Behind the Spa Green Walls

From the road, my office looks like the kind of place where a woman in a pretty dress helps somebody sign a will, explains why the family land cannot simply be “put in all the children’s names,” and then goes home at five o’clock with her desk clean, her emails answered and her nervous system largely intact.

It is a very convincing building. Hampton Law Firm sits quietly in a small North Louisiana town, painted in calm colors and arranged to make people feel as though whatever brought them through the door can probably be handled without anybody being arrested in the lobby. The chairs are comfortable. The files are organized. There are framed documents on the walls and a particular shade of spa green that suggests peace, stability and perhaps a woman who remembers to drink water.

The walls are lying. Behind them is a desk filled with family tragedy, murder, dementia, addiction, suspicious deaths, disputed wills, missing money, secret accounts, divorces, old betrayals and property descriptions drafted so badly that I have occasionally wondered whether the surveyor was being actively pursued while writing them. There are children trying to figure out what to do with parents who no longer know them, parents trying to save children who do not want to be saved, and entire families who have not spoken in twenty years suddenly being advised that everyone must cooperate because Great-Grandfather failed to handle forty acres before he died in 1973.

That is the part of law people understand, at least generally. People know lawyers deal with ugly things. They expect criminal files, divorces and family disputes. They may not realize quite how much grief can fit inside one filing cabinet, but they understand the concept. What they do not see is everything else that quietly passes through the room.

Several years ago, at around eight o’clock on an otherwise ordinary Tuesday night, a few lawyers and law-enforcement officers sat quietly behind these same spa green walls waiting on a grand jury. This was not a matter that would be discussed at the gas station the next morning and forgotten by Friday. It was a case making national news. Reporters were waiting. Families were waiting. People well outside North Louisiana were refreshing phones and trying to confirm whether indictments had been returned, and so were we.

There was no press room, no line of television cameras and no dramatic courthouse corridor filled with people shouting questions. There were just a handful of lawyers and officers sitting inside my little law office in Farmerville after the normal workday had ended, waiting patiently and pretending not to react every time somebody’s phone vibrated. Every vibration caused every head in the room to move at once, which is apparently what professional restraint looks like when several adults are all waiting on exactly the same information.

Someone could have driven past at 8:07 that night and assumed I was finishing a deed before going home. They would have had no reason to imagine that the people sitting under the spa green paint were waiting on a grand jury decision being followed across the country.

That is the part people rarely take into consideration when they think about places like this. We assume important things happen in important-looking rooms. We picture marble buildings, security checkpoints, long conference tables and men carrying folders while looking deeply concerned. Sometimes they do. Other times, something making national news is being quietly discussed in a little green office in Farmerville while a closing file sits six feet away and a group of otherwise respectable adults stares suspiciously at every iPhone in the room.

The office never announces the difference. There is no light over the door that turns red when the matter inside has crossed from ordinary legal work into something people hundreds of miles away are trying to confirm. The walls do not change color based on the significance of the conversation, and the building does not become more impressive simply because something important is happening inside it. It just holds it, and by the next morning, somebody may be sitting in the exact same chair signing a Last Will and Testament.

That contrast has always fascinated me. I was sitting at my desk this morning expecting a relatively quiet day. By “quiet,” I mean wills, deeds, client calls and perhaps one person insisting that the entire family agrees on something while forwarding me fourteen screenshots demonstrating that the family most certainly does not agree on anything.

Instead, I became increasingly interested in a developing statewide legal and political situation involving public officials, judges, lawyers and judicial institutions. Not because I am involved in the public matter and not because I am sitting on secret information beneath a stack of succession files, but because legal controversies look different when you understand the human architecture surrounding the institutions involved.

People outside the profession tend to imagine the legal system as a collection of separate buildings occupied by separate people. The Attorney General is in Baton Rouge. The Supreme Court is in New Orleans. Judges are in their districts. Commissions meet in formal rooms. Lawyers represent clients. Everybody performs a clearly defined professional role and then returns to separate lives where no one has ever attended anyone else’s wedding, practiced law together, served on a board, known the other person’s parents or watched somebody else’s children grow up.

That is not Louisiana. I am not entirely convinced that is Earth.

The institutions may be enormous, but the human network inside them is remarkably small. A lawyer practices for thirty years. Another lawyer becomes a judge. Someone’s child goes to law school and becomes a lawyer too. People prosecute cases together, oppose each other, serve on commissions and appear before the same courts. Families know families. Professional relationships stretch across decades. Then one morning, several familiar names appear in one public controversy and the average person sees a list of officials.

A lawyer sees a family tree drawn by Westlaw.

That does not mean anything improper has happened. In many situations, the existence of real relationships requires people to be more careful, not less. But the public version of the legal system is very clean. The human version has roots.

I can read a public court filing and recognize names connected to entirely different parts of my life. My father serves in one professional capacity. A lawyer from North Louisiana serves in another. That lawyer has a daughter who is also an attorney. A justice may be someone my family has known since I was three years old. His wife may rent an office from me. Eventually, the curious part of my brain begins drawing lines, the lawyer part studies the lines, and the ethics part takes away the marker and writes, “Absolutely none of your business,” across the entire diagram.

That may actually be one of the stranger parts of practicing law in a small state. Recognizing a connection and using a connection are two entirely different things. Some of the most important professional decisions I make are decisions not to do something: not asking my father a question I know he cannot answer, not confusing knowing someone personally with having professional access, not turning an old friendship into leverage and not calling the person who could probably explain the entire situation merely because I happen to have the person’s telephone number.

Sometimes the fact that you can make a phone call is the best reason not to make it.

This is where ethics becomes considerably less exciting than television promised. No one has ever approached me in a parking garage with a briefcase full of cash. Frankly, my legal career has involved disappointingly few briefcases. Most ethical decisions look much more boring. They look like questions you do not ask, calls you do not make, information you do not repeat and conversations you quietly leave before someone says something you do not need to hear.

They also look like sitting silently while someone on Facebook explains a complicated legal controversy with tremendous confidence and approximately eleven percent of the information.

There is a discipline in knowing enough to understand why something may be far more complicated than it appears while still saying nothing. Lawyers become very good at sorting information. There is information I can use, information I cannot use, privileged information, confidential information, hearsay, gossip and things said in courthouse hallways that I will remember until I die but would never promote to the status of “fact.”

Then there is my largest category: things I desperately want to discuss with another intelligent adult but cannot, so they remain trapped in my head indefinitely and eventually become part of my personality.

I was sitting behind these very calm green walls thinking about all of that this morning when the Attorney General’s Office called because Homeland Security wanted to meet with me and one of my clients. There was, as usual, no appropriate transition. I did not close a classified file, disable a listening device and answer a secure red telephone. I was doing ordinary small-town lawyer work. There were documents on my desk involving dead relatives and land, and I was probably eating something over my keyboard that qualified as lunch only because I consumed it somewhere near noon.

Then Homeland Security entered the schedule.

This is why I have stopped saying, “Today should be quiet.” Apparently, those words function as an invocation. Every time I believe I am about to spend an uninterrupted afternoon drafting wills, some branch of government develops an interest in somebody I represent.

The strange part is that the contrast no longer feels particularly strange. During another actual law-enforcement operation in town, my phone rang and someone urgently told me, “You need to run out the back door right now. Run down the street. I’ve got eyes on you.”

This was not a sentence I had prepared to receive while seated at my own desk. Law school did not cover it. My malpractice carrier has never circulated a helpful flowchart titled, “When an Unseen Person Has Eyes on You: Suggested Next Steps.” I had approximately three seconds to determine whether I was being kidnapped, rescued or invited to participate in a situation for which my shoes were deeply inappropriate.

I did what any intelligent, highly trained professional would do and immediately became suspicious that someone was trying to make me look stupid. They were.

The officers were playing a joke on me during a real operation involving someone else. I was not in danger. Nobody needed me to escape through the rear of the building, and there was no tactical unit monitoring my movements. By the time they explained this, however, I had emotionally committed to the scenario and was slightly disappointed.

Ten minutes later, I was back at my desk correcting a legal description as though I had not briefly believed an unseen law-enforcement officer was directing my evacuation from the building. That is a fairly accurate summary of practicing law here. Something absurd happens, I stare at the wall for fifteen seconds, and then Microsoft Word needs me again.

The law never stays politely inside the file. It moves through families and friendships. It travels through marriages, businesses, churches, politics and land. It follows old professional relationships into new public controversies. It takes people we knew long before we understood their titles and places their names into opinions and orders we now read professionally.

Then it leaves a lawyer sitting in a small office in Farmerville trying to determine whether the thing fascinating her is legally relevant, ethically discussable or simply another connection that belongs in the enormous mental file labeled, “Interesting. Shut up.”

Maybe that is the part of law people see least. The public sees lawyers talk. We argue, write, advise and ask questions for a living, but nobody talks much about how often good lawyering requires a person to know when not to speak, not to ask and not to move closer.

Sometimes the most ethical thing a lawyer does all day is recognize exactly how close she is to something and deliberately remain where she is. That is much harder than television makes it look, particularly if the lawyer is naturally curious and has access to both the internet and the telephone numbers of people she absolutely should not call.

From the road, none of this is visible. A person can drive past my office while a family is deciding where an elderly parent will live for the rest of her life. They can drive past at eight o’clock on a Tuesday night while lawyers and law-enforcement officers quietly wait on a grand jury decision making national news.

They can drive past while a statewide controversy is open on my computer and I am mentally recognizing relationships I have no intention of touching. They can drive past while Homeland Security is being added to my schedule or while I sit alone trying to determine whether a telephone call directing me to run out the back door is credible.

Or they can drive past while I am genuinely drafting a Last Will and Testament and becoming unreasonably angry because Microsoft Word has moved the signature block to a separate page.

The building looks exactly the same either way. The sign does not change. The walls remain green. There are no flashing lights identifying whether the conversation inside involves murder, a mortgage, a judicial institution, a federal agency or twelve acres and a barn nobody has entered since 1987.

The office simply holds all of it.

I think that is what people misunderstand about small-town law firms. Small does not mean simple. Rural does not mean disconnected. Quiet does not mean nothing important is happening.

People assume important things happen in important-looking places. Sometimes they do. Sometimes lawyers and officers sit quietly behind spa green walls at eight o’clock on a Tuesday night waiting for news the rest of the country is trying to confirm, and then Wednesday morning comes, the coffee is made, the lights come on and someone walks through the front door with a question about a will.

The office never tells them what it held the night before.

And before I even make it home from work, I see a newly published article regarding this situation I’ve been fascinated with. A freshly filed Motion to Recuse a New Orleans Judge. My phone rings. Judiciary oversight has been activated and part two begins…

Judith Hampton

Attorney at Law

Hampton Law Firm, LLC

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