The ringleader of this reckless greed and cruel bullying was the head of a small group, and there were another man and a woman who seemed to go along with what the lead bully wanted. They acted as though I were the crazy one, the unreasonable one, the one who should just go away. I wanted to go away. I had calls with them every week, and I dreaded these weekly calls.
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| I graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School, and when I passed the Illinois state bar exam and took my oath as a lawyer I actually took it seriously: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm, as the case may be), that I will support the constitution of the United States and the constitution of the state of Illinois, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of attorney and counselor at law to the best of my ability." |
Public humiliation for honesty
Would I find effective allies among the team? No. It seemed that most people went along with the lawlessness, and that no one had figured out a way or had power to do anything about it. The firm seemed quite soaked with doing things the wrong way, and people who believed in doing things the right way didn't seem to have a way forward. The boss singled me out as a non-team-player, because I didn't do things the Andersen way, i.e. illegally.
At an in-person team meeting at one point, the group lead suddenly handed me a book and told me to read out loud to the group. I took a quick look: it was about being a team player. I read out the marked passage, while the group lead and the others stared at me. I interpreted this to mean he was calling me out for not being a team player, meaning being someone who wouldn't break the rules. In making me read the passage from this book, he seemed to want to humiliate me. For what, for being honest?
He reminded me of my first-grade teacher, before my family pulled me quickly out of first grade and placed me into second grade at age 5 -- I had already entered kindergarten a year early, at age 4, because by age 2, I could read, write, do math, engage in critical thinking, and: dance! -- so I effectively skipped 2 grades, ultimately graduating high school and starting college at Harvard at age 16 instead of the customary 18. Sometimes, if this topic comes up, I tell people today that what they see before them are the remains of a child genius. : ) In any case, back in first grade, my teacher didn't like that I could read and write and do all those other things that the other kids couldn't, and believed I should be "held back" to let the other kids "catch up." I remember her as mean, sour, never smiling. She would have me come stand at the front of the room and read books to the other kids, trying, it seemed, to turn them against me and somehow to humiliate me for being me. I had the same feeling when the group lead had me read to the class, as it were; that this was a way to show the group that I was a rebel (for being a lawyer who wanted to follow the law) and that they should turn against me. How ridiculous it all was: I didn't want to be on a team that cheats. That's probably not what the author of the team-player book had in mind anyway.
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| Prodigy: on my 3rd birthday, having zhuzhed up my look with one hiked sleeve and a robe on my head. I remember expecting to feel different on my 3rd birthday, discovering that I didn't, pondering that, and deciding to go on with the experiments and adventures of life. |
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| Remains of the prodigy: several days ago, age 49, before giving a talk to one of my alumni groups, the Alumni Network of Harvard Women, zhuzhing around with some chocolate at Hannah's Bretzel. |
The kids in first grade were a pretty decent group, and I don't remember losing any friends over being able to read while they couldn't. I couldn't tie my shoes, and some of them could. We all had some things we could do and some things we couldn't, and it certainly wasn't a big deal to me. As children, don't we naturally evaluate each other by character? For example, no one wants to play with the kid who lies or steals. Twenty-five years later, that hadn't changed.
The lawyers at Andersen were a somewhat mixed group in terms of how they dealt with the bullying and pressure at the firm. Some let themselves be bullied, and broke the law. Some spoke with me covertly about the fact that they didn't like what was going on, either.
On the one hand, I felt sympathetic toward us all, being pushed to work longer hours than you would think in-house work should involve, for less money than we would be paid at a law firm which is why the hours were supposed to be shorter, being pushed to work in a way that broke the law as well as internal regulations, and having to work with internal clients and bosses who were disrespecful. The work wasn't interesting, either. Churning out contracts so that a company could get its software installed wasn't what I had in mind when I envisioned becoming a lawyer to work on meaningful projects. If that's the work that you do and you like it, God bless you. I was tired of fine print, especially when the people it was supposed to help didn't want my help.
On the other hand, I also seemed to be in the wrong place if I was waiting for the people's revolution. What if all 70 of us in the legal department looked at the lies and the bullying and said: Enough. What if all of us in the world said: Enough.
The point is: I found no powerful allies at this job.
Some of the people I did find:
Bills to pay
The group lead gave my projects to another young lawyer. I asked that lawyer how he could do what he knew was wrong. He said, barely looking up and not making eye contact: I have bills to pay. Well so did I, including student loans, but weren't there other ways to pay them than by breaking the law, your bar oath, and your ethics?
Take a walk
I had a colleague who was also upset about what she saw. She wouldn't talk near the firm, so we would walk to a park away from downtown, and commiserate. She was smart, and kind, and we became friends, bonding in the midst of disaster.
Outside the department
I looked for allies or a mentor outside the legal department, but again found none. I had met one of the few woman partners, who was "in the line," meaning responsible for revenue generation. (In-house lawyers were seen as an "expense.") I was impressed that she seemed nice and kind yet successful, a rare combination among people I'd met in that environment, plus she was a woman partner, also rare. I spoke with her about the rules I was being asked to break. She agreed that there was an Andersen style to doing things, and that the firm was steeped in this style. She suggested that there was really no one inside the firm I could talk with about this if I expected change or any positive outcome.
I was amazed the firm hadn't already been shut down. I made up my mind to leave. I didn't want to get disbarred so that a mean pack of rude rule-breakers could break the law and get their bonuses. Six months after I started, I quit. Six months after that, the firm was indicted, and in 2002 they closed.
Before that, more strangeness, outrageousness, and lawlessness, starting with another episode of an interaction outside the department:
A firing
During the six months I was a lawyer at Andersen, seating arrangements seemed to be in a disorganized flux. I was asked if I wanted to sit in open seating, or in a sort of fishbowl office. Both choices were different from the private offices I'd had at law firms, but that was ok with me. I noticed that most people, including the legal department's various array of bosses, sat in open seating, so I chose that too.
At one point, I was moved to a seat outside of the legal department, while it was undergoing some type of physical maintenance (looking back: let's hope it wasn't that people needed more space for document shredding). I don't think I was the only one moved, though I may have been moved to the most cramped space. I was seated at a tiny cubicle (it was so small I can't really say "in" the cubicle, but just "at" the cubicle) which was a small desk connected to a long row of other desks, semi-separated by small partitions on each side. The women working in this row were in bookkeeping roles. I'd have short friendly chats with them. I learned for example that the woman on my left was a pastor's wife.
One day I returned to my mini space and saw that the pastor's wife was crying and putting her belongings into a box. No one else was watching or saying anything, they just kept their heads down and kept typing or working on paperwork. I had never seen this kind of corporate America firing before, and asked my crying neighbor if she was going to be ok, and what exactly had happened? She didn't reply, and kept crying and packing. I didn't understand why she didn't reply, and kept trying to talk with her. Then I noticed the security guard standing nearby, and that another one of our neighbors was gesturing to me to be quiet. Apparently if you were fired, you weren't allowed to speak or look at anyone, you just had to put your personal things into a box and let a security guard take you off of company property. And apparently if you sat near someone fired, you weren't supposed to talk to them or be seen to notice.
It made me think of Jews being forced out of their homes during the Holocaust, and of some neighbors pretending not to see, out of fear.
I knew that if I was ever the boss, and I had to let someone go, I would find a nicer way to do it, that protected the dignity of the person and of the coworkers and culture.
Meanwhile, back in the (il)legal department:
Was he pleading the Fifth?
The leader of my group within the legal department stopped talking to me when it was clear I wouldn't break the law. He simply stopped talking to me. It didn't matter if I had a question, or said good morning, or came up to his desk for any reason. He would just pretend I wasn't there, and say nothing, in front of everyone in our open-seating department, possibly trying to encourage others to ignore me too or at least letting them know it was ok to do so as part of his twisted "team player" idea (more like a group bullying or ostracization idea).
I remember thinking: does he practice this at home in the mirror? Does he practice being stone-faced and looking through someone who is addressing him? We might call that childish, yet that is an insult to children, isn't it? I think instead it is cruel in an adult way, trying to belittle someone and hurt their feelings, and trying to get other people to do it too. Breaking off communication is breaking off any relationship, any acknowledgment of that person's existence and humanity. If you read the posts on my work as a lawyer in Germany, you might remember that some of the German male lawyers who didn't want an American female associate simply refused to talk with or acknowledge me. Has this particular technique of law firm or corporate or social antagonism been studied or addressed enough?
If I hadn't quit, would a further step have been trying to make me wear a yellow star, to mark me as a non-person as far as the firm was concerned? Or some sort of "non-team-player" badge? Ha, maybe I should have shown up in a yellow star of my own volition, in Hamburg and at Andersen! What do you think the response would have been?
Dallas disaster
My direct boss, the one who ostensibly oversaw 3 of us other attorneys and was never seen to do any work himself, instead reading the newspaper at his desk during the day, announced at one point that he and I would go to Dallas so that I could meet the internal clients in person. It feels strange to call him my boss, although technically he was, as I never got any feedback on work from him, or had anything like what I would think of as a normal relationship with a boss. Why don't we call him Reads Newspaper at Desk, or how about underboss.
Underboss and I flew from Chicago to Dallas, and we went to Andersen's Dallas office, but we didn't meet the internal clients. Strictly speaking, we did meet some other Andersen employees: we sat down with someone with whom I didn't work, we crashed some meeting or other, and someone else said a quick hi on his way out of the office without breaking his stride. But I never did meet in person the people with whom I had weekly calls and who ridiculed me for trying to do my job, such as for wanting to discuss alternatives or solutions to going over Andersen's own risk limits on their deals. (I used to imagine them wearing black cowboy hats and conducting business in a raucus and rowdy saloon, like the villans in an old western movie, but that was uncharitable of me.) It was clear to me by that time that the consultants didn't respect lawyers and ignored us -- or at least that's how they treated me -- unless the lawyers were pawns or facilitators of their recklessness, so why should they bother to meet me in person? Again, that was my perspective. In any case, there was no agenda for the trip, at least none that I was shown; no specified people, places, or times added to my calendar. We just showed up in Dallas. Did underboss try to set up proper meetings and fail? Did he try to set up meetings at all? What was the point of this trip?
Perhaps even weirder, or perhaps this was the point of the trip: underboss tried to get me drunk, at the airport on the way to Dallas, and at a very expensive wine-pairing dinner in Dallas. He did not try to take advantage sexually. Instead, I sensed he was trying to get personal information from me. Why? Toward what end? Some sort of blackmail project? Is that how he got out of doing any work; he just blackmailed people? Or was that his real job? Or was there some other goal behind all of this? I don't know. It made no sense to me. Here is what happened:
At the airport, waiting for our flight, underboss suggested we get a bite to eat, and we sat down at a restaurant. I said no to alcohol, as I drank very little at that time (today I don't drink at all; I never really enjoyed the taste or feeling, and after even half a glass of wine I just fell asleep). My boss seemed disappointed that I wasn't drinking. He started telling me things about his personal life, and then asking me about mine. This seemed obvious, manipulative, and creepy to me, and I didn't know to what end. I avoided answering his questions, not because I had anything to hide, but because I didn't trust his motives. He never came off as what you would call a nice or friendly person, and he certainly never supported me at work. He was one of those pompous types with nothing to back it up; rotund and bespectacled, he seemed to affect a kind of snobbish aspect, though it wasn't clear what he was snobby about. What was his game?
After we landed in Dallas, we checked in at the beautiful old Adolphus Hotel. Underboss suggested we go to dinner. I didn't want to, but said yes, I guess still trying to be a professional and make the most of this job. Underboss presented himself as quite the gourmand, and ordered for us an enormous multi-course meal where every course came with a specially paired wine. I told him I would never eat or drink that much, and wasn't the whole trip with expensive hotel and dinner a bit extravagant. He said don't worry, the firm is paying. (I always wondered at the lavish expenditures I saw people at Andersen make. This was very unlike my law firms.) Again he kept trying to get me to open up about my personal life, over this long and exhausting dinner of what was for me too much food and wine, even though I just picked at the dishes and took little sips of the wine. At almost 5'2" and not quite 100 pounds, I was never a big eater or drinker (unless you count chocolate, life-long obsession). Again I resisted sharing too much information about myself, not because there was anything to hide, but because he was creepy and I didn't trust him and I had already seen the old trick at previous jobs of someone using my authenticity against me.
The next morning, after too much food and drink even though I had tried not to have too much, I felt sick. Since we had no meetings scheduled, I called underboss and told him I was sick after our big wine dinner that was indeed excellently prepared but that I knew I shouldn't have had, and that instead of meeting at 9 to go over to the Dallas office I needed another hour to see if I felt better, and I could meet him there at 10. He said ok.
Only apparently it wasn't ok. Apparently underboss now had the ammunition that maybe he really had been trying to gather against me, because he told our boss in Chicago, the group lead -- hey why don't we call him bullyboss going forward -- that I had blown off a 9 am meeting and was not punctual. Wow. That's like the kid on the playground who splashes you with mud and then tattles on you to the teacher for getting dirty. What on Earth did these people want from me? Oh yeah, to break the law.
After we got back to Chicago, bullyboss broke his rule of not talking to me and said he wanted to talk to me. He took me to a windowless conference room, where he asked if there was anything I wanted to tell him about the Dallas trip. I knew whatever was coming wasn't good, but I still didn't know what it was. Like what, I asked? He said he had heard that I missed a meeting and messed up the whole trip. Ah, I thought, so this is the game we're playing: underboss went behind my back to tell bullyboss a negative story about me, which maybe bullyboss had instructed him to get in the first place? How would you interpret the situation? I explained that I had been sick that morning, and had communicated that, and that there weren't any meetings anyway, so I didn't miss anything or mess anything up. But of course this wasn't about reason, it was about bullying me for not being a "team player" and not approving deals that broke SEC, IRS, and internal rules. So there I was, with bullyboss berating me in a windowless conference room. To give you a fuller visual image, I should tell you that bullyboss was very slight physically, small and short.
Even so, the scenario seemed threatening in a way, or, more accurately, as though it were meant to seem threatening: bullyboss marching me into the windowless conference room while everyone in our open-seating office could see him marching me into the windowless conference room, and then bullyboss criticizing and castigating me in the windowless conference room while I just stared at him and thought Yes this hurts my feelings but truly what a shameful coward this guy is. Yes, to me, these men were cowards, in loathsome violation of their oath as lawyers and of basic human ethics. I didn't feel so much scared as disgusted. Bullies are pretty much always cowards, aren't they. Someone who is confident doesn't need to hurt others. And a true boss is supposed to support the team in doing great work and being part of a great culture, not bully the team and persecute people who are trying to do the right thing. What a disaster.
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| I have no photos from that disaster of a Dallas trip, and, to bring in some positivity for us, am instead including photos from a Montreal trip I took with my mother a year or so prior. She hadn't been to Montreal since before I was born, and I had never been, so voilà! |
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| Erskine and American United Church, Montreal. First photo: Le Chateau condo building, Montreal. Thank you to a dear friend, also in chocolate, who told me what these buildings are. They were near our hotel, the Ritz, where I treated Mom and me due to a very favorable exchange rate! |
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| Here I am, age 29-ish, at the Montreal Ritz. This was a working vacation of course, but inspiring, and I got to travel with my mother which was a joy! Too bad she couldn't have come with me on the Dallas trip with (or instead of) underboss. |
Whistleblowing blues
Should I have tattled on Andersen to the government, been a whistleblower? Keep in mind that I didn't work on any Enron projects or know Enron was a client. But I did see violations of SEC and IRS rules. Also, important to me in this calculation: I didn't see the firm directly hurt other people; I saw it jeopardize itself. Still, that meant jeopardizing the jobs of the tens of thousands of people who worked there worldwide. Keep in mind too that the SEC's Office of the Whistleblower wasn't created until 2012, not only after the accounting scandals of the early 2000s but also after the financial scandals of 2007, and this was 2001. (Grim side note: Andersen was involved in two of the ten worst accounting scandals of all time.) Still, should I have contacted the government? Who at the government could I have called? Should I have contacted the media, or the Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission? What would be the consequences?
There didn't seem to be anyone in the Andersen legal department I could talk this over with. Anyone at a level above my bullyboss was inaccessible. I tried to talk to the head of the legal department once, simply to say hello, when he was in town from New York (so much about Andersen's geography made no sense, such as why the head of the legal department was based in New York while his department was at company headquarters in Chicago), but he wouldn't even say hello or look at me. I guess he was being a "team player" by ignoring me?
I didn't talk to anyone in HR, as they were known to be unhelpful for pretty much anything pro-employee. (At my exit interview, I told a woman from HR what I had seen; she took no notes and seemed to care not at all. In fact, I asked her: aren't you going to take notes, and don't you care at all? She did not reply.) I did talk informally with a couple of lawyer friends outside of Andersen, but no one had real advice. I also talked with a woman partner at Andersen as mentioned, not a lawyer, and she seemed sympathetic and cautious; she agreed with me that the firm did things in a specific (implied: criminal?) manner, and said that there wasn't much one could do about it. Back in those days, there didn't seem to be anyone to tell, or any path toward a positive outcome, or any way to keep your career if you tattled (if you wanted to keep your career), or anything to do other than quit. I didn't seem to have a way effectively to access Covey's 8th Habit -- and he hadn't written the book yet -- namely finding your "voice" or personal significance and helping others find theirs, or maybe I wasn't in the right place or time to do it, or at the right place yet on my path? Or maybe since Andersen was going to crash anyway due to its role with Enron, and some of what was in shadow was going to be brought to light, my efforts at light-shining were not needed there as much?
The situation reminded me again of elementary school: If you're a child being bullied, what are your options? Contact the government? Contact your elementary school's HR office? In fourth grade, at age 7, when my parents divorced and I had to go to a new school in the middle of the school year, I was no longer surrounded by the pretty decent kids of my prior school but instead found mean jealous kids at my new school, who bullied me for being petite, smart, and of mixed heritage. For being me! I told the teacher, and she walked away. Walked away! There wasn't a whistleblower office for kids, or Lady Gaga's anti-bullying foundation, or apparently anyone to turn to. So, I learned how to stand up to bullies and handle situations myself, non-violently to be sure, such as by communicating boundaries, telling the bullies just what I thought of them, and sometimes making unexpected allies in the process -- occasionally bullies themselves would become friendly. (Sort of proto-8th Habit, if you're reading along in Covey.) That part about bullies becoming friendly didn't happen at Andersen.
If you remember the Enron scandal and the talk of whistleblowers at that time, or if you don't or were in another country or were a child then or not yet born, it always struck me that the individuals who were referred to as Enron whistleblowers really weren't quite whistleblowers, at least not before they were subpoenaed to testify before Congress after Enron went bankrupt. A whistleblower is someone who alerts the public to wrongdoing, or who alerts the government which is supposed to represent and be the public. But the people who were referred to as Enron whistleblowers didn't alert the public or the government, they alerted Enron. For example, this Enron vice president wrote an anonymous letter to the Enron chairman about her suspicions of accounting fraud. But the fraud didn't become publicly known until the company declared bankruptcy. Still, she did testify before Congress. And, she became unemployable, making her living as a speaker instead. (Speakers bureaus: call me!)
Another non-whistleblower whistleblower who was also an Enron exec and who also talked with the chairman about fraud -- and who sold his Enron stock for millions of dollars and retired at age 43 before the company imploded -- was found dead from what was judged a suicide before he could give his scheduled testimony to Congress.
And, years later, I heard a strange speech at a women's luncheon in Chicago by a woman who claimed to be an Enron whistleblower yet lied about what job she held at the company, and told a story that somehow just didn't ring true to me. For example, she kept saying in her talk she was "in the legal profession." As a lawyer, I thought maybe that meant paralegal, because if you're a lawyer you generally admit to being a lawyer, and the legal secretaries / legal assistants I worked with were upfront about their jobs too and indeed were proud of their specialized training and knowledge. (Side note: I worked with a couple of really wonderful administrative assistants at Andersen; they were the ones I felt sorry for when the firm imploded and everyone lost their jobs.) So if the speaker was in the legal profession at Enron but wasn't a lawyer or an admin, that left paralegal, right? She also talked about what basically sounded like letting herself be bought off by Enron stock options; was this a display of transparency and vulnerability, or unrepentant greed?
After her talk, I happened to run into her in the lobby of the hotel where the event was being held. I told her I had listened with great interest to her remarks, and asked her if she could clarify what her job was at Enron, so I could understand; was she not a lawyer then, but a paralegal perhaps? She stared straight ahead, not looking at me, and repeated that she was "in the legal profession." How could I believe anything she had just said in her talk, for which evidently she was highly compensated by the women's organization that brought her in as keynote, if she couldn't even admit to what her job was? USA Today ultimately exposed her as a fraud. Can you imagine fraudulently charging an organization tens of thousands of dollars to speak to them fraudulently about your role in a fraud? Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised if someone who worked at Enron was shady even after the end of Enron? Come to think of it, the group that held that women's luncheon turned out to have some shady characters too; maybe this is another instance of birds of a feather flocking together? Count me out.
I am not criticizing whistleblowers or almost-whistleblowers or inadvertent whistleblowers or anyone or anything of that nature. (Though I am not in favor of a liar capitalizing on lies; that is part of why we need whistleblowers.) On the contrary, I believe in speaking out, sometimes to my own detriment. These memoirs are a form of blowing the whistle on the misery- and misogyny-filled mess that was the legal profession as I experienced it. The point about whistleblowing questions at Enron and Andersen is simply that whistleblowing could be a very murky business back then, and difficult to accomplish, even when you knew something big. (The point is also that I just didn't fit in with or have the same mindset as the people I was surrounded by.) I knew I was being asked to break the law in non-Enron matters, and I knew I wouldn't do it, so after looking for options, and being bullied by my boss and others, I quit.
Today we know that no matter what I had chosen to do or not do in terms of alerting anyone outside the firm about the violations I saw, it might have made little to no practical difference as the firm was about to crash due to its role in the Enron debacle anyway. But that was not part of my calculation at the time of course, and I went through much anguish thinking about what I should do.
Also today, there are more protections in place for whistleblowers, and even financial incentives, yet it can still be dangerous, complicated, and career-ending. Here is a recent article on pros and cons and how-tos of whistleblowing today.
Rash
As you may recall if you have been following these memoirs, illness seemed to lie in wait for me at various lawyer jobs. I had a low fever every day at Lawyer Job 3, which went away at Lawyer Job 4 where I developed an eye tic. The eye tic went away when I quit that job; are you ready to hear what physical ailment befell me at Andersen, Lawyer Job 5? A rash! On my neck. My mother noticed it one day when I was wearing my hair up. I looked in the mirror and twisted my head to the side, and saw a red rash toward the back of my neck. So that's why my neck had been itching; it wasn't just my hair or collar. Over time, the rash on my neck didn't go away, and got a little bit worse, so I went to the doctor. The doctor asked me a few questions, ruling out allergies and the like I suppose, and then asked: are you under a lot of stress?
I burst into tears. I felt incredibly stressed from the pressure at my job, the retaliation because I wouldn't break the law, conference calls with mean internal clients, long hours that I hadn't expected in an in-house setting with lower pay than at a private law firm, and just plain meaningless work, at a firm where I obviously had no future.
The doctor didn't really comfort me or anything, but said there were some visiting Swiss doctors at the hospital and could they come look at my rash too. A bit stunned, I said ok. Suddenly around 6 more doctors were peering at my neck, saying they had never seen such a rash, and expressing great interest as they debated and discussed and took pictures of this rash.
This to me felt like a terrible low point. Had I gone to Harvard and Harvard Law School so that I could get so stressed out at a firm where people had no values or respect, that I developed a rash that doctors could come stare at?
Absolutely not. Once again, I finally listened to my body. I filled my prescription for a little tube of neck rash cream, and quit my job.
After I quit, and had no more health insurance, I went to get the prescription refilled. The rash was clearing up, and I thought a second round of cream would help speed the rash's departure. But without insurance, the cream would have been over $100. When I showed the pharmacist my expired insurance card to try to explain that I hadn't expected such a high price since I was used to the price with insurance, he sneered and looked as though he wanted to throw me out of the hospital where I'd been born. Maybe he'd seen a lot of expired insurance cards. I decided the rash would just have to go away without any more cream. It did. I am lucky to enjoy radiant health post-law. What about people here in the US who aren't so lucky, and also find themselves without health insurance at one point or another? If you have started to think, reading this post or multiple posts, that I am radical (radical = believer in empathy and equality, fairness and justice), you are correct.
Last day
I gave bullyboss a positive business book, mirroring the fact that I'd been given a positive business book at my atrocious job prior to this in some ways even more atrocious job, and also mirroring the fact that bullyboss had made me read from a book at a team meeting to call me out as not-a-team-player because I wouldn't break the rules or the law. Bullyboss ignored me, and that was my last day.
When I told my internal clients I was leaving, were they relieved? One of them, part of the Texas team I spoke with on weekly conference calls and used to envision wearing black cowboy hats in a rowdy saloon due to their cruel words whenever I suggested we not break internal rules, surprised me in a positive way: he apologized. He said it was wrong the way he and his co-workers had treated me. Apology accepted.
And then there were four
After Andersen crashed and closed, a friend who worked at a Big Four accounting firm (the Big Five were down to the Big Four; are you also thinking of the title And Then There Were None?) told me that many Andersen partners and employees started working at her firm, and kept doing things in their old fashion. Her firm's management had to send out memos and 30-minute voicemail blasts reminding everyone to follow the law.
Subpoena shenanigans
After I left Andersen, I was subpoenaed. Not for anything involving Enron, nor for anything involving the unrelated SEC and IRS violations I had seen, but as a witness in a wrongful dismissal case (not involving the pastor's wife but someone else). The subpoena came while I was speaking at a Mary Kay event (I still loved that hand cream I had discovered during Lawyer Job 3). It was weird: there I was in a room full of women, and suddenly this man walks in and hands me an envelope. Was I being stalked again (see previous post)? I asked the group if we should open it, and they said yes. So we paused, and opened it, and saw that I was being ordered to go to court and testify. It was about whether I had heard bullyboss say something about another employee, which I had. And it seemed to come from the side I had been asked to be a witness for, the side of the person who claimed to have been wrongly fired. So why couldn't they have just mailed me the subpoena, as happened with the also ridiculous subpoena in the aftermath of Lawyer Job 4 (previous post)? Or called me up and asked me to accept it? I had already said I would say what I had heard; why did they have to go through such theater for what basically amounted to a calendar confirmation?
The case actually went to trial instead of settling, and I went to the court date, as agreed and anyway as subpoenaed, and saw that I was the only witness for the one side. Without additional witnesses or testimony, it seemed to me -- and ultimately to the jury -- that the case wasn't perhaps as fleshed out as it could have been, as I could speak only to what I had heard, not to anything else that may have been needed to prove the case.
But, none of that was up to me, and, even though the judge seemed somewhat unfriendly or irritated by the whole thing, maybe he had his reasons and anyway that was not up to me either but up to the judge. I was just ready to go home. Instead, I found myself locked in the courtroom. It sounds kind of like a nightmare, right? The judge announced that the courtroom doors would be locked while the jury stepped away. This was an important precaution, I'm sure, but it was one that I was not prepared for, and I suddenly felt claustrophobic, with bullyboss sitting there -- ignoring me of course. I hadn't felt claustrophobic in the windowless conference room before but now I felt that way in the Daley Plaza courtroom. Maybe it was because in the conference room, I could get up and leave, but I couldn't leave the courtroom. I felt trapped. I felt very happy when the jury came back in, and I could quickly go out.
Lawyer Jobs 4 and 5 both dragged me into odd post-job lawsuit experiences involving other people's disputes. If you are a regular reader of these memoirs, I'm quite certain you have been noticing crazy patterns and parallels among my various experiences as a lawyer, and in any case, I'm sure you can see why I was tired of it all.
Was Andersen grasping at straws from the grave?
Nothing involving Andersen seemed able to unfold cleanly, and I was surprised -- maybe I shouldn't have been -- when their 2002 conviction was overturned in 2005 over whether jury instructions in the case involving document shredding had been too vague. This didn't seem to change anything in reality, at least not from my perspective, and probably also not from the perspectives of people who had lost their jobs, life savings, or loved ones, due to the Enron scandal at the heart of it all.
Where are they now
Today, the group lead -- bullyboss -- who told me if I didn't break the law he'd make my life miserable is the general counsel for an IT consulting firm with $2.5 billion in revenue. Just for comparison, Andersen had $9.3 billion in revenue when it went out of business in 2002. Does he break the law at his current company too? Threaten employees and then retaliate if they don't break the law for him? According to the website of his current company, core values include integrity and respect; are these just words, or are these values implemented? The company where he now works is apparently a spin-off from an Andersen spin-off. Does that mean the culture is similar to the Andersen culture that I experienced, or do they take integrity and respect -- and the law -- seriously? The legal profession has a place for bullyboss, but not for me.
I first looked up information online about bullyboss last year in fact, when I ran into him, after all those years, at a conference held by a law firm where a friend of mine is a partner. Seeing him brought me back to that trauma. I felt surprised, then uncomfortable, and then angry that this person hadn't gone to prison, or apparently faced any consequences for his actions, but instead had a high-paying job at another company. I told this to my friend, right there at the conference. My friend was wonderful about it, confirmed immediately with one of her partners that this was who I thought it was, and apologized that I had to experience the situation in the past and then relive it. Suddenly, I had the urge to let bullyboss know I was there, but I didn't want to talk to him. So, when it was time for Q&A after the keynote, I stood, introduced myself, and asked a Q. I like to do that at these things anyway, so that it isn't just men asking all the questions and steering the conversations. I don't know what bullyboss felt or thought when he saw me, if anything. Maybe I was just one of hundreds of lawyers or others he's bullied or threatened before, who knows?
A beast that grows back two heads?
During my current research I also came across the fact that the Andersen name has been revived. In fact it's been revived twice, and two firms calling themselves Andersen have gone to court to have their trademark issue resolved. I was shocked that anyone wants to use or be associated with that name, and doubly shocked that two (2!) firms want to use and be associated with that name. Is it because some oldsters older than I am remember the true old days when the name Arthur Andersen stood for integrity? Is it because no one else remembers anything from 20 years ago when the name Arthur Andersen stood for fraud? To me, calling a firm Andersen would be like naming a housing development Auschwitz.
Terrible lesson: I was in a rigged game, played by cruel, greedy, law-breaking incompetents, with absolutely no place for me. Another way to put this plainly, through an example: a US vice president widely known for lack of moral behavior was involved with Enron, and I wanted nothing to do with a situation involving one of the most despised men in American history, reviled for his role in torture and other war crimes, and for his avarice, corruption, and more.
Positive lesson: I cannot work for people whose values are less than mine, and indeed I have the choice not to.
Another positive lesson, clarified much later: A good way to live is every day to do something positive for body, mind, soul, and someone else. This builds strength, personal growth, spiritual development, and compassion. I had been searching for this path, or I was on the path of putting together these simple ideas into something that would be profound for me. Seeing negative examples showed me what I needed to do, and not to do. Inner peace creates world peace.
You can see why I left the law, yes? Did I finally leave the legal profession after this job? Yes and no. Believe it or not, I tried to get another job as a lawyer after this. But the attacks of 9/11 happened, and no one was hiring. In fact, I was at home, working remotely during my last two weeks at Andersen, when the attacks came. My sister lived in New York City at the time, and thank heavens she was unharmed. Phones were down and the internet seemed slow, but we finally reached her by email. My family and I were all alive, and I had no income. I moved out of my apartment, which had been above my budget anyway and which I had moved into for its security when a crazy former date was stalking me in his Mercedes (previous post). My building managers were happy to let me exit the lease, as I didn't know how I would keep paying the rent. I placed some things in storage, and sold others; one of the building managers bought my beloved sleigh bed and navy blue velvet sofa.
I moved in with my mother to regroup; she lived in a small condo and had certainly not expected any of her grown children such as the Harvard educated lawyer (yours truly!) to move back in with her one day (spoiler alert: it wouldn't be the last time), yet she was and is awesomely kind, and there I was.
A note: if you experienced 9/11 in any way, I'm sure you also have vivid memories of that time. I remember that for two weeks before that day, I kept seeing, in my mind's eye, a plane crashing into my apartment building. It was terrible and I couldn't shake the vision. Then it really happened, at the twin towers in New York and at the Pentagon in Washington, DC. Other buildings in other cities were spared when all flights were grounded. I know someone who later realized they were on a pre-9/11 practice flight with some of the killers, I know someone who was in one of the towers when it was hit and who managed to get out, and I know there were 10 Harvard alumni among the 3,000 people who died in the attacks, while there were 6,000 people who were injured in the attacks.
These were heavy days.
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| In the previous post, I promised you photos of my new apartment at that time: to escape a stalker, I moved out of my classic vintage / art deco building with no security, and into a new vanilla box building with solid security. I decided to experiment with bold paint, and had the living room painted red! I missed my built-in bookshelves, so bought new bookshelves and had them painted red too! |
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| I'm sure a small red living room is a "design don't" for most people, yet it gave the space some character, was fun to discuss with a dear interior decorator friend and with the charming boyfriend I dated after my divorce for 8 or 9 months, and it gave me a jolt of energy! |
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| Here and below: views from my north-facing apartment, on the 51st (!) floor, with Lake Michigan visible as part of the negative space in the distance. |
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The nation and the economy in the recession of that time seemed to be collapsing like my already-collapsed disastrous career as a lawyer. I had no job, no insurance, no money (student loans, though), no home of my own. What to do next?
To be continued...!
Valerie Beck
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