I got up and hurried over to the facing sofa.

“Settling in, are you?”

“Settled. And anxious to get to work.”

“Good, good. Glad to hear it. First things first.” He jerked his chin at a multipage document lying front and center on the coffee table between us. “I need you to sign the NDA.”

I picked it up. Nondisclosure Agreement was the document’s title. “I don’t remember seeing this in the new-hire packet,” I said, flipping pages.

“No, this isn’t from HR. This is my own creation for my troops here in the Law Department. Obviously we handle a great deal of confidential and sensitive information. We need extra protections here.”

The bar rules governing client confidentiality should have given him all the protections he needed. But as I skimmed through the pages, I saw that he was going far beyond the bar rules. This NDA covered any information about the company or its employees that I might acquire during the course of my employment, whether or not such information was confidential or privileged. The penalty for disclosing any such information would be the automatic entry of a judgment against me for any and all damages caused by such disclosure, which I was required to stipulate were equal to the sum of at least $1 million.

There was no way this NDA would hold up in court. I knew it and Barrett certainly knew it, too. He must have drafted it solely for its in terrorem effect. It didn’t scare me, though. I already had over $1 million in judgments entered against me, and any subsequent judgment would come behind those. CDMI would wait in line an eternity before it could ever collect a penny. Not that I had any intention of disclosing company information. I picked up the pen on the coffee table and dashed off my signature.

“Good. Thanks,” Barrett said. He spread his arms wide over the back of the chesterfield. “So. The Palmer case.”

He proceeded to give me a ten-minute summary of the case. It was nothing I didn’t already know, and in some instances know better, since he mangled a few of the details. But I listened and nodded and attempted the occasional interjection: “Yes, I saw that in the file” or “I was struck by that, too, when I read the judge’s opinion.” He spoke over me, cordially, but in a tone that made it clear my only job was to sit and take it all in.

Opposing counsel Mark Ivins was a showboat, Barrett declared, and the Palmer case was nothing but a publicity stunt. Ivins was attacking the business judgment of the company’s executives, alleging malfeasance in the operation of its manufacturing facilities abroad, but that was only a smokescreen for his real grievance: executive compensation. He’d been going after companies all across the country in case after case, complaining that executives were grossly overcompensated, that the average CEO raked in three hundred times the amount of the average American worker. Executive overcompensation was his pet crusade, something he thought would endear him to the public and make them overlook his own lavish lifestyle.