DAVID SCHMAHMANN

NIBBLE & KUHN does a number on the law and lawyers. It’s clearly written by an insider. How long have you been a lawyer? What is your practice like?

I’ve been a lawyer for over thirty years. I started out at a firm in New York and then I came to Boston and until recently was a partner in the law firm founded by Judge Louis Brandeis. I was a trial lawyer there, and I did try more cases than the hapless “trial lawyers” at Nibble.

Certainly the puffed up corporate firm of NIBBLE & KUHN provides a lot of comic material. How is N&K different from and similar to many of the outfits you’ve worked for? And worked with?

All law firms have their moments, and certainly mine did. And lawyers are easy targets for humor because they’re sort of know-it-alls and also, in my experience, usually terrible businessmen. There’s also something about being a lawyer that almost requires a particular kind self promotion. In addition, of course, you’d be hard pressed to find more than a handful of lawyers who’d honestly admit that personal injury lawsuits, the kind of lawsuit at the center of this novel, are far more about enriching lawyers than about getting justice for anyone. The guy in the expensive suit will tell you – hell, he’ll tell anyone who’s prepared to listen – that it’s about justice, and about the redress of injury, but it’s just not. It’s about money. Making money. Making lots of money by inventorying other peoples’ misfortunes and turning them into cash, a giant slice of which goes to the lawyers (but of course.) And to get there, to the moment money actually changes hands, well I don’t think the average person has a clue how inefficient, wasteful, arrogant and arbitrary the process happens to be.

And yet. And yet. We need lawyers. I don’t have to go into why.

NIBBLE & KUHN is such a different book from your award-winning first novel EMPIRE SETTINGS, which dealt with life in apartheid and post apartheid South Africa. What “creative adjustments” did you make? As a writer did you “hear” the novels differently as you wrote them?

They’re both from parts of my life. In a way I suppose my outsider’s take on the law derives in part from the fact that I am an outsider. Deep down I’m a South African still, though I’ve lived in America for almost all of my life. Empire Settings was set in part in South Africa, and in the era I lived there, and I tried to recreate a time and a place that is quite gone, and that evokes very mixed feelings in me. I mean, youth can be lovely, and mine was lovely, and so can first love, and yet it’s also true that I lived in South Africa at a time when some people would say that simply going about your daily life reinforced a terrible injustice.
In Nibble & Kuhn I’m dealing with something much less serious, funny actually, and that is greed and pretension. I understand the role courts and lawyers play, but I’ve also seen it very close up. It’s not a pretty sight.

The romance between your hero Derek Dover and the intriguing Maria Parma is not your usual love affair circa 2009. What was most challenging when you wrote about these characters and their attraction to each other?

It was easy. Maria lives in her own world and has an unusual set of values and priorities, but while she’s obviously quite unconventional she also has her head screwed on absolutely straight, even if it takes her a while to sort out the tangle she gets herself into. I love the way she sees the world, and she embodies the traits and quirks I’ve found most compelling in women I’ve known over the years.

The climax of the novel involves a trial the judge never wanted to have. Isn’t it unusual for a judge to be so direct in his demanding a settlement? Is it really true that the attorneys in firms like NIBBLE & KUHN almost never go inside a courtroom?

Are you kidding (on both questions?) If judges didn’t get lawyers to settle almost every case that is filed, the whole system would collapse under its own weight. Everyone knows it. Personal injury lawyers troll the internet and airwaves for claims to bring, and then bring them in the thousands, and if they didn’t get paid a ransom, of which they get a hefty cut, to drop the cases and walk away the whole system would break down. The courts couldn’t possibly actually try all the injury claims that are brought. So in the end, the plaintiffs’ lawyers get paid handsomely (sports team owning, private jet chartering, mansion building, handsomely), the company lawyers get paid some very wonderful hourly rate, the judges and court reporters and courtroom officers and expert witnesses and trial exhibit creators and jury consultants and focus group experts all make a good living, and sometimes some ordinary people actually walk away with something too, almost coincidentally. Guess who pays for all this? We all do. A dollar or two at a time on some of the things we buy, hundreds or thousands added onto others, but we pay. And an army of self righteous blowhards will be quick to tell us how lucky we are to have them fighting for justice on our behalves.

And on the second point, most lawyers in the “trial” departments of large law firms are like glorified, overpaid, squabbling, fancy dressed, claims adjusters. They never come close to trying cases or to having to persuade juries of anything. In fact, you can swing a bat in a trial partners' meeting at just about every major big city white shoe firm without hitting anyone who’s looked into a juryperson’s eye for a decade.

There is a definite “arc” in the personal and professional education of your hero Derek Dover Are you saying something here about how law is practiced today, and the toll this takes?

This could be a personal matter. When I was a young lawyer in New York, on some mornings I would pray that the elevator cable would snap and plunge me fifty stories into the basement so that I didn’t have to show up in those horrible beige offices. It got easier over time, and I’ve always made a lot of money which made it hard to leave, and I’ve met some fine and interesting people along the way. But unlike Derek I stuck with it and tried to make the most of it. Derek’s more courageous than I am, frankly. But then he has Maria.

Your next novel will be a sequel to EMPIRE SETTINGS. When you were last in South Africa what were your feelings about how the country of your childhood and youth had changed?

My next novel, Ivory from Paradise, is not really a sequel to Empire Settings but rather a companion to it. Many of the same people are in it, and several years have passed.

Empire Settings was the story of a love affair between people of different races under apartheid, and how it left them, many years later, what they remembered and what they regretted.

Ivory from Paradise, on the other hand, is the story about a fight over someone’s possessions, but it’s really a story about the ownership of memory, how different people can remember the same thing in starkly different terms, and how this can affect how they act in quite concrete ways. Who really owns anything, in the end, or any place, and can one’s fondest memories turn out to be not much more than an insult to others, are the central themes of the novel?

My years in South Africa remain the central building blocks of my life, and the end of apartheid was one of the more exciting things I’ve seen happen. And yet I am also disappointed by many things in the new South Africa; the wasted opportunities, a new kind of racism that makes civil discourse difficult, corruption, nepotism, rampant crime and pervasive violence. Whether the country thrives or sinks depends, in my view, in large measure on whether people opt for honesty in how they see both the past and the present. Time will tell.