When I first watched The Prisoner as a teenager, I was captured, in every sense, by its themes and its aesthetics. A secret agent resigns, is gassed in his London flat and wakes up in a candy-colored seaside village where everyone wears numbered badges and piped blazers, the taxis only make local trips, and a white balloon hunts down anyone who tries to leave.
Large institutions may look different from the outside—the U.S. Air Force, the American Bar Association and a modern alternative business structure law firm—but leading change inside them follows remarkably similar patterns.
Give a blank sheet of paper to a 10-year-old, and ask them to draw a picture of a lawyer. Most likely, you’re looking at an adult in a navy-blue tailored suit consisting of a jacket and either a skirt or pants, with dark shoes.
“We basically just work ourselves to death and stay unnoticed,” the judicial assistant said with a wide smile when I asked what her day to day looked like. It had only been a few minutes since I walked into chambers to meet the judge for whom I would be interning.
Imagine a family that is in their early 30s with two children under 10, a house loan and maybe a bit of work on the side. If the parents were to die tonight, who would raise the children? Who gets the house? Who's in charge of their accounts while their estate is being probated?
Throughout my career, I have learned a lot from my “adversaries.” One such adversary was the late great Ross D’Apice, a Brooklyn defense attorney and legend who passed away several years ago.
Lying in my bed in this hill town two hours southeast of Kathmandu, I wake each morning to ritual. Around 5:30 a.m., birdsong rises from the nearby forest. An hour later comes bell ringing and the long, plaintive note of a conch shell. Incense drifts, faintly, through my window from the small Hindu temple where Shiva, the guesthouse chef and the temple’s namesake, performs his daily prayers. Hindu and Buddhist practitioners have performed similar rites for hundreds of years in this polytheistic Himalayan nation.
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