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"To get a job, the students should be long enough on family connections,
為了獲得一份工作，學生們應該有廣泛的家族關系，
long enough on ability or long enough on personality, or a combination of these.
具備各種能力及完善的人格，或者是這些特點的綜合。
Something called acceptability is made up of the sum of its parts.
這些特點加在一起就構成了所謂的可接受的資格。
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.
如果一個人具備其中任何一個特點，他就可以得到一份工作；如果他具備其中任意兩個特點，他就可以挑選工作；
If he has three, he could go anywhere.
如果他三個特點都具備，那么他到哪里都沒問題。”
Bickel's hair was not fair. His eyes were not blue.
比克爾沒有金黃色的頭發，也沒有迷人的藍色眼睛，
He spoke with an accent, and his family connections consisted,
說話還帶有口音。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.
基本上屬于居住在羅馬尼亞首都布加勒斯特的耶特·比克爾的所羅門的后裔，近來，才搬到布魯克林。
Flom's credentials were no better.
即便弗洛姆帶著證明信，也沒有使面試的情況好到哪去。
He says he felt "uncomfortable" when he went for his interviews downtown, and of course he did:
他說，當他來到市區面試時，感覺非常“不舒服”，確實如此：
he was short and ungainly and Jewish and talked with the flat, nasal tones of his native Brooklyn,
他身材矮小，一看上去就像猶太人，他比較笨拙，說話時語音單調，還帶有布魯克林式的鼻音。
and you can imagine how he would have been perceived by some silver-haired patrician in the library.
你可以想象，那些坐在書房里的“銀發貴族”們會用什么樣的眼光打量他。
If you were not of the right background and religion and social class and you came out of law school in that era,
如果在那個時代，你是法學院畢業生，然而你卻沒有恰當的背景、宗教背景以及不屬于適當的社會階層，
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",
或者你只能自己開一個公司，處理一些找上門來的案子，
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處理的案子。這實在太不公平了，然而事實就是如此。
But as is so often the case of outliers, buried in that setback was a golden opportunity.
不過，對于那些出類拔萃的人來說，這種事太平常了，而且，挫折對他們來說，往往很有價值。
The old-line Wall Street law firms had a very specific idea about what it was that they did.
華爾街那些老牌法律公司有他們自己獨特的行事方法。
They were corporate lawyers.
他們屬于企業律師。
They represented the country's largest and most prestigious companies,
他們代表著美國最大而且最有聲望的公司。
and "represented" meant that they handled the taxes and the legal work behind the issuing of stocks and bonds
所謂的“代表”，指的是他們主要處理企業股票、債券發行的稅收和法律工作，
and made sure that their clients did not run afoul of federal regulators.
保證他們的客戶的行為不會和聯邦政府的法規發生沖突。
They did not do litigation; that is, they rarely had a dividion dedicated to defending and filing lawsuits.
他們不接收訴訟案例。那就意味著，他們基本沒有人會愿意花心思去打官司，做辯護。
As Paul Cravath, one of the founders of Cravath, Swaine and Moore, one of the very whitest of the white-shoe firms, once put it,
就像非常非常紳士的“白鞋公司”——美國凱威律師事務所 (Cravath,Swaine and Moore)的創始人之一的保羅·克拉瓦什（PaulCravath）說的那樣，
the lawyer's job is to settle disputes in the conference room, not the courtroom.
律師的工作就是把糾紛解決在會議室內，而不是在法庭上。
