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The Mouth that Pours

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Carrying two cell phones and often reaching her desk before 6 a.m., Wong is not shy about crediting herself for her success. "You never hear Margaret Wong is not the greatest lawyer in the world," she says. "That's how good I am. It's in here -- and I tell my kids this -- it's in my mind, in my brain, in my heart, and in my gut. It's there. I see a case and I know what to do -- that's how good I am."

Wong has excelled in what is not the law's most glamorous field. There are few Perry Mason moments, no multimillion-dollar judgments. The work is technical, similar in routine to family medicine or auto mechanics -- diagnose, repair. It's also a volume business. Since 1998, Margaret Wong & Associates has taken on 12,000 new matters. The firm employs between 30 and 40 people at any given time. At the moment, six (counting Wong) are attorneys. The rest are paralegals, accountants, secretaries, and other support personnel.

One recent morning, Wong led a tour of her firm, which occupies a building on Chester Avenue owned by a family trust. Space abounds. Rooms are reserved for exercise and quiet meditation. Wong plans for a sizable corner to double as a Chinese-American meeting hall. The youth and color wheel of skin tones among the workforce suggest a drop-in center for international college students.

Throughout the tour, Wong introduced the visiting reporter as her "friend" -- though the interview was of such a nature that it had to be arranged through and attended by her attorney -- and as a "fellow journalist," a reference presumably to her father's profession and her consideration, at one time, of a career as a reporter. Inappropriate introductions are supposedly a habit of Wong's. Tracy Harves, a lawyer who sued the firm in 1998 after a dispute over maternity leave, complained that Wong referred to her in front of clients as the "knocked-up attorney." (Wong denied this.)

Harves worked at Margaret Wong & Associates not quite a year. Short stints at the firm are common. A document in Ehrbar's case file lists the dates of service for some 100 employees. According to the document, of 32 associate attorneys hired in an 11-year period, 17 lasted less than a year. Patrick McLaughlin, Wong's attorney, attributes the turnover to the wider trend of fluidity in the workplace and the narrow focus of the practice. "Anybody who wants to do something besides immigration is not going to do it here," he says.

But departed attorneys have said that their former boss, in addition to disparaging seemingly all ethnicities but her own, flashed a beastly temper. "If she got upset about something, she just snapped," former Wong attorney Harlan Karp said in a deposition he gave in the Ehrbar case. Karp said Wong would apologize later for her outbursts, which she called "one of her weaknesses," according to his deposition. A Wong alum who spoke to Scene on the condition of anonymity compared the tongue-lashings and subsequent apologies to what a battered wife endures.

Wong concedes that she can be a taskmaster, but she points to excellent benefits and company trips to Cancùn and Jamaica as signs of her generosity to employees. "And when they do something good, we'll slip them $100," she says. "Sometimes I just give them cash, because I don't want the office to know, so, you know, 'Here is some extra money.'"

The former attorneys who are critical, Wong notes, are current competitors. She sued three lawyers who left en masse in 2000 and started their own firm. Her suit claimed that they stole her client lists and "breached their duty of loyalty" by placing their interests ahead of hers. "Some of these people just came back and bit me," she says. "But it's okay -- no negativity, because I want them to succeed. Because if they succeed, I'm succeeding in my mentoring."

Still, similarities in the complaints made against Wong suggest that more than ingratitude is at work.

Michele Norton thrives in a world she can barely see. She suffers from congenital nystagmus, a condition marked by rapid and involuntary eye movement. In typical nystagmus cases, "dancing eyes," as they're sometimes called, do not allow for light rays to focus correctly on the retina. Norton has about 20 percent of her vision and a visual field of two feet, according to court documents. Despite her disability, she graduated magna cum laude from Edinboro University in Pennsylvania. After attending law school at Case Western Reserve, she passed the bar exam on the first attempt.

Prior to taking the bar, Norton worked as a paralegal at Margaret Wong & Associates. According to the suit, Norton told Wong at the time she was hired that she needed certain accommodations; she took longer than a sighted person to complete some assignments. The suit alleges that Wong agreed to make the accommodations -- and remarked that Norton's visual impairment offered certain advantages. "She commented that having Ms. Norton at the Defendant law firm would make her (Mrs. Wong) look good," the suit says. "She said she could also use Ms. Norton's vision problem to gain sympathy and sway individuals."

But the suit goes on to claim that Norton was discriminated against and harassed by Wong and others at the firm because of her disability as well as her race (white) and national origin (U.S.A.). The suit describes screaming sessions and tears. "At one point while she was berating Ms. Norton, Defendant Wong angrily stated, 'Even my dog knows when to walk away and not keep talking.'"

Norton was fired on March 31, 2003. That day, the suit claims, Wong rushed into Norton's office and berated her for filing a corporate client's petition for an individual alien who owed the firm money from another matter. The suit says also that Norton had renewed requests for "certain reasonable accommodations" a few days before she was terminated.

Shortly after Norton's firing, the suit alleges, someone from the firm approached her and suggested that she could come back to work. When Norton said she wanted to speak with an attorney, the offer was withdrawn, the suit says.

Later, Norton's attorney informed the firm that a lawsuit would be filed. The suit suggests that Wong reacted angrily. Norton alleges that Wong contacted her current employer, also an immigration lawyer, telling her new boss to "watch out" and asking whether the employer could persuade Norton to settle the suit.

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