Season Two · Part One · Episode 6 of 24
Hal says the thing he believes, and means every word of it.
Hal Smith heard about Margaret and Renee’s lists before he was meant to, which was fitting, since hearing about things before he was meant to had built most of his career.
It was Renee who told him, in the end, on purpose. She’d decided a week earlier that Hal needed to hear it from a partner rather than learn it from a rumor, and that if he was going to fight it, it was better he fight it with her in the room than in a hallway with someone who couldn’t hold their ground.
She laid it out plainly. Nine names. Six sponsored by someone who’d once been among them. A fourteen-year version that told the same story with different data. She did not use the word bias, not because she was avoiding it, but because she’d learned long ago that the word did less work in that room than the numbers did.
Hal listened without interrupting. From Hal, that was a bad sign, not a good one.
◆
“I’ll tell you what I hear,” Hal said after she’d finished. “I hear that some partners took an interest in some associates, some associates did well, and now we’re calling that a problem.”
“I’m calling it a pattern,” Renee said. “A pattern isn’t automatically a scandal. It’s just something that’s been running without anyone’s oversight.”
“Everything worth having runs that way at first,” Hal said. “I didn’t have anyone’s hand on me either. Thirty years ago, nobody sat me down to explain how to build a practice. I watched, asked when I had to, and mostly just did the work until people trusted me with more of it. That’s not a design flaw, Renee. That’s how it’s supposed to feel from the inside. Earned.”
“I believe you felt it was earned,” Renee said. “I’m not arguing about what it felt like from where you were standing. I’m telling you what it looks like from the associate two doors down, who worked exactly as hard and never got the same look from anyone.”
◆
Hal thought about that longer than he let on. He thought about his own mentor, a partner named Whit Ferguson, gone now for fifteen years, who used to take Hal to lunch on Thursdays without ever calling it a program. Whit had grown up two towns from Hal’s, had gone to a state school the way Hal had, and had the same flat way of talking about money that came from growing up without much of it. Hal had never once, in three decades, described that resemblance as the reason Whit picked him. He’d described it as recognition. Whit had seen something real in him.
It did not occur to Hal, sitting across from Renee, to wonder how many other associates in that era had something just as real in them and simply hadn’t reminded anyone of Whit Ferguson.
What occurred to him instead, the thought arriving with its own defensive heat, was Kevin Patel’s name, even though Renee hadn’t mentioned Kevin at all. Hal had watched Kevin’s equity-track move go through nine months ago and had said, at the time, that the kid had earned it. He still believed that. He simply had never once asked himself whether earning it and being equipped for what came next were supposed to be the same thing.
◆
“So what exactly are you proposing?” Hal said, and the word “proposing” came out with an edge because some part of him had already guessed the shape of the answer and didn’t like it.
“Nothing yet,” Renee said. “I’m not proposing anything today. I’m telling you what I found because I’d rather you hear it from me while it’s still just a conversation than from a committee once it becomes a policy.”
Hal sat with that. He had spent thirty years believing that rainmaking could not be taught, only proven, the same way he’d believed it when Susan first walked into this building three years ago, talking about judgment and ownership as though they were things a firm could actually name out loud. He’d been wrong about that once already. He was not yet ready to be wrong about this too. Some old, stubborn part of him understood the difference between not being ready and not being right, and was choosing, for now, to stand on the first.
“I built what I built,” he said, quieter now. “I’m not going to apologize for it.”
“Nobody’s asking you to apologize,” Renee said. “I’m asking you to look at it. That’s different, Hal, and you know it is.”
◆
Alone afterward, Hal sat for a long time, thinking of a name he hadn’t said out loud in years. Whit Ferguson, the man who had seen something real in him on a Thursday afternoon in a diner two blocks from the courthouse.
He tried, honestly, to picture Whit doing the same thing for someone who didn’t remind him of himself at all. He found he couldn’t quite finish the picture, and the unfinished picture sat in his chest longer than he expected.
← Episode 5The MSL SagaEpisode 7 →
Susan B. Silverman works with mid-sized law firm leaders on the problems this season dramatizes: succession, sponsorship, and the client relationships that never get handed down. Book a free consultation.
The MSL Saga™, MLARD™, and the 85/15 Model™ are trademarks of Susan B. Silverman Consulting. The MSL Saga and all episodes © 2026 Susan B. Silverman Consulting. All rights reserved. Unauthorized reproduction or distribution is prohibited.
