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Volume 25, Number 1 & 2 (2001) reprinted by permission Legal Studies Forum COHEN, ZELINSKI & HALLORAN LOWELL B. KOMIE At Northwestern Law School in Chicago that spring of 1955, jobs were posted on a bulletin board on 3x5 cards, all neatly typed by the dean’s secretary. In those days the law firms were permitted to advertise “Christian applicants only.” I, being Jewish, was appalled, particularly since the portrait of the Jewish lawyer who apparently donated the building, Levi Mayer Hall, was hanging within fifty feet of the bulletin board. Levi Mayer had been a prominent lawyer in Chicago, the senior partner of a large downtown firm. I immediately went to the dean’s office and objected to his secretary, a placid, silent, young woman. She promised languidly to make my objection known to the dean, but nothing was ever done, and the “Christian only” ads continued behind the locked glass of the employment bulletin board. I looked for several jobs that summer while I studied for the bar with Thomas Hardy—our bar review course teacher, not the English poet—whose precept has always remained with me: The 60/40 rule. Sixty percent of any recovery for the lawyer, 40 percent for the client. I’ve never been able to apply it, but I remember the roguish and able Mr. Hardy with affection for his precept. Unfortunately, even after his review course I failed the bar exam because out of four essay questions, I only finished two. Each of my answers were worthy of a law review article, but even then, law reviews didn’t publish bar exam answers, and the two completely unanswered questions did me in as a lawyer for that season. So I answered an ad on the law school bulletin board for a small firm with a Jewish, Polish, and Irish name: Cohen, Zelinski and Halloran. They welcomed me, hired me, and paid me $35 a week, with a private, windowless office, and I was their law clerk, manqué lawyer, for the summer of 1955. The offices of Cohen, Zelinski and Halloran were on the seventh floor of a twelve-story office building in down-town Chicago. As you entered their law firm door, there was a small reception room with a beautiful woman at the desk as receptionist. Her name was Giulietta. In my memory, Giulietta remains classically beautiful and classically profane, as if she were the Mona Lisa always talking on the phone obscenely to her mother. She was very moody, with glistening black hair, and she lit her cigarettes dramatically and flourished them as she talked. At least half of the clients sitting in the reception room barely spoke English and really were too worried about their legal problems to listen to Giulietta. We were friends, though, and I liked her. The first office on the right, past the reception room belonged to a lawyer who was never there: Sam Blumberg. He worked full time at the post office and had come out of law school during the Depression and never had built a practice. He had a few clients and did some collection work for dentists, hunting and pecking on an old, square, black Royal typewriter. He kept a tiny padlock on his telephone so no one else could use it. There were two other offices down that corridor occupied by tenants of the firm. One was the office of a real estate lawyer. He was really a landlord and owned some large residential apartment buildings. He didn’t practice law anymore. He kept his door closed most of the time. The other tenant was a solo practitioner who also sold casualty and auto insurance. He was bald, with a neatly trimmed red mustache, very business-like, prompt, and efficient. He had a large active general practice. I remember most of all how he controlled his clients by his telephone voice. He was always curt and definite. He never engaged in small talk and he was combative and argumentative, all good qualities for a lawyer. However, at that time I didn’t realize it, and I wondered how he could get away with shouting at his clients. The main office of Cohen, Zelinski and Halloran, the central room of the suite, was occupied by the three part-ners who had all gone to law school together and had begun the firm shortly after graduation. There were three large desks, all in the same room, and everyone could hear each other’s phone conversations and dictation and keep tabs on each other. The room was full of files and there was also another central filing room with steel cases, floor to ceiling, full of files. The files were kept in brown manila envelope jackets with the firm’s name and address neatly printed at the bottom and black-ruled margins on the front for entry of the case’s progression. You could pick up a file, glance at the front of the jacket, and immediately tell the status of a case. The cases were mostly personal injury cases, roughly 75 percent of the 2,000 files. Most of the personal injury cases came from Michael Zelinski, whose family owned a well-known tavern on Milwaukee Avenue on the Northwest Side. Mike worked there as a part-time night bartender, and every morning walked in with his pockets stuffed with cards and notes and cash from clients who had retained him across the bar. Mike Zelinski also became my personal tutor. He was determined that I pass the next bar exam in September. After work, at least twice a week, he’d first go down to the bar in the lobby and have a shot and a beer, and then come back upstairs to the office to lecture me. He was a brilliant young lawyer and very patient and tolerant. He had a slight lisp and his glasses were always down on his nose and he was kind-hearted with a square, solid face. He was also tough and confident. I’d gone to a fancy law school, Northwestern. I think Mike and the other two partners went to John Marshall, a city school. He taught me to be succinct, not to write a treatise to show off my erudition; just answer the question as quickly as possible and then move on to the next question. I was also given the job of drafting complaints and motions in minor cases—simple property damage and collection cases. I’ve always been a master of complication and I’m still that kind of thinker, but for those four months that summer I became a master of simplicity. I passed the bar exam and became a lawyer that September. I immediately bought a sleek, green Triumph two-door, racing coupe on a three-year installment plan, and the payments probably exceeded my monthly salary. That was okay with me because I needed a car to impress women. The evening lectures from Mike stopped, and I was given a raise, maybe to $50 a week and a percentage of any collection cases that I could collect. I was also given a staggering court call. Instead of being able to leisurely pursue women, I had to drive my beautiful new car into the scummiest areas of the city and consort with criminals, thieves, burglars, cops, bail bondsmen, judges, bailiffs on the take, and all the effluent of the corrupt Chicago court system. Every morning before I went off to court I would sit at Jack Cohen’s desk and go over the daily court call. This was typed by Giulietta, ideally the night before, but usually that morning and usually late, so we’d only have a few minutes to go over the cases. Then I’d rush out to court or down to the parking lot to my car. Jack Cohen’s eyes burn in my memory. Both Jack and Mike Zelinski are dead, but as I write this I can still feel myself sitting at Jack’s desk being instructed by him. He was a short, handsome man with slick, black hair and dark eyes. He smoked a pipe and smiled easily. He was often on the phone talking in Yiddish to his mother. He tried to calm her staccato directions with “sha, sha, mom,” (quiet, Ma, take it easy). Mike Zelinski also had to take daily calls from his mother, who was a real martinet, a tough Polish tavern keeper who kept him constantly running errands. Nothing would ever please her. Mike was a tough lawyer, but she had him whipped, and already he was beginning to drink heavily. The last time I saw him was more than fifteen years ago in an elevator on LaSalle Street. His face was disfigured by cancer and he’d just come back from New York, from Sloan-Kettering Memorial Hospital. “Too many cigarettes and too much scotch whiskey,” he said to me and shrugged. Then he squared his shoulders and headed off to court. He looked back at me once. Jack Cohen, though, wasn’t destroyed by his mother. He could handle her and still run the office. He was married. Mike was single. So Jack went home each night, and Mike went downstairs to the bar and then back to the family tavern. Still, the business came from Mike and his tavern contacts. Jack Cohen was the negotiator. Every morning he had a stack of ten or fifteen files on his desk and he’d call insurance company adjusters or defense lawyers to try to settle cases. These settlements were the lifeblood of the office. The formula for settlement of small cases was three or four times the “specials” (items of special damage). If you had $1,000 in lost wages and $2,000 in medical bills from a collision and had a bad whiplash, Jack might settle the case for $9,000. He’d take a third for his fee (not 60/40-but almost), $3,000 for the lawyer and $6,000 for the client. So if he could do that on five of the fifteen files stacked on his desk that morning, he’d make $15,000, which wasn’t bad for a morning’s work. Particularly from my $50-a-week perspective. However, it never happened that way. There would have to be countless calls, follow-ups, arguments, motions filed, depositions, always more delays, and finally a few of the cases might blossom into money. That’s why the office was always on the edge of financial disaster, and the criminal and divorce retainers, real estate closings, and probate fees, which were certain cash, were very important. The third partner, Sean Halloran, was very seldom there. There wasn’t enough income in the office to allow him to work full time as a lawyer, although later he became an excellent trial lawyer. He worked full time as a brakeman on the railroad. A young married man, he’d come into the office in his trainman’s uniform and sit with his black square trainman’s cap pushed back on his head, and call his few clients. This may all sound strange, and it was, but it was also strangely fascinating to me because I had come to the office from law clerking at a silk-stocking firm. I had been working there part--time in my last year of law school. My main job was to file CCH Reports, which was probably the most boring job I’d ever had. I also put the books away in the library. I remember when I left, I gave my job to my roommate, who was editor -in-chief of our law review at Northwestern. I took him down to the office. The firm had 75 lawyers. The senior managing partner interviewed him. The senior partner had a bad stammer and said to my room-mate, “Just because we’re g-g-giving you Komie’s job as assistant librarian doesn’t mean that when you g-g-gradu-ate you’ve got a job here.” I smiled and shook the old man’s hand, and my roommate took over. Later, my roommate became the managing partner of that firm and held the position for more than twenty years. A few years ago I sent him a young man, an applicant for a job, a young man with good credentials but from a city law school. My roommate wrote me a rather cold, formal letter telling me that the young man had been turned down. I want to tell about an average day as a brand-new lawyer, but it isn’t very easy moving back forty years to talk about that young man as he rushed past the church window filled with the strange people in white robes. I’d always head first to the clerk’s office—there were always long lines. The thud of stamps echoed as you turned the pleadings over to the clerk for stamping and case-numbering. The guy ahead of you in line, perhaps from the Chicago Housing Authority, could have fifty forcible detainer—eviction—cases to file. You have to be in court in ten minutes to argue a motion, then two more courtrooms for two more motions, all before 11:30 A.M. What do you do? You read the motions while you stand in line and think about the arguments—thud--thud-thud—your complaints and summonses are finally numbered, a brief guttural grunt—“Next!” You turn in the check and wait for the cash register receipt, and then run up the escalator to the sheriff’s office, more lines, another check, clerks behind cash cages with bars. The amount of each check depended on mileage, how far the service of summons was from the center of the city. Another receipt, you run to the elevator and wait in line to ride up to the courtrooms. When you get there, maybe 25 lawyers are waiting for the morning call. You have three courtrooms to juggle. So you go from one to another, all on different floors, ride more elevators, ask each of the clerks to hold your case and tell them where you’ll be. Sometimes they’ll agree to hold the case, sometimes they just shrug. You call out the names of opposing counsel as you walk out of the courtroom, hoping to reach agreement to have the case held or put over to the 2 P.M. call. Then after the arguments, you head back to the office to return phone calls, a quick lunch, and then at 2 P.M., back to the courthouse. More filings, more motions to be argued. What were these motions? Usually motions to strike or motions to dismiss, insurance defense firms filing motions directed to the pleadings. The simplest fact allegation—Auto A strikes Pedestrian B rendering her injured, a broken left foot, “sick, sore, lame and disabled” with loss of wages, medical and hospital expense—would result in a flurry of motions. Typically a motion to strike, to make more definite and certain, or a motion to dismiss for failure to state a cause of action, for lack of jurisdiction, or improper parties, or the statute of limitations. In those days there weren’t sanctions for improper pleadings. Rule 11 of the Federal court and state counterparts didn’t exist. A lawyer wasn’t required to certify pleadings and could say almost anything, which ultimately would be tailored into something resembling the truth. Very seldom would a court dismiss a case with prejudice, and when complaints were stricken or dismissed, it was with leave to refile within thirty days. What were the actual cases about? Well, let me put them in categories and talk about them briefly. Divorce: I saw a man crawl across the office floor on his belly to plead with his wife to return to him. I must have filed one hundred divorce suits for the firm, and I remember only that one. She sat there, a tired, worn-faced woman in a black dress, in her sixties, and when he crawled to her and touched her foot with his hand, she unfolded her arms and touched his head and forgave him. Real Estate: I did at least twenty real estate closings, and I also remember only one. It was an escrow, an apartment building owned by a rabbi, a client of Jack’s. A very stern, serious man with a black beard and black hat. As we were just about to close and receive the check, a report was delivered to the buyer that the building was infested with termites. I can’t remember exactly what happened. There was a lot yelling and screaming, mostly in Yiddish. I think the closing collapsed. Not the building, just the closing, as if the termites had eaten it. I don’t think Jack was too happy when I came back to the office and told him the deal had blown. Jury Trials: There were several. I vaguely remember my first; it involved an automobile accident. I had a tower of books on my counsel table. I do remember that I lost the case. That’s probably why I’ve erased it. Some of the partners came to the courtroom to listen, and sat in the back row along with some of their lawyer friends. They were like grizzled baseball scouts watching a wild rookie pitcher. I calmed down for my next case and did much better, although I lost that too—it involved a freight car filled with rotting watermelons. The client was a food broker from the market, and a load of watermelons had arrived rotted. I think they were left on a Chicago siding in the hot August sun, and they all exploded. I argued from another lengthy tower of cases on demurrage. The judge, an old Bohemian from Cermak Road, with a wry unbelieving face, bald and dyspeptic, had an expression of disbelief that he’d often mutter: “What the fud.” It was always shocking when you first heard it—“What the fud”—particularly if you were in the back of the courtroom and you couldn’t really hear him distinctly. I remember the first two losses—0-2 for the rookie pitcher. Bankruptcy: There were several, but the one that lingers is the case of an old Yugoslavian man, Svetolik Gruyovich. He was dying of cancer; a tall, thin man, very gentle and shy. He’d been a partisan during World War II. He stood waiting for me in the lobby of the new Federal Building. He wanted to discharge his debts from his small business in bankruptcy before he died. It was his last wish. Somehow it had become, for him, the equivalent of payment. Bankruptcy, I was taught, is a statute of repose, and Svetolik invoked it and sought that repose. I remember the trustee who examined him. He finally released my client, but it was a nasty, humiliating examination with implications of fraud being committed by Svetolik by hiding his assets. If there was a fraud, it was the wealthy trustee who was the fraud, not the poor dying man who had come to the Federal Court looking for repose. He finally got it. He died before he was discharged in bankruptcy. Jockeys: Clients like Svetolik Gruyovich just didn’t show up in the office. Gruyovich was brought in by a heavy, dark-browed Yugoslavian man who always wore the same greasy homburg and a tattered black coat with worn velvet lapels. I don’t remember his name, just his dark, heavy face. The man had been a lawyer in Belgrade and either was defrocked or could never pass the American bar. He became a “jockey”—he’d feed lawyers cases for a percentage of the fee. There were lots of other jockeys or chasers who hung around the bar downstairs and ran after personal injury cases and criminal cases and drank with the lawyers. I never saw any money passing hands, but the jockeying was a given. Often the lawyer wound up in debt to the jockey, and if the jockey was a minor mafioso, that was real trouble, if you consider threats of evisceration or garroting real trouble. Murder: One of the lawyers who hung out at the bar downstairs became my friend, Casimir Zymak. Casimir was a Pole with an open, guileless Slavic face, a snub nose, and fine brown hair, a square face that suddenly reddened when he laughed, drinking down his cognac, coughing and waving away his cigarette smoke. Casimir was ridden principally by a jockey named Petey, a short, morose, sallow-faced, nervous man who really loved Casimir and lent him money, chauffeured him, and looked after him like a mother. When Casimir died, they said he was into Petey for at least twenty-five grand, but Casimir would have dismissed it with a wave of his thick hand, and could he have arisen from his grave, would have promised Petey to pay all of it. I sat on a murder case with Casimir. A man had shot his wife in the back five times down the stairs of their second-floor apartment. She’d had a love affair. Casimir saved the man from the electric chair—he was given 99 years by the jury. Later, the defendant had his sentence commuted by the governor and was paroled. I remember Casimir took a retainer from the man’s family but failed to work on his appeal, and eventually a lawyer from the bar association took over. Before the appeal was filed, Casimir was picked up on a writ for nonpayment of alimony by his ex-wife and he was thrown into County jail. He was on Alimony Row, but he was mixed in with the murderers and armed robbers. I think he owed the ex-wife $1,500. We took up a collection that night in the downstairs bar, and I was dispatched in my green Triumph to get Casimir out of jail. A judge came down to his courtroom at night and entered an Order of Discharge after I took the $1,500 to the wife’s attorney. I drove down to the County jail at 26th and California and stood waiting for my mentor in front of the heavy steel door. Finally the eye slit open and closed. The heavy door opened, and Casimir came stumbling out. He still stank of whiskey, and his tie was gone. “Vhere have you been? “ He was annoyed that I hadn’t gotten there sooner. I said to him, “What did your clients say when they saw you being brought into a cell?” “My clients? I only saw the man who shot his wife. I told him don’t vorry about a thing.” Now looking back at that young lawyer who was me, I realize I have to try to reconsider all these events from the view-point of the young man. He was eternally optimistic because he was young and really hadn’t learned to worry about life. He followed Casimir’s precept, “Don’t vorry about a thing” except with one exception. He worried about women. His briefcase was stuffed with pleadings, but his head was stuffed with dreams of women and there were several who floated in and out of his mind constantly. The major player in these dreams was Lucinda, a dark-haired, black-eyed beauty who was a stewardess. Not an airline stewardess—a train stewardess. Several of my classmates, now employed as young lawyers, dated beautiful airline stewardesses, but I never could meet one, and the closest I came was Lucinda, who Mike Zelinski introduced me to in the bar downstairs. She was sitting at the bar in her tailored blue uniform with gold trim and silver wings—they were two silver Zephyr trains approaching each other towards an orb of a silver sun. Lucinda and I would meet at a bar in her neighborhood where her brother was the sullen bartender. She would sit at the bar in her uniform wearing her perky train stewardess cap and show me blurred snapshots she’d taken from the train windows—deer at a salt lick in Estes Park. Later, in my car with the plastic windows steamed, she was still just as perky and cool sitting with her cap on. She would cross her legs like a vise and kiss me once or twice, and tell me in her train vernacular that “your engine is running, hon.” Later, I actually met a real airline stewardess, but we only had one date. Two classmates and I took three airline stewardesses for dinner to a Greek restaurant. My stewardess date was from South Dakota and as she drank ouzo she began drawing outlines of her family farm on the table cloth. “Here is where the silo is, and here’s the barn, and these stick figures are my mother and father and these little bitty ones are piggies.” Eventually she passed out from the ouzo and fell right off her chair to the floor. We carried her up to my classmates’ apartment by using his zebra skin rug as a litter, but she was unconscious until morning, and even I, having dreamed all of my life of making love to a stewardess, could not make love to an unconscious stewardess. I fell asleep beside her. In the morning she kissed me on the cheek and ran for a taxi to the airport. She would never go out with me again. The other major players in my life were a schoolteacher from St. Louis and a Chicago woman, both about twenty-three and both determined to get married. I promised to marry each of them, which took me and them both by surprise. The Chicago woman began to talk to me only in baby talk. She apparently suddenly confused me with her father, who always had been to her a distant and formidable figure. The St. Louis woman still conversed as an adult, but dumped me and got engaged to a salesman who was making big money. I would stand under the “L” tracks at the pay phone outside the office and plead in the crescendo of the “L” trains for her to come to Chicago for one last reconciliation, but she refused. So I went to St. Louis, reserved a suite at the Park Plaza, and cashed in my last cache of E bonds, and blew it all on one weekend. She wouldn’t come up to the room, even though I’d convinced her that I was now a successful trial lawyer in Chicago winning huge verdicts. So I spent that night staring at the singer in the bar of the hotel in her black velvet gown. On Monday I was back in line in the Municipal Court Clerk’s office with my briefcase, $500 poorer; in fact, broke. Women no longer concerned me. Now I had begun to think about money. How much of this is true and how much is fiction I don’t even know. Truth and fiction are so intermingled in my memory that I simply no longer recognize the difference. If I could have done it all over again, I would have avoided train and airline stewardesses entirely and not made double proposals. I would have looked for a young woman lawyer as a wife. We could have opened up a law office together. But there weren’t any young women lawyers. We only had three women in our class, and they quickly disappeared from Chicago. I couldn’t propose to anyone like Hillary Clinton. I simply didn’t know a woman lawyer. After I had been at Cohen, Zelinski and Halloran for a year, a law clerk I knew, Jack Loftus, decided to rob a bank. Jack actually drove out to the northern suburbs one afternoon and robbed a bank. He was picked up four blocks away, and all the money was recovered. But there was Jack’s photo, with a foolish grin, in the Chicago Tribune. Jack was clerk to a flashy, hard-drinking lawyer who always wore beautiful hats and camel’s hair coats, a criminal trial lawyer with political connections. Jack followed him everywhere and wore the same type of hat and camel’s hair coat, but no one paid attention to Jack. He was just a lawyer’s gopher. He wasn’t even a law student, just a tough, heavy Irish kid off the street. So he robbed a bank out of desperation to make all of us see him as a man. Four months later, after the robbery, I saw a slim blond man in handcuffs with two others being brought through the courthouse corridor. I stared at him. “Hey, Lowell, it’s me Jack,” he called out to me. Jack’s outlandish and sad bid for attention shook me up and made me realize that I had better get out of the downstairs bar where Jack hung out and leave my friends at Cohen, Zelinski and Halloran before I too became a bank robber. So I left the firm and opened my own office: LOWELL B. KOMIE, ATTORNEY AT LAW, 1956. I remember the sign painter with his stick, carefully daubing the letters. It was a thrill. I had a beautiful brown leather chair with a textured seat, tall as a judge’s seat. I rented a suite in an office leased by some lawyer friends. The first bill I got was from the sign painter, and then from the office for rent. I didn’t panic because my father had given me $500. Now I’ve been a lawyer almost forty years. If I’ve averaged $25,000 in fees for those forty years, I guess I’ve made a million dollars. In a way, I have become a millionaire, although I never realized it until just now. I don’t think so, though. In my early years, I probably averaged only $10,000 to $l5,000. I remember my first fee. It was $250. I took it as a retainer for filing an appeal for a woman who had fallen in love with a streetcar conductor and lent him money to open a business. He never repaid her. She was a sweet, kindly woman in her sixties. She’d lost the case in the trial court on a Motion to Dismiss for improper service of summons. She went to the bar association to look for a new lawyer for the appeal, and I got the reference. It was purely chance; my name was next on the reference list. I won the case on appeal. She became my first real client. I don’t think I ever collected her money for her, but I had given her a sweet moment of triumph over the system. Unlike Svetolik or Casimir or Jack Loftus, she had won, and under our system of justice we respect only winners, and I had at last also become one. One and 2 for the rookie pitcher. I can thank Jack Cohen, Mike Zelinski, and Sean Halloran for giving me a chance at becoming a lawyer when I thought the world had fallen in on me. “Cohen, Zelinski and Halloran: Adventures in the Law Trade,” first published in 23 (6) Student Lawyer 28 (February 1995). Lowell B. Komie © [1995] |
