A couple of hours after getting home from Thursday's cocktail party, Ian called, wanting to go to a midnight dinner. Options are very limited at that time on a week night, and since I didn't want to go all the way over to Georgetown, we agreed to meet in Adams-Morgan at El Tamarindo.
Ian brought a laptop to follow the scores on a Phillies baseball performance or something (West Coast??), so we sat back near the bar where he could get a WiFi signal.
I wasn't really that hungry, especially in view of the hour, so I just got a couple of pupusas con queso y loroco. It came with a little bowl of the traditional curtido (pickled cabbage) on the side. I'm still trying to figure out what the big deal is with Salvadoreans and loroco (those green flower buds they like so much in their pupusa fillings). Ian had a chicken burrito with rice and beans. We discovered they have a policy at El Tamarindo that they charge for chips and salsa after midnight. Ian moaned and whined so much about it to the waitress that eventually she brought him a free basket. Afterwards, Ian wanted a piece of tres leches cake, so we split one.
After we'd been there for a while, seven 20-somethings came in to eat and were seated at the table next to us. Judging from their loqatiousness and conversational topics, I suspect they'd been out drinking for a while. They ordered food and wanted more drinks. It was after last call, though, but the waitress acquiesced, though she told them if they ordered, they'd have to be done with the drinks in twenty minutes. Then, right at 2 a.m., the waitress came and collected the glasses, in compliance with D.C. liquor laws.
Well, at the table was a certain loud female (we'll call her "Meagan"), an '07 Georgetown Law alumna and an associate at one of the big downtown firms, who started throwing a fit about her drink being taken away. She argued with the waitress and later a manager that they weren't going to pay for their drinks and claimed she didn't know they were going to be taken away (which would be an interesting argument, had the waitress not been standing right by Meagan when I heard her tell the table they'd have to finish their drinks in twenty minutes). The manager mentioned calling the police if they weren't going to pay the bill, and then Meagan started throwing her lawyer-weight around and arguing how she knew the law. After the waitress and manager moved on, Meagan kept loudly proclaiming how horrible the food was, how she'd never come back again (yay!), and asking the people at her table if there food wasn't just the worst they'd ever eaten. Turns out some of the other guys at her table were lawyers, too, and she was talking about them suing the restaurant for her.
Needless to say, she was being very disruptive to all the other tables in the dining room at the time. I was trying to ignore them, not really being interested in her discourse with her friends about the "definition of slut," in addition to other weighty topics, though I did note a few of the rises in conversation, such as the couple of times some of the embarrassed young men at her table were trying to calm her down, including a time when I wasn't sure if she was trying to text or email or call somebody on a Blackberry and one young man got very annoyed with her and said she wasn't being "cool."
Well, things calmed down somewhat until check time, when she started up her demands and insults with the waitress again. The waitress, I suppose to calm things down, had taken Meagan's drink off the tab but not all of them, since I think Meagan was the only one who hadn't completely finished her drink in time. But then, something happened that particularly bothered me. Now, loud, obnoxious, boorish, drunk females are nothing new to Adams-Morgan, but I found this to be a problem. The other guys at the table put cash in for the tab, but Meagan took all the cash and paid the bill with her credit card. She then loudly proclaimed to her companions that she was going to submit the bill to her boss and get reimbursed for the evening!
With seven people having dinner and drinks, that certainly would be an undeserved windfall to her pocket. What's worse, though, she wasn't entertaining on behalf of the firm, they didn't discuss any business at all, and some of her companions even questioned the validity of what she was proposing to do. She claimed her boss did this sort of thing all the time, and she wouldn't even notice when the reimbursement request came through. So, will Meagan be defrauding her law firm? What if the firm turns around and bills the illegitimate business expense to some client? Does her firm have a practice of submitting illegitimate business expenses for reimbursement? Do they bill clients for their personal non-business related meals and entertainment? And, what sort of example is being set if some of those table companions were summer associates, learning "how things are done" by lawyers in the real world?
Well, I don't know any of the managing partners at Meagan's firm, or I might have dropped one of them an email or mentioned her at some cocktail party where I saw one. Witnessing this potential breech of professional ethics still has me a little uncertain; I suppose I should just ignore it and mind my own business. What would you (especially you lawyers) do?
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