Season Two · Part Two · Episode 14 of 24
Hal signs up to sponsor someone and discovers how much he doesn’t know.
Hal’s two nominations arrived on Margaret’s desk a full week before anyone else’s.
Both names belonged to non-equity partners in litigation. Both had grown up within an hour of where Hal had grown up. Both had played in the same church softball league that Hal had played in for twenty years. Margaret didn’t say anything about it yet. She brought the file to quarterly review instead and let the pattern speak for itself.
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“Walk me through these two,” Susan said once the five of them were settled around the table, Hal’s page open in front of her, next to the written criteria.
“I’ve seen both of them hold up under real pressure,” Hal said. “Depositions that went sideways. A client who wanted to fire us at nine at night. I trust my own eyes more than a spreadsheet.”
“I believe you,” Renee said. “I also believe that’s almost word for word what nine different partners told me when I built my list, about nine associates who all turned out to look, sound, and act exactly like the partner describing them. Your eyes aren’t lying to you, Hal. They’re just not neutral. Nobody’s are.”
“I’m not choosing people who remind me of myself,” Hal said. “I’m choosing people I’ve actually seen do the work.”
“You’ve watched two people do the work,” Renee said. “Out of how many associates in this building who’ve never once had the chance to be watched by you? That’s not a character flaw. It’s just what happens when sponsorship remains a matter of taste rather than a matter of design. It’s exactly why we wrote the criteria down in the first place.”
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Susan let that sit for a moment before speaking again. “I want to try something,” she said. “Not instead of your two. In addition to them. I want to hand you a third name. Someone you didn’t pick, who meets every line of the readiness criteria and whom you have never once brought into a room.”
Hal looked at her, wary. “Who?”
“Anna Martinez,” Susan said.
Hal was quiet long enough for Jason to answer for him. “She’s been on the partnership track for a year and a half,” Jason said. “Judgment, efficiency, ownership, all three, cleanly, since the day MLARD had a name. She’s exactly the kind of plateau Renee’s been finding everywhere else in this firm, except this one’s been sitting three floors below you the whole time.”
“I don’t really know her work,” Hal said. “I don’t think I’ve said more than ten words to her in five years.”
“That’s rather the point,” Susan said.
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Alone afterward, Hal turned it over for most of an hour. He thought, not for the first time this month, about Whit, about the two names he’d have nominated without a second thought if nobody had been watching. He wondered whether Whit had ever once looked past someone who reminded him of himself, and, sitting there, understood that he already knew the answer, because he’d just done the same thing on paper an hour earlier.
That was the part he couldn’t argue his way around, and once he stopped trying, the rest went quickly. He picked up the phone and called Margaret’s office himself rather than wait for the file to come back to him. He said yes before the end of the day. He told himself it was because Susan was right. Mostly, it was because he didn’t have an answer for her that wasn’t.
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He and Anna met for the first time the following week, in a smaller room than the one PRIME usually used, which felt, to both of them, like the right size.
Hal came in with a plan already in place because it was the one thing he knew how to build. “I want to bring you onto the Kessler Manufacturing relationship,” he said. “Real client, real stakes, nothing staged. You sit in on the next two calls. I introduce you properly, and by the third one they’re used to seeing you there.”
“I’d like that,” Anna said, and meant it. Then, carefully, the way she’d learned to raise issues with partners who hadn’t asked for her opinion yet: “Can I ask about the other kind, the one Susan added to the criteria, demonstrated visibility?”
Hal’s first instinct, the one he didn’t say out loud, was that it sounded like a lucky article looking for an excuse to happen twice. He caught the thought before it left his mouth, which surprised him more than the thought itself. “Tell me what you mean,” he said instead.
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Anna pulled out her phone. “I’ve been writing short pieces on healthcare regulatory developments for about a year,” she said. “Nothing official. I post them. I never asked anyone whether it counted for anything because until three weeks ago there wasn’t anything for it to count toward.”
She turned the screen so he could see it. A list of short posts, with dates going back eleven months. Beneath the most recent post, a row of numbers Hal didn’t immediately know how to read.
“What am I looking at?” he asked, and didn’t bother pretending otherwise.
“Profile views,” Anna said, pointing. “Six hundred and forty this month. This column shows who looked, on the days the platform tells me who they are. Two in-house counsel. A recruiter. A paralegal at a company we’ve never worked for.” She scrolled further. “This one got picked up and reposted by someone at a trade association. That’s not luck. That’s the same thing Mei did, just smaller and slower, because nobody was watching for it or protecting the time it took.”
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Hal stared at the numbers, mostly because looking at them was easier than saying anything. “I don’t know how to sponsor this,” he admitted at last. “I don’t know what good looks like here. I’ve never written one of these. I’m not sure I could tell you whether one of these was working or just noisy.”
“Then I’ll show you,” Anna said, without much weight behind it, the way you’d offer to explain a filing system to someone who’d never needed to learn it. “It’s not that different from a memo, honestly. Say the truth plainly, explain why it matters to the person reading it, and don’t waste their time getting there. You already know how to do that part.”
Hal almost laughed. “That’s the first sentence on this whole subject that’s made any sense to me.”
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He thought about Whit again on the drive home, which had been happening more often lately than he was entirely comfortable with. Whit had never taught him this because nothing like it had existed in Whit’s building. But Whit had also never once let himself be taught by anyone younger, about anything, and Hal was fairly sure that failure had nothing to do with the era Whit practiced in and everything to do with the kind of man he’d chosen to be within it.
“I don’t have to keep making that particular mistake,” Hal said out loud to an empty car, felt foolish, and didn’t take it back.
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By the end of the week, Anna’s plan had two lines instead of one. Sponsor-led introduction: the Kessler calls, then Aldergate Insurance after the new year, logged and protected, and the door Hal already knew how to open. Demonstrated visibility: two posts a month, logged and protected the same way, reviewed quarterly for what they produced rather than judged in the meantime for whether they looked like real work.
Hal signed his name to the second line more slowly than the first. Not because he doubted it. Because it was the first plan he’d ever built for someone else that included something he’d have to learn before he could honestly claim to teach it.
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