异类之不一样的成功启示录 第81期:法学院毕业生的面试难题

 "To get a job, the students should be long enough on family connections,

为了获得一份工作，学生们应该有广泛的家族关系，
long enough on ability or long enough on personality, or a combination of these.
具备各种能力及完善的人格，或者是这些特点的综合。
Something called acceptability is made up of the sum of its parts.
这些特点加在一起就构成了所谓的可接受的资格。
If a man has any of these things, he could get a job. If he has two of them, he can have a choice of jobs.
如果一个人具备其中任何一个特点，他就可以得到一份工作；如果他具备其中任意两个特点，他就可以挑选工作；
If he has three, he could go anywhere.
如果他三个特点都具备，那么他到哪里都没问题。”
Bickel's hair was not fair. His eyes were not blue.
比克尔没有金黄色的头发，也没有迷人的蓝色眼睛，
He spoke 1 with an accent, and his family connections consisted,
说话还带有口音。如果追溯其家族根源，
principally, of being the son of Solomon and Yetta Bickel if Bucharest, Romania, by way, most recently, of Brooklyn.
基本上属于居住在罗马尼亚首都布加勒斯特的耶特·比克尔的所罗门的后裔，近来，才搬到布鲁克林。
Flom's credentials 2 were no better.
即便弗洛姆带着证明信，也没有使面试的情况好到哪去。
He says he felt "uncomfortable" when he went for his interviews downtown, and of course he did:
他说，当他来到市区面试时，感觉非常“不舒服”，确实如此：
he was short and ungainly and Jewish and talked with the flat, nasal tones of his native Brooklyn,
他身材矮小，一看上去就像犹太人，他比较笨拙，说话时语音单调，还带有布鲁克林式的鼻音。
and you can imagine how he would have been perceived by some silver-haired patrician 3 in the library.
你可以想象，那些坐在书房里的“银发贵族”们会用什么样的眼光打量他。
If you were not of the right background and religion and social class and you came out of law school in that era,
如果在那个时代，你是法学院毕业生，然而你却没有恰当的背景、宗教背景以及不属于适当的社会阶层，
you joined some smaller, second-rate, upstart law firm on a rung below the big names downtown,
你只能加入一些次于大牌公司的二流小公司，
or you simply went into business for yourself and took "whatever came in the door",
或者你只能自己开一个公司，处理一些找上门来的案子，
that is, whatever legal work the big downtown law firms did not want for themselves. That seems horribly unfair, and it was.
就是那些知名的大公司不愿处理的案子。这实在太不公平了，然而事实就是如此。
But as is so often the case of outliers, buried in that setback 4 was a golden opportunity.
不过，对于那些出类拔萃的人来说，这种事太平常了，而且，挫折对他们来说，往往很有价值。
The old-line Wall Street law firms had a very specific idea about what it was that they did.
华尔街那些老牌法律公司有他们自己独特的行事方法。
They were corporate 5 lawyers.
他们属于企业律师。
They represented the country's largest and most prestigious 6 companies,
他们代表着美国最大而且最有声望的公司。
and "represented" meant that they handled the taxes and the legal work behind the issuing of stocks and bonds
所谓的“代表”，指的是他们主要处理企业股票、债券发行的税收和法律工作，
and made sure that their clients did not run afoul of federal regulators.
保证他们的客户的行为不会和联邦政府的法规发生冲突。
They did not do litigation; that is, they rarely had a dividion dedicated 7 to defending and filing lawsuits 8.
他们不接收诉讼案例。那就意味着，他们基本没有人会愿意花心思去打官司，做辩护。
As Paul Cravath, one of the founders 9 of Cravath, Swaine and Moore, one of the very whitest of the white-shoe firms, once put it,
就像非常非常绅士的“白鞋公司”——美国凯威律师事务所 (Cravath,Swaine and Moore)的创始人之一的保罗·克拉瓦什（PaulCravath）说的那样，
the lawyer's job is to settle disputes in the conference room, not the courtroom.
律师的工作就是把纠纷解决在会议室内，而不是在法庭上。