Free The Color of Law by Mark Gimenez Page B

defense attorney to take your place. It’s a simple mathematical calculation, Scotty.”
    “Dan, what the hell are you talking about?”
    Dan stood and stepped over to the grease board mounted on the wall under the head of an elk, opened the wood doors, and picked up a marker. Writing as he spoke, he said, “Say the case takes a thousand lawyer-hours, worst-case scenario. We pay a defense lawyer—now I’m not talking a summa cum laude graduate; I’m talking anyone with a license—fifty dollars an hour—”
    “
Fifty an hour?
We charge a hundred an hour for our summer clerks’ time.”
    “They’re top of their class. I’m talking a bottom-of-the-class lawyer, Scott, someone who needs fifty bucks an hour. So a thousand hours at fifty an hour, that’s a fifty-thousand-dollar expense to the firm.”
    Scott knew his senior partner had thought this through because Dan Ford didn’t part with fifty cents easily much less fifty grand. He was a lawyer who calculated the profit the firm generated on each copy machine—forty cents per page—and made damn sure the copiers ran around the clock, spitting out paper and adding almost a million dollars to the firm’s annual bottom line. Ford Stevens marked up the cost of everything in its offices, animate and inanimate, turning a profit on every associate, paralegal, secretary, typist, courier, copy, fax, and phone call. And Dan Ford kept tabs on everyone and everything.
    He was saying, “But that frees up those thousand lawyer-hours for you to work for our paying clients at three-fifty an hour. That’s three hundred fifty thousand dollars in revenues for the firm. Deduct the fifty thousand we pay the defense lawyer, and the firm still nets three hundred thousand, versus losing the entire three hundred fifty thousand if you have to work the case.”
    Scott’s spirits started to lift. “Will Buford go for that?”
    “Sure. Before the federal court had a public defender’s office, we got appointed all the time. Hiring them out was standard operating procedure for the big firms.” Dan shrugged. “And besides, it’s a win-win situation: she gets a lawyer who knows more about criminal defense than you do, and you get rid of her.”
    Dan closed the doors to the grease board and said, “You know a cheap criminal defense attorney?”
             
    RO ERT HERR N, ATT NEY-AT-L W, the sign out front read because the landlord was too damn cheap to replace the letters that had been shot off. Didn’t matter, it was the only sign printed in English, and most people in this part of town couldn’t read it anyway. This attorney’s office was not in the best part of town; it was in a piece-of-shit strip center in East Dallas. He was a street lawyer; hence his office was at street level. He would often arrive to find someone sleeping on the stoop. He never kicked them awake as the other business owners in the strip did: hell, the guy might be his next best client. And he never called the police, which would be a monumental waste of a phone call; the police only kept the peace in the parts of town that mattered. He simply stepped over them and entered the law offices of Robert Herrin, Esq.
    His professional address was a thirty- by twenty-foot space, one room and a tiny john, lodged between a Mexican bar and a Korean donut shop; he ate donuts for breakfast and drank beer for dinner. The roof leaked, the ceiling tiles were discolored, and the scent of mold permeated the place. The linoleum on the floor was cracked and curling at the corners like elves’ shoes. His desk was metal, as was his chair, but it swiveled and had a nice seat cushion. Fortunately, he was a pretty fair typist because he couldn’t afford a secretary. And here Robert Herrin, Attorney-at-Law, had eked out a legal living for the last eleven years, representing those members of society who wouldn’t get past the security guards at a downtown law firm.
    He was a fixture in this East Dallas neighborhood—he