The Rainmaker

Don't compromise yourself - you're all you have.

I'm alone and outgunned, scared and inexperienced, but I'm right.

I don't feel stupid, just inadequate. After three years of studying the law, I'm very much aware of how little I know.

Please give me fifty more years of work and fun, then an instant death when I'm sleeping.

A battered wife is a married woman until she gets a divorce. Or until she kills the bastard.

All students enter law school with a certain amount of idealism and desire to serve the public, but after three years of brutal competition we care for nothing but the right job with the right firm where we can make partner in seven years and earn big bucks.

The coffee arrives, and we backslide into what lawyers do best---talking about other lawyers.

life is too short to despise people who simply can't help what they've done.

He's my client, and he's counting on me. I'll take him, warts and all.

We cuss them because we're not good enough for them. We hate them because they wouldn't look at us, couldn't be bothered to give us an interview. I guess there's a Trent & Brent in every city, in every field. I didn't make it and I don't belong, so I'll just go through life hating them.

There are few things in life worse than a long-winded lawyer.

The company later went broke, and of course all blame was directed at the lawyers. Not once did I hear any talk that maybe a trace of mismanagement could in any way have contributed to the bankruptcy.

Anyone can cook a trout. The real art is in hooking the damned thing.

It takes just one, he says over and over. You hear that all the time in this business. One big case, and you can retire. That's one reason lawyers do so many sleazy things, like full-color ads in the yellow pages, and billboards, and placards on city buses, and telephone solicitation. You hold your nose, ignore the stench of what you're doing, ignore the snubs and snobbery of big-firm lawyers, because it takes only one.

I am motivated by thoughts of my sorrowful little client and the screwing that he got. I'm the only lawyer Donny Ray has, and it will take much more than paper to slow me down.

F. Franklin the Fourth has a job with a firm rich in heritage, money and pretentiousness, a firm vastly superior to Brodnax and Speer. His sidekicks at the moment are W. Harper Whittenson, an arrogant little snot who will, thankfully, leave Memphis and practice with a mega-firm in Dallas; J. Townsend Gross, who has accepted a position with another huge firm; and James Straybeck, a sometimes friendly sort who's suffered three years of law school without an initial to place before his name or numerals to stick after it. With such a short name, his future as a big-firm lawyer is in jeopardy. I doubt if he'll make it.

I can feel the competition here, very much like the first few weeks of law school when we were terribly concerned with each other's initial progress. I nod at a few acquaintances, silently hoping they flunk the exam because they're silently hoping I Collapse too. Such is the nature of the profession.

Like a snake creeping through the undergrowth, I sneak into the law school well past noon and hours after both of my scheduled classes have broken up.

underwriting,” an odious but not illegal practice. When a claim

preferred means of treatment that no one but a quack would claim

SUDDEN AFFLUENCE triggers a desire for the better things in life.