Tracey rarely noticed her clients. Of course, she looked directly into their eyes when the time came to be sincere, but it was all part of an elaborate dog and pony show. She schmoozed them and after they hired her and left, she couldn’t remember the first thing about them until the next time she needed to see them. For some reason, Elena was different. Tracey swept in the room with her usual smile, prepared to spit out the same old spiel, but Elena stopped her dead in her tracks. Tracey wasn’t quite sure why. Maybe it was her natural beauty and the stark contrast between them: Elena was dark, her skin creamy caramel, her silky hair jet-black. Even sitting, Tracey could tell that she was long and lean but with the ample curves of a woman. It was more than that, however. Perhaps it was the way Elena looked at her, like she was looking right into her soul.
Tracey didn’t realize that Elena and her son were about to become the greatest challenge of her career and that how she handled this woman and this case would become one of the defining moments of her life.
Tracey had been a marketing major in college, following in her father’s footsteps. Her mother had died giving birth to her and it had been she and her father ever since. Dad had been a businessman and Tracey had planned to be one too.
“Go to work for yourself,” Dad had advised. “You’ll never get rich working for somebody else.”
Tracey took the old man’s advice to heart. She decided to make the law her business. She could start her own firm, be her own boss. Before she ever set foot in her first law school class, she had a preliminary marketing plan in place, identifying and anticipating the pitfalls of the practice.
She traversed the state checking out the small, very successful firms. Personal injury was where the big money was for the small practitioner, and advertising was the means to getting the best personal injury cases.
“Experience is the only teacher,” Daddy had told her, over and over again. The last conversation on that subject was just a month before his death. “Don’t set your feet in stone until you know the lay of the land. Look into each nook and cranny. You never eliminate the risks but you can minimize them.”
Again Tracey followed the sage advice of her father. After graduation, she started slow, spending two years at the state attorney’s office in Fort Lauderdale, doing misdemeanors and minor felonies. That experience made her somewhat comfortable in a courtroom, although she didn’t intend to be there too often in private practice. It also taught her there were too many attorneys in the big cities, all gnawing on the same bone. The path to success had to be outside the major metropolitan areas, but that was the enigma: How do you make money outside the centers of money?
There were many small towns in the interior of the state in need of good legal services. It was an untapped market but a risky one. You couldn’t just pick one town and try to make it there. You’d starve. You had to have a base of operations large enough to sustain yourself while at the same time reaching out to the small towns.
That became Tracey’s plan. She chose Vero Beach as her headquarters, a sleepy town on the east coast populated by retirees but large enough to sustain a practice on its own. She took out a substantial bank loan and started advertising in the Yellow Pages, then radio, then billboards. Television was too expensive at first. Although personal injury clients were her target, she threw in criminal law as well. It was all part of the plan.
There were other parts of the package that had to be massaged. Tracey was fairly attractive but she needed work if she was going to stand out. It was her own assessment, an honest marketing evaluation not based on any insecurity-at least that’s what she told herself. She was tall and she stayed in shape through daily workouts and a stingy diet, but her nose was too big and her breasts were minimal. So part of the money was spent on a nose job and implants, her dingy brown hair went platinum, and Tracey came up with a catchy slogan-Let the James gang fight for you! Now wherever Tracey’s ads appeared, her full-length picture accompanied them. She definitely had separated herself from the boys in the blue suits.
Immediately, the calls started coming in. Tracey instructed the two girls who answered the phones to screen each potential client using a detailed questionnaire that she had “borrowed” from another firm. Later, she reviewed every answer to determine who was worth seeing and who wasn’t. Her research after law school had told her to aim for the middle: not the small soft-tissue cases or the high-end million-dollar cases, but the fifty to a hundred thousand dollar cases that proliferated between them. If liability was clear (that could be established through the questionnaire) and insurance coverage was good, those cases could be settled without ever stepping into the courtroom or filing suit. They might be settled for less than they were worth, but the focus was volume not people.
Based on the number of calls she was getting, Tracey hired two retired insurance adjusters to interview the selected clients, obtain medical records and insurance information and, eventually, make a settlement demand. She allotted herself ten minutes with each person. Within a month, she had twenty-five good cases. Within a year, it was three hundred and there were six adjusters handling the claims.
The adjusters were an idea she had also “borrowed,” from an attorney in Tampa she’d never met. When she toured the offices of Mr. Dale Willingworth, she spoke only with the office manager. There wasn’t an attorney in sight but the place was teeming with insurance adjusters. She learned that adjusters knew the claims process inside and out; knew what a case was worth; knew how to work it up; and knew how to get the most money. Theoretically, if the selection process was good enough and the case was in the target range, a lawyer was superfluous.
As she drove out of Tampa that day marveling at the huge billboards on the highway advertising the Willingworth law firm (“Need a Lawyer?”), Tracey wondered if Mr. Willingworth even existed. She laughed out loud to herself, almost veering into the outer lane of traffic, imagining a law firm without any lawyers.
Two years after law school, she was the most successful personal injury lawyer in Vero Beach even though she had never filed a civil complaint, never argued a motion, and never appeared before a judge. What she did do to maintain her credibility was take some criminal cases. Criminal cases, unlike civil cases, needed to be handled at all stages by an attorney because there was so much courtroom involvement. As she did with the civil cases, however, Tracey cherry-picked her criminal clientele. She never did felonies unless the client was wealthy and willing to pay. The retainer was fifteen thousand dollars, payable up front, and twenty-five thousand for a capital case. When the balance in the account hit five thousand, the retainer had to be replenished. If it wasn’t, when the money was gone so was the James gang. There were no exceptions, no lost causes. She had every client sign a document saying they understood the rules. Tracey’s motto was the same as Abraham Lincoln’s: “A lawyer’s time is his stock in trade.” Unlike Honest Abe, however, she intended to be paid for every second.
Daddy would have been proud.
The James Law Firm had been in operation for five years when Elena made her first visit. Things had changed dramatically since the not-so-humble beginnings. The firm had expanded into the small communities in the interior of the state. Tracey had offices in ten cities from Arcadia to Okeechobee. Offices without lawyers-at least without lawyers paid by her. She negotiated with a local lawyer in each community to provide office space for her when she needed it; established a local telephone line and an 800 number. Her picture went on the back of the local telephone book and on several full pages throughout and she was on billboards heading into and out of town: a full body shot, artfully done. Tracey was standing in a tight navy blue business suit, her silky blond hair resting on her shoulders, a smile breaking from her ruby red lips. The caption was always the same-Let the James gang fight for you! — in large, bold print always level with Tracey’s breasts. You had to read the small print at the bottom of the ad to know that Tracey was advertising her legal services.