Chapter 1: Work Smarter, Not Harder

Chapter 1: Work Smarter, Not Harder

The word hung in the sterile, air-conditioned space of the corner office, as polished and offensive as the man who’d uttered it.

“Shit.”

Sterling Prescott III leaned back in his ergonomic throne, a chair that cost more than Leo Vance’s monthly rent. He nudged the thick, seventy-page legal opinion on his gleaming mahogany desk with a single, manicured finger, as if touching it might soil him. The document represented sixty-three billable hours of Leo’s life—long nights fueled by cheap coffee, weekends sacrificed to the dusty archives of case law.

“This is… shit, Vance,” Sterling repeated, drawing the word out. He flashed a condescending smile, the kind reserved for a particularly slow servant. “It’s unfocused. The precedent is weak. Honestly, I’m not even sure what you were trying to argue here.”

Leo stood before the desk, his hands clasped behind his back to keep them from clenching into fists. He could feel the cheap synthetic lining of his off-the-rack suit jacket sticking to his skin. He knew the argument was sound. The precedent wasn’t weak; it was obscure, a brilliant piece of legal triangulation he’d unearthed from a forgotten appellate court decision from 1987. It was the kind of find that should have earned him praise, a nod of respect.

From Sterling, it earned him a death sentence.

“With all due respect, Sterling,” Leo began, his voice dangerously calm, “if you look at section C, subsection four, the ruling in Kramer v. Allied Shipping directly supports our position on—”

“Spare me the details,” Sterling waved a dismissive hand, already picking up his phone. Its screen reflected the glittering Manhattan skyline behind him. “I don’t have time for a law school lecture. I have a client to manage. A very important client. Just… go. I’ll fix it.”

Leo knew what “fix it” meant. It was a well-worn routine at Blackwood & Finch. Sterling would re-type the entire document, changing a few commas and conjunctions. He would put his own name on the cover page. Then, he would present it as his own Herculean effort, born from a late-night stroke of genius. And Leo’s sixty-three billable hours? They would vanish from the system, deleted by a senior associate "cleaning up" the billing records.

This wasn't the first time. It was the third. The first time, Leo had been shocked. The second, he’d been furious. Now, a cold, hard dread settled in his stomach. The firm had a brutal "up or out" policy. Associates who didn't meet their billable hour targets were cut at the end of the year without a second thought. Sterling wasn’t just stealing his work; he was methodically, deliberately, pushing him out the door.

Leo gave a stiff nod. “Of course.”

He turned and walked out of the corner office, his back ramrod straight. He felt Sterling’s smirk following him, a physical weight on his shoulders. He walked past the expansive offices of the other senior associates, each a monument to inherited wealth and legacy admissions, until he reached the bullpen. Here, in the heart of the firm, the junior associates were packed into sterile, grey cubicles like well-dressed veal. This was his world. A world of ramen noodles, crushing student loan debt, and the desperate, gnawing hope that his brilliant mind could somehow overcome his working-class background.

He passed Elara Hayes’s cubicle. She was on the phone, her brow furrowed in concentration, but she glanced up as he passed. Her eyes, sharp and intelligent, held a flicker of sympathy. She knew the game. She was just better at navigating its treacherous currents. She gave him a small, almost imperceptible nod, a silent acknowledgment of the gauntlet he’d just run. Leo appreciated the gesture more than she could know.

He sat down at his desk, the glow of his dual monitors illuminating the faint tremor in his hands. Sixty-three hours. Gone. That put him nearly a hundred hours behind the target for the quarter. It was an impossible deficit to overcome. He was a dead man walking.

Desperation clawed at his throat. He couldn’t let it end like this. He had fought too hard, sacrificed too much, to be undone by a lazy, arrogant fraud in a bespoke suit.

There was one last, desperate option. The nuclear option.

He stood up and made his way towards the elevators, his destination the fiftieth floor. The partners’ floor. The air grew quieter, the carpet thicker, the art on the walls older and more expensive with each ascending level. He was an intruder here, a plebeian in the halls of the gods.

Arthur Harrington’s office was at the end of the hall, its heavy oak doors a silent testament to his power. His secretary, a woman who had worked for him since before Leo was born, looked up with an expression of mild surprise.

“May I help you, Mr. Vance?”

“I need to see Mr. Harrington. It’s urgent.”

She looked at him over the top of her spectacles. “He is preparing for a deposition.”

“It will only take a moment,” Leo insisted, his voice firmer than he felt.

She seemed to weigh the potential fallout of refusing him against the certainty of Harrington’s annoyance at being disturbed. Deciding Leo was the lesser of two evils, she sighed and pressed a button on her intercom. “Mr. Vance is here to see you, sir. He says it’s urgent.”

A gravelly, impatient voice crackled through the speaker. “Send him in.”

Leo pushed open the heavy door. The office smelled of old leather, paper, and power. Unlike Sterling’s modern glass box, Harrington’s domain was a fortress of tradition. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves groaned under the weight of legal tomes. A fire crackled in the hearth, even though it was a mild autumn day.

Arthur Harrington stood by the window, his back to the door. He was a formidable man in his late sixties, a legal legend who had built the firm from the ground up. He didn't turn around.

“You have sixty seconds, Vance. Start talking.”

Leo’s carefully prepared speech crumbled in his mind. He took a breath and plunged ahead. “Sir, it’s about the brief for the OmniCorp case. I submitted my research opinion to Sterling Prescott this morning, and—”

“And he didn’t like it,” Harrington finished, finally turning. His eyes were like chips of granite, hard and unforgiving. “I am aware. He called me an hour ago to complain about the quality of work he’s getting from his juniors.”

The injustice of it struck Leo like a physical blow. Sterling hadn’t just stolen his work; he’d preemptively poisoned the well.

“Sir, that’s not—” Leo stammered, his composure cracking. “My work was solid. He’s going to put his name on it. He’s done it before. He’s deleting my billable hours. He’s trying to get me fired.”

Harrington walked slowly to his massive desk and sat down. He steepled his fingers, looking at Leo as if he were a particularly uninteresting insect.

“Prescott is a fool,” Harrington stated, not as an opinion, but as a fact. “He is lazy, and his father is a bigger fool for indulging him. But his father is also our firm’s second-largest client. Sterling Prescott brings in eight figures of revenue a year by playing golf. What do you bring in, Vance?”

Leo stood in stunned silence. The question was a checkmate.

“I see,” Harrington said, a flicker of something—not quite sympathy, but perhaps weary understanding—in his eyes. He leaned forward. “You are a brilliant legal mind, Vance. Your memo on the Fenwick appeal was the finest piece of writing I’ve seen from a junior in a decade. But this is not a library. It is a battlefield. Your intelligence is a weapon, but you are swinging it like a club.”

He leaned back, his expression turning to stone once more. “You want my advice? Here it is. Stop whining to me about Sterling Prescott. Stop expecting the world to be fair. It isn’t. You have a good mind. Use it. Work smarter, not harder.”

He gestured to the door. “Now get out. My deposition is in ten minutes.”

Dismissed.

Leo walked out of the office in a daze. The walk back to his cubicle felt like a mile. Harrington’s words echoed in his head. Work smarter, not harder. It was the coldest, most brutal, and most honest piece of advice he had ever received. Harrington hadn’t offered him help. He had offered him a challenge. He had confirmed that the rules of fair play did not apply.

Leo slumped into his chair, the despair from earlier replaced by something else. Something cold and sharp. A spark of rebellion. If the official channels were a dead end, he would have to forge his own path.

His fingers flew across the keyboard. He wasn't just a lawyer. In another life, he might have been a hacker. He'd paid for his first year of community college with money he’d made finding security flaws in small business websites. He knew the firm’s network was a fortress, but every fortress had a back door, especially one built by the lowest bidder and maintained by people, like Harrington, who still thought of a 'cc' as a carbon copy.

He navigated to a command-line interface, his screen filling with green text. A few keystrokes, a bypassed administrative prompt, and he was in. He sliced through the network’s superficial security layers, a ghost in the machine. He navigated to the server where active case files were stored.

Directory: /Cases/Active/OmniCorp/Drafts/

There it was. A file named OmniCorp_Memo_SP_v2.docx. The timestamp showed it had been created an hour ago. He opened it.

His words stared back at him. His arguments, his structure, his obscure precedent from 1987. The only change was on the cover page.

PREPARED BY: STERLING PRESCOTT III

Leo stared at the screen, the blinking cursor a steady, rhythmic pulse. The cold spark inside him grew, fanned by Harrington’s words. Work smarter.

A slow, knowing smile touched Leo’s lips for the first time that day. Sterling thought he was a tool to be used and discarded. Harrington saw him as a weapon being wielded incorrectly.

They were both about to find out just how sharp that weapon could be.