My parents sued me for the four point seven million dollars my grandmother left me, and to prove I was unstable their own attorney subpoenaed my service record and put it in front of the judge himself. He had read two pages of a hundred and forty. That is how my family found out what I do for a living.

The file is a hundred and forty pages long.

He did not read the rest, because he did not think he needed to. He already knew what I was. He had been told, at length, over three months, by two people who had been telling that story since 1987.

I have thought about Vernon Slaught a great deal and I do not think he is a bad lawyer. I think he is an average lawyer who accepted a characterisation from his clients and then went looking only for what confirmed it.

That is the most common failure in my profession and it is not rare and it is not stupid. It is what everybody does when they are certain.

He paid four hundred dollars an hour of my parents' money to fetch the single document that ended their case, and then he handed it to the judge himself, in a folder with his own firm's name on the front.