“... you have been assigned to work with Mia Anderson. She was the only partner to vote against taking you on so you’ll need to impress her. She is in the process of building a case that you should be interested in, it’s a class action lawsuit on behalf of a group of tiny workers who say they were taken advantage of by their boss,” Diane explained as she extended her open palm towards Isabella, expecting her to hand you over. Isabella gingerly held out her palm and tilted it over towards Diane’s awaiting hand. If she had simply held her hand out next to your new bosses hand, you could have simply stepped onto it, but instead you ended up stumbling off of her hand and falling face first into Diane’s awaiting palm.
You quickly scrambled to your feet and tried to act like nothing happened, to try and suppress the rising embarrassment you were feeling.
Diane didn’t seem to react to your blunder, her face remained stoic and professional. Isabella however, looked incredibly embarrassed and her face had flushed a deep crimson. Before Isabella could even apologise, Diane had turned away and began carrying you across the office, which even at this early time of the morning was abuzz with activity as the employees of Martinez, Anderson and Roberts ran files to one another, typed on keyboards and read over files. She walked towards set of three doors at the opposite end of the floor from the receptionists desk, each one had a plaque stuck to it inscribed with the name of one of the partners. The large, full length windows beside each door had their shutters closed, obscuring the office on the other side. Pushing on the middle one, she entered the office of Mia Anderson.
The inside of the office was lavishly decorated, obviously intended to impress prospective clients. The floor was covered with a beautiful green carpet, and the walls mostly covered by large, wooden shelving units housing hundreds of books, frames containing certificates and awards and small mementos from Mia’s career. Another large, full length window that fully covered the wall opposite the door gave the office a view out to sea, and the centre of the room was dominated by a large, mahogany desk, which was currently covered in documents spread out across it’s surface.
Your attention was drawn from the decor towards the woman pacing around the room, reading from a paper in her hand.
Mia Anderson was shorter than Diane, although she would still be ginormous compared to you, and was wearing two inch heels to compensate, which she walked around the office effortlessly in. Her legs were adorned by a set of tan nylons which travelled up her legs to around the knee before being cut off from view by a pin striped, dark-grey skirt suit which hugged her generous curves. Her auburn hair was pulled back in a bun and her hard faced expression implied she was in deep thought, before Diane cleared her throat to get her attention. Turning towards the noise, Mia’s pale blue eyes immediately trained on Diane, and then you in her hand, and her plump, full lips twisted into a small frown.
“Oh, hello Diane,” Mia didn’t even address you, she just briefly smiled at Diane and then looked back at her document. “Just set him on my desk, I’ll get to him in a moment, and outline what he’ll be doing today.”
Diane looked at you, shrugged and then her expression turned stern. She didn’t say anything as she walked towards Mia’s desk and set you down, but her expression alone conveyed the message that you were already on thin ice, so you should be on your best behaviour. As she turned around and walked away, you did your best to not look at her round, wobbling backside, which stretched her business dress to the limit, figuring that being caught staring at your boss’s ass would be the last thing you wanted on your first day.
After Diane closed the door, the buzz of activity from the office floor was drowned out, replaced by the soft impacts of Mia’s footfalls on the carpet. She didn’t talk to you for several minutes, so you chose to glance over the documents lined out on her desk. Most of the information you got out of your glance over them was information that Diane had already told you, it was a class action lawsuit on behalf of a group of tiny workers who say they were taken advantage of by their boss. The new information that you gleaned at a glance was that the case involved twenty two tiny workers at a computer manufacturing facility, employed to do the fine work that would otherwise require a machine, who allege that their supervisor, a woman named Sandra Allen, would physically punish the tiny workers for refusing to work overtime to for not making quotas, and when one of their number, a tiny guy called Thomas Miller, tried to get the workers to unionise to protect themselves from the abuse, she used him as an insole of a month. From the glance you got there wasn’t a massive amount of evidence for this, Sandra had clearly covered her tracks well, and it was hard enough normally to prove that a tiny worker’s rights had been violated since they are so small and often it isn’t picked up on security cameras. It was only really a few of the tiny worker’s word against hers.
You were so busy reading over the papers in front of you that you didn’t even notice Mia approaching till she was standing right next to the desk, casting you in shadow. Her gaze pierced right into you, her eyes almost surveying your worthiness without her even knowing anything about you really.
You recalled that during the interview Mia had barely paid attention to your answers to her questions, except if the answer gave her a way of trying to get across to the other partners that they shouldn’t hire you. Yup, this woman would be a difficult one for you to win over.
“Hmph, well, at least you’ve got the foresight to look over the case notes. Don’t think for a second that I’m anywhere near thinking that hiring you was a good idea though. All that you are going to do here is damage the firm’s image, and I’m not going to keep that opinion to myself,” Mia huffed, crossing her arms over the swell of her chest.
“W-well I hope to prove you wrong, ma’am,” you tried to remain as respectful as possible, despite the fact that you thought she was being incredibly unreasonable. Mia smirked cruelly at your response.
“Well then, here’s your first chance to “prove me wrong”, you’ve looked over the case notes, so what are your thoughts,” you couldn’t see it, but you heard the soft impacts of her foot tapping on the floor impatiently as you took a moment to consider what you had read.
“Hmmm. I think that this is a difficult case to prove, but if we can get statements from all of the 22 workers and proof that no one had seen Thomas Miller in the period of time he was allegedly under Sandra’s feet we could have a pretty strong case,” you smiled up at Mia, happy that you had managed to come up with all of that basically on the spot. Even Mia seemed slightly impressed, before switching back to her condescending smirk.
“I know you’re probably sympathetic towards the tiny workers that we are representing because they are your kind but you’re obviously not considering the fact that Thomas Miller could have volunteered to serve as Mrs Allen’s insole, because that’s the story she’s going with, and no amount of evidence we can come up with will counter that, because at the end of the day, it’s the word of a woman well respected in her company against that of an itty, bitty bug,” Mia’s words genuinely baffled you. How could she talk like that about one of her clients!
“Well if that’s how you feel, then why did you take this case?” You asked, genuinely curious.
“Much like taking you on at the firm, I was outvoted, Diane and Olivia thought it would be a good PR spin. And then Diane and Olivia had the gall to dump the case on me, despite me being the only person with the sense to advocate that we distance ourselves from this trainwreck of a case as much as possible,” Mia’s scowl as she talked about her partners told you that she wasn’t exactly a fan of the two women.
“So what do you propose we do then?”
“I’m glad you asked...”
1) “...because I’ve already figured out a plea deal, hopefully this will show you the compromises we have to make on these unwinnable kinds of cases.” Mia plans to propose a deal with Sandra Allen’s attorney, which would allow the workers to unionise, but Thomas Miller be assigned a permanent usage license giving Sandra full ownership of him. How do you react to it, and do you try to interfere?
2) “...we are going to go and meet with our clients to discuss strategy.” How will Mia treat the tiny clients?
3) “...I’m going to read over these case files to find a crack in the opposition’s defence. I’d usually get the intern assigned to me to go and get me a coffee, but since you’re too small to even do that, you’ll have to help me out in some other way.” Mia tosses you onto her chair to cushion her ass/throws you in her shoe/writers choice.