I am not sure that people really understand what we do. After all, we are the only law firm in the community association industry that has a Client Relations department, dedicated to just to you—our clients. It all started about 5 years ago when Scott and James asked me to help them scout a location for a few little seminars they were going to teach. So simple. I could do that. I scouted hotels and found a great spot and set it all up. Then–would I take registrations for these little seminars—over the phone? And by email? And be available all the time to answer questions about them? Oh my!

The next month I went to a trade show with an attorney because no one else was free. I was mortified to find that we had no booth or displays. Nothing. We just stood at the table provided and put out our brochure. So the attorneys asked if I could help with trade shows, which turned into delivering things to clients…you get the picture. Soon I was too busy to do it all alone. Then I met Heidi. In Heidi I saw the person who could help me bring it all to the next level.

Heidi and I got moving organizing the seminars, planning trade shows and golf events, visiting clients, taking calls from anyone who had questions or concerns, making sure everyone’s needs were met efficiently and quickly. When any new program rolled out, Heidi would make personal visits to tell clients about it and make sure at the same time our service was up to par. We planned two annual events: the charity event, CANcel Out Hunger; and our client appreciation event, the Shindig.

Along the way we needed more team members. Last year, Dacquiri joined the team, before leaving to have her baby girl. And now Stacy Bolen is a full time member of our Client Relations team. The three of us may have tasks divided up internally, but any of us can take your call and help you find what you need or answer your question. If you are not sure what you need, Client Relations is probably the answer!

Every summer we at Carpenter Hazlewood have a friendly little competition on the Wii. We try to break the monotony of the heat, humidity and hard work by holding a bowling tournament. Names are placed in brackets resembling the March Madness of college basketball and the games begin. Our Wii is downstairs in our big breakroom and games are scouted by potential opponents and friendly workmates alike. The first few brackets are played over the course of the first two weeks of July and players are eventually whittled down to the Final Four. (As you may remember, this is the activity where Javier tore a calf muscle last year. This is serious business.)

We certainly have firm favorites. Erin in accounting is always very good, very no-nonsense. Our office manager, Ange is also pretty good. Teresa, the director of litigation support, is an awesome bowler in real life, and it translates to the Wii. Annette, in document management, quiet, serene Annette rocked everyone’s world last year to win it all. These people are feared.

When Scott was up against Teresa, he got lucky. Teresa had to go out of town and forfeit her game. Scott advanced, only to lose his next game. Too bad, so sad. My daughters worked at the firm this summer as office grunts. They are pretty good at this game, so they were disappointed when they lost in early rounds. Then there is me. The girls had to remind me which buttons to use as I had not played since last year. There was much eye rolling.

But I won my first game! Barely. I squeaked by the second round. I was humble and telling people I wasn’t very good, and that it was a fluke. But I even won the third game. By this time people were taking notice. I was getting lots of comments like, “How is it possible that you are in this game? You stink!” All right, look. You know how you can say bad things about your sister, but no one else better bad talk her? I felt the same way. I can tell people I stink, but that doesn’t mean everyone else get to say that. Rude!

My kids were shocked that their old, lame mother was in the Final Four. But I was up against NICK. Nick is a file clerk who puts a weird spin on the remote and is basically unstoppable. He had run over every person up to that point. He ran right over me and won the whole tournament. . He took home the trophy and got his name on the plaque in the breakroom. Congratulations Nick. You aren’t going to be working here next year, are you?

I don’t know if we are normal, but the people around here seem to get a strange pleasure out of torturing each other. When a germaphobe goes out of town, they will come back to pictures of their office mates sitting in their chair with feet on the desk and their pencils in their mouths, just mocking them through photos. Once we wet down some Kleenex, wrinkled them and spread them all over Javier’s desk to appear used. If his window opened, he might have jumped.

Attorney and Cardinal fan Josh Bolen has a Cardinals rug in front of his office. That bird has been defaced too many times to count. His eyes have appeared to be pecked out. He has been stolen. He has been noosed. What can I say? Cowboy fans are everywhere.

When Heidi announced she hated pastel Post-it notes? Her office got plastered with them. When Javier made a crack about needing a mirror so he would have something beautiful to look at? We wallpapered his entire office with pictures of ourselves. That was expensive and time consuming. But oh, so worth it!

We have placed rubber roaches, rats, bloody fingers, spiders, etc. in the breakroom. We prank call each other. We torture each other in any way we can. If you announce a fear or a dislike, that will come back to haunt you around here. So I ask—is office torture normal, or are we the only ones?

Approximately 6 million Americans are Germaphobic, I estimate that at least 10% of them work in this office.  Time and again, I’ve  watched many a co-worker run toward our huge bottle of Purell to kill some imaginary germs, and it makes me wonder, is there something  about being in the legal field the creates an irrational fear of germs?

Was it the pictures of the enforcement case we handled with the lady that was hoarding trash? Or the one where we sued the lady with 60 cats? Is something like that gross enough to make someone a germaphobe? I don’t know.

But I do know that it has been educational to work with people who are scared of germs. Did you know some people here think that if you put an onion on your desk it’ll soak up all the germs in the air?  Here is a list of things I’ve learned NOT to do around germaphobes unless you want to hear about it for weeks:

DO NOT

• Eat the Pop Tart you dropped on the break room floor, even if it is the last one.
• Tell anyone that the M & M’s fell on the carpet and you put them back in the container anyway.
• Try to touch anything on a germaphobe’s desk. It took me forever to get that staple out of my hand.

And  the list goes on and on. It’s not really all that bad though. It’s actually very entertaining! The next time you’re bored, walk by your office germaphobe’s desk and pretend to sneeze. Then quickly grab the pen they were just using. Write a quick note, then put it back on their desk and walk away. Priceless!

Today, Behind the Scenes would like to discuss a somewhat controversial and deeply personal topic: the office thermostat.

In offices across America, the battle is waged daily. Ours begins at approximately 8:30 a.m. when managing partner Scott Carpenter walks into the office. The routine never varies. I hear the door open, then a person walking swiftly toward the corner office. My survival instincts begin kicking in and I automatically reach for the winter parka I keep on a hook behind my door.

A whimper can be heard from Accounting as they watch Scott push that tiny lever to 60. And we all know what’s coming. The transition is slow at first, only enough to warrant getting a second cup of coffee to take the chill off.  After ten more minutes, your fingers start to slow down making typing almost impossible. Then the cold hits you a like a tons of bricks. Did I just see my breath?

When it’s possible to blow the circuits of a 10 story building because too many people have space heaters plugged in, you know you have a serious problem! One day we hope to have everyone at CHDW at the same internal temperature. Until then, I’m investing in an electric blanket!

It is a little known fact that when you take the elevator up from the lobby to the 4th floor to get to the lobby of our office, you could also press the down button on the elevator and get to our offices. Yes, that’s right. Carpenter Hazlewood has two floors in our building.  A year or so ago we outgrew the 4th floor and the only space the building had open was on the bottom floor, and a small group of us had to move.

The name of that bottom floor is very dependent on who is talking. If you were moving, it was the Dungeon. If you were convincing people to move, it was the Garden Level! To the building management, it is simply the Parking Level. To us, it is the Basement. Isn’t that really what the lowest floor is—a Basement? We never saw why the name had to evoke such emotion, and Client Relations was getting moved. Truth be told, the basement dwellers weren’t getting such a bad deal. If you have never been behind our building, it is gorgeous. There is a nice green park with tall pine trees and a shaded little pond with bridges over it, complete with ducks who deliver ducklings right on time every spring. And the Basement Dwellers have windows looking right out onto the park now. Some of the offices even have doors that open out there!

So the Basement Dwellers had the killer view, but they we were cut off socially. It was Client Relations, the 4 person management and accounting team (all females)…and Scott. We took to calling ourselves the Basement Babes…and Scott. We developed our own little culture down there, as isolated people often do. We developed bad habits like just yelling across the space for each other instead of walking into each others’ offices or using the phone system. Why would we do that when we practically see the person we needed? Basement bonding. Good times. We were just getting ready to order Basement Babes T-shirts (minus Scott). Then the IT guys moved down…the fun was over for good. But computer help is just a step away. That is not such a bad thing when your keyboard freezes. And the view is still really nice.

Most of you probably know that I am married to attorney Scott Carpenter. A few years ago we owned a rental house in Gilbert. Some friends of ours were moving out of state and had planned to sell their starter house to their neighbor “as is”. At the last minute the neighbor backed out of the deal. Our friends had not prepared the house for the market and needed to move the next day. We assured our friends we would take care of it. We cleaned out our savings and came up with a down payment to buy the house. We fixed it up enough to hire a management company and rent it out.

The renter was a single mom. All was fine until we began to receive the occasional letter about weeds, a dead bush, etc.  The twist was that our law firm represented this particular association. We discussed hiring a landscaper and adding it to the tenant’s rent. But then new letters arrived. The trash can sat out. An unauthorized basketball hoop went up.  When I got the final letter, I asked Scott, “Can you sue yourself?” He was exasperated. “Of course not!” He snapped. “I would have to refer the case to a competitor for conflict of interest and they would sue me!”

Needless to say we declined to renew the lease at the end of the year and sold the house. We decided we were not meant to be landlords. I never want to receive another letter saying Carpenter Hazlewood might sue us! I can’t afford their fees.

For some reason clocks seem to be an issue around here. We suppose because time is important to attorneys. They are always rushing to be somewhere, they book their calendars to the minute and they bill…well, you know. There has been a bit of a debate about what kind of clocks to get for the conference rooms. We have a large clock in the education suite with Roman numerals on it that is very nice, thank you. When we were recently discussing the fact that we were looking for new clocks for the conference rooms, one of the attorneys said, “Please get one with real numbers. I can’t read the one in the Education Suite.”

Really? Did we just hear that? How do people get through law school without being able to read Roman numeral clocks?

Scott wants big black clocks with huge red numbers on them so you will feel like you are in a prison or a school cafeteria. He actually ordered some off Amazon. We hid them when they got here and we hope he just forgets he ever ordered them. They are hideous.

We bought some clocks that seemed to match the décor of the conference rooms. They got a big thumbs down. Too small, the people declared. They were returned. We shopped again and the next batch was declared acceptable. They were placed in the office manager’s area. A few weeks passed and they were somehow placed back in the office of Client Relations with some hooks. We were asked when we were going to hang the clocks we purchased. We are here to relate to clients. But somehow, the little jobs that have no one assigned to them become ours. How did that happen? How did we become the interior decorators? We decided to accept it as a compliment on our excellent taste and find the hammer.

So next time you are here, notice the new clocks with the numbers. They are really nice. And they are hung perfectly.

Welcome to the first edition of Behind the Scenes. We created this blog so you could get to know us a little better in a different light. That AND we’re sick of people asking us, “So what’s it really like to work in a law firm?” Instead of answering that question a million times we thought we would let you see for yourself. So we’re taking you, well, Behind the Scenes.

We’ve noticed that when people think of lawyers they think one of two things: Either the attorneys spend all day in court trying cases with defendants screaming at them, “YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE TRUTH”; or that all of us around here wear dark suits and run around carrying briefcases talking in hushed tones. Not even close. No one has ever pulled a Jack Nicholson on one of our attorneys from the stand, (not that we know of anyway) and no one here runs. Ever. But it’s not all legal issues and serious conversations either. It actually gets downright noisy in here. In fact, we had to move our break room to the basement due to all the lunchtime shenanigans. Apparently we were disturbing the peace upstairs. It actually worked out better though because now we have more room for our Wii bowling tournaments. True story: last year during our Wii bowling tournament one of the partners (Javier) actually tore his calf muscle running up to the screen. Good thing we have worker’s comp!

We really hope that you’ll join us on this tour of our place and we hope you enjoy our stories. We have some doozies. We promise you won’t be disappointed.

Shannon & Heidi