Sad day at a firm much like mine. We've had some layoff-related suicides as well, but at least we're competent enough not to let the news get out. Good grief, if you can't even keep secret a suicide in your building, how can a client ever trust that you won't let his dirty laundry out as well? I would never do business with a firm that couldn't keep its own mishaps out of the press. Even when a former associate came in and shot the entire 32nd floor to death, no one knew. Not even their families -- at least not for about a week, since it's not like they were getting home more often than that anyway. That's actually one of the (endless) benefits of working the associates to the bone: no one realizes when they go missing. No friends, no families, no nothing. They can just fall right off the grid, and besides the 2800 hours a year that we've billed for them, it's like they never even existed.

The ones who kill themselves in the office are always the selfish ones, only thinking about themselves. Do you know how much it costs to get blood out of the carpet? And the casebooks are pretty much unusable once guts have been splattered on their spines. We lost about thirteen hours of document work after the most recent suicide -- he had the gall to leave his latest markup on the desk, right within the splash zone. Couldn't tell what was marked red with the pen and what was red with blood. At least the guy at Kilpatrick Stockton updated his e-mail auto-reply. Be thankful for the little things.