Legally Nude

This story is the ninth in a series. Hopefully, it can be read pleasurably as a stand-alone work. The previous installments give some context. This installment starts slowly but, hopefully, gets warm towards the end.

*****

Not long after Claire and Rick's bottomless party, Mala got another call from Claire. Mala called Sarah, Carla, and me into a conference room.

"Do you remember Erin, the red-headed server at Claire's party?" Mala asked. Sarah and Carla looked somewhat blank, but I nodded affirmatively. Erin was stunningly beautiful and pretty hard to forget.

"Well, she just got her Bachelor's in anthropology from _____ (Ivy League university). She doesn't really know what she wants to do now. Her parents are friends of Claire and Rick. Claire was 'hoping' we could find something for her to do here so she can make a bit of money."

Sarah made the first point that always came up when we talked about employees. "As an employee, we can't require her to work nude." And," Sarah went on, "with us working nude there is always the risk that she could set us up for a sexual harassment claim. That would make her some money."

Mala, always solicitous of her most valuable client, rejoined "I really don't think that Claire would be asking us to hire her if that was a risk. I gather that Claire and Rick are pretty close to her parents. I think Claire could put a halt to it if things went down that road. Also, remember that Claire controls about $ 2 million in annual billings for us. I really think that we need a better reason than a theoretical fear of a claim to refuse Claire's request."

Carla hit on the beginnings of a solution. "You know, many of the surrounding counties still don't have e-filing and don't have their records online. It is a real pain in the ass to have to get dressed to go make a filing or get a public record or go to the library. Couldn't we have her work clothed and use her for all of those little errands that we have to get dressed for now?"

As it seems is always the case, money, or the fear of losing it, won out and we agreed to invite Erin in for an interview, primarily to placate Claire. Talking to me, Carla was building a case for hiring her. "It will save us dressing and undressing multiple times a day. If I remember her correctly, she's very pretty so she might be good at witness interviews. If she just graduated from ______ she's probably a lot more tech savvy than any of us."

As always, the question arose of whether we conduct the interview nude or clothed. While there was a conceivable bit of risk legally, we decided that nude was better because that was how we work and what she'd see if we hired her. "Remember," I added, "she worked as a server at Claire's bottomless party wearing only an apron. I don't think she is going to be that clothes compulsive."

Erin arrived for the interview in a dark green dress that contrasted nicely with her rich red hair. The dress was business appropriate, barely. The hem was about mid-thigh and the dress clung to her body. Erin had a body that a lot of things, mostly male, would love to cling to.

Erin had brought copies of her resume, which we read quickly. Impressive was an understatement. Summa cum laude. Departmental honors. Published as an undergrad. State championships junior and senior years of high school in the 200 meter breaststroke. Besides that, she had spent a summer in college doing finish carpentry for a home-remodeler.

"My Dad was into carpentry as a hobby and taught me a lot when I was younger. I doubt that a job involving hard physical work is on my career path and thought that I needed some exposure to that," Erin explained.

All things considered, Erin made a powerful impression. Mala explained the job to her as we conceived of it. It was probably wishful thinking on my part, but I thought Erin looked disappointed when Mala explained that we would expect her to work clothed. Yet, Erin made no comment about that nor about the fact that her four interviewers, her potential employers, were all completely naked.

Finally, Sarah directly addressed the elephant in the room. "Erin, you understand that the four of us work naked? In fact, it is in our partnership agreement that we are required to be nude when we are in the office and any other time we're on firm business unless doing so is illegal or offensive to our clients. You also understand that Mala, Carla, Harry, and I live together? Sometimes, we are, uh, a bit familiar in how we touch each other."

Erin smiled. "I remember all of you from Claire's party. It is your shop and you are free to do as you please. You won't offend me. Now, I can't promise that I won't write a paper about this someday. I am an anthropologist after all, but I'll change the names."

To make a long story slightly shorter, we agreed to give Erin a tryout as a general purpose assistant at a salary and benefits guaranteed to make her parents, and Claire, happy. The decision turned out to be a good one. While Erin's office wardrobe was just this side of seductive (a positive in my estimation), her work was exemplary. She turned out to be extremely skilled at locating data on the Internet, from weather data to obscure articles by potential experts. Anything that wasn't strictly legal research Erin could do more quickly and more reliably than any of us.

Erin was also very good at document review. One bane of a litigator's existence is the vast volumes of paper, now more often electronic images of documents, generated by clients and opponents that might have some bearing on an issue in a case. Of course, one time honored tactic in litigation is to dump roomfuls of documents on your opponent in which the handful of meaningful material is buried. That way, you can truthfully say "we produced it" but there is a reasonable chance that your opponent will overlook it. As a very small firm, we were a frequent target of that tactic. Erin was quick to understand what mattered in cases and had an admirable attention to detail. Also, apparently, she never got bored. At the end of ten hours of reading the driest material, Erin was still reading as attentively as when she started. Embarrassingly, she repeatedly found meaningful things in documents which Sarah, Carla, or I had reviewed and missed.

Erin's hiring was also timely. Carla had just gotten a very involved trade secrets case from Marek. Sarah and I had gotten an exceedingly complex construction case.

Our city is built on a number of hills. Atop a few hills sit old mansions built by the railroad and beer barons of the Nineteenth Century. Since the late 1960s, most of the rest have been capped with high-rises of varying architectural merit. However, one hill just east of Downtown had remained undeveloped since the vineyards died from some sort of disease in the 1870s. Our hills are notoriously unstable and that hill, while a prime site, had been deemed unsuitable for construction.

Some real estate developers who became our clients decided that no site is truly unsuitable for construction, particularly if it has views that can command seven figures. These men engaged a large engineering firm to do soil and geotechnical investigation to determine if a mid-rise, very high end, condo tower could be built there. The developers understood the engineers' answer to be "yes" provided that an expensive system of piers and supports was installed beneath the building's foundation. That system worked quite well until a few days after the foundation pour was completed, and following a couple of days of hard rain, when about half of the foundation slid thirty feet down the hill, taking part of the pier system with it.

The developers had pre-sold several million dollars worth of condo units (the view really would have spectacular) and projected an overall profit of around $ 16 million. The slide made it obvious that the project would never be built. Our clients needed to recoup their lost investment, recompense their disappointed buyers, and, hopefully, recover their expected profit.

The project had been insured. However, our clients' insurer took the position, probably correctly, that the insured loss was only the value of the property destroyed: the foundation and pier system, not the expected profit from the largely unbuilt project.

A second fact became a major feature of the case. The support system designed by the engineers was something that had been developed in Alpine Europe, but this was its first installation in the States. No local contractor had been willing to undertake the work so a contractor was brought in from Turin, Italy. Leaving aside whether that contractor had adequate (or any) insurance coverage or sufficient assets to satisfy a judgment, none of its assets were in the US and trying to enforce a US judgment, if we got one, in Italy would be uncertain and take decades.

The geotechnical engineers quickly became our prime target for recovery. Of course, their position was that the support system was properly designed but must have been defectively installed by the Italians. Another issue was that, while our clients felt that the engineers had given them an unconditional guarantee that the support system would work in this application, their contract with the engineers said something else. The contract expressly stated that the engineers were giving no warranties and would only be liable for negligence, basically the same situation as if there had been no contract.

Our first question became whether we had a colorable case that the engineers had been negligent. This determination required the opinion of another engineer. At this point, Erin became invaluable. We quickly ascertained that the local engineers who were amenable to doing litigation support were totally unfamiliar with this support system. Erin expanded our search nationwide with the same result. Erin then identified engineers who had worked with the system in Switzerland, northern Italy, and Austria. However, those engineers had the not uncommon European distaste for American litigation and declined to become involved.

Finally, Erin found an engineering firm in Munich which had worked with this system. Better yet, their senior geotechnical engineer spoke excellent English and had experience with US litigation. Erin took responsibility for copying the engineers' report, the design drawings, and the as-built drawings and sending those to the German engineers along with everything we could find about the soil, topography, and geology of our building site.

After a few nervous weeks, word came back from Munich that yes, the German engineers thought that the engineers in our case had been careless. The question of negligence is much more complicated than that, and depends in part on the standard of care of professionals in the locality where the work was done. With our clients' blessing, Sarah and I boarded a plane to Munich to sit down with our potential expert witness.

We arrived in Munich early in the morning. The German experts had sent a car which met us at the airport and took us through town to their offices. I personally love Munich. Sarah had never been there before. We were both looking forward to the opportunity to play tourist for a day or two. First, however, was a very long day with the German engineers. The bottom line, arrived at after much de facto cross-examination, was that the support system used was very successful in parts of the Alps. However, the soil and geology in our region was significantly different from Alpine conditions and the support system sold to our clients was wholly unsuited for use in our region. Moreover, the information which would alert a reasonable engineer to that fact was published. The engineers hired by our clients were, at least, negligent for failing to fully understand the limits of the system they had recommended and designed and that negligence was the direct cause of the structure's failure. Any reasonable engineer possessing the data our clients' engineers had accumulated about the site should have told our clients that the condo tower could not be built there.

Sarah and I were tired but satisfied as we rode into the Stadtmitte to the hotel Erin had booked for us. In our room, Sarah was casually leafing through the multi-lingual brochure about the hotel when she said, "Harry, your realize that there is a spa attached to the hotel?"

"I hadn't, but it seems worth checking out," I replied.

We put on more casual, and less rumpled, clothes and made our way to the spa. Outside the entrance, a young lady dressed in white like a nurse confirmed that, as hotel guests, we had spa privileges, but there was an additional fee of 50 Euro per person. A bit steep, but neither of us was inclined to argue. We paid and were handed keys "to your change room lockers -just inside that door."

Inside the first door was a second door. On that door was a sign in German, French, and English. The English said "nudity mandatory in sauna, steam room, hot pools, and swimming pool. Nudity permitted anywhere in spa."

Sarah read this, turned to me, smiled, and said "our type of place."

"I wonder if Erin knew about this when she made the booking," I mused.

The spa was rather busy. There were cubicles to change in, but most spa guests were stripping down in the walkways between them. We stripped, locked our clothes and few valuables in a small locker against the wall. Next to the lockers was a stack of fluffy robes. We each picked one up, and carried them over our shoulders.

From the change room, we walked into a huge room containing the swimming pool. The room was bright, airy, and quite warm. It had a high clear glass ceiling through which we could see the setting sun and the lights of Munich at night. The pool area was quite busy, but not unpleasantly crowded. I noticed that much of the crowd appeared to be twenty-somethings, about evenly split between men and women. A few wore robes, but most were nude.

Sarah and I used the showers on one wall and the sought out the steam room. After a half hour steam, another shower, and a few leisurely laps in the pool, we were sitting in chaises on the pool deck discussing our options for dinner.

"Excuse me," came an accented female voice. It was a young lady sitting next to us with a group of three young men and two other ladies. "You wish to eat? You know that there is restaurant here in spa?"

We did not. The young lady explained in good but rather rusty English that there was a restaurant/pub in the spa. "We were just going there. You join us?"

We were happy to join them. Sarah and I got up to go back to the change room to get dressed for the restaurant.

"No, no" the young lady said, "just come on." With that she and her friends stood up, all nude and started walking. We slung our robes over our shoulders and followed.

Indeed, the restaurant and pub did serve a largely nude clientele, albeit with clothed staff. We found a large round table and sat down. Introductions were made. The waitress, herself rather young and attractive in something meant to be a dirndl, took drink orders.

Our new friends were all young professionals in Munich. They, and many others like them, had bought the pricey spa memberships and liked to spend their Friday evenings there because, as the young lady who first spoke to us explained with a giggle, "we eat, drink, no clothes." I gathered that the nude spa was a popular weekend date destination among Munich's young urban professionals.

We had a wonderful meal and drank more excellent Bavarian beer than was probably wise. Our new friends, slightly more frisky, were headed back to the spa, which stayed open until 1:00 a.m. Sarah and I, however, begged off, explaining that we had just gotten in that morning, were tired, and wanted to see a bit of Munich on Saturday.

Our young lady friend who had started our evening together said, "We will be back tomorrow night. You join us?"

I looked at Sarah, who smiled. "Certainly," I responded, "what time?"

Our rendezvous scheduled, Sarah and I went off to dress and go back to the room. We were, by that time, thoroughly exhausted. We quickly undressed and fell into bed.

Since we never worry much about closing curtains, the summer sun poured into our east-facing room the next morning. We both felt surprisingly good. We quickly showered, together, and dressed to walk Munich.

For a couple of hours, I showed Sarah around a few tourist sites, like the Marienplatz and the re-built Hoffbrauhaus. Then I guided her into the Englischer Garten. As we walked into the field beside a small, cold branch of the Isar, she gave a small cry of delight. Spread out over several acres before us, in the center of one of Europe's great cities, were hundreds of nude people. I had been there before, but the state-sanctioned nudity essentially downtown was new to Sarah and impressed her greatly. We quickly found a spot to lie down and stripped off. Seeing one of the old, fat, bearded vendors who walk through the park, I bought us a couple of beers.

One improvement made since my last visit was the addition of port-a-johns in the FKK section of the park. I do tend to drink beer in Germany. On my previous visits, I had been forced to dress and walk to the WC by the Chinese Tower. I'm told that locals whizzed in the stream, but it was always too cold for me.

Sarah's natural ability to make friends soon showed and we eventually found ourselves playing in a nude soccer match in the afternoon sun. I'm not at all a soccer player, although Sarah did fairly well. After the match, we and our equally sweaty new friends washed off in the cold stream.

We stayed in the Englischer Garten longer than we had planned. Once we dressed and started back to the hotel, Sarah was disappointed that the shops were mostly already closed. On an impulse, I dragged Sarah down into an S-bahn/U-bahn station and caught a train to the Hauptbahnhof where I recalled stores stayed open later. My vague recollection was correct and Sarah was able to find some reasonably nice gifts for Mala, Carla, Erin, and Terry.

When we got back to our room the sight of Sarah's magnificent form had me thinking that some horizontal exercise was in order. Sarah, however, demurred. "Let's save it. Tonight could be interesting."

It was about 9:00 p.m. when we met our friends from last night at the spa entrance. I guess I was fatigued the night before, but it hadn't really registered with me that all three of the young ladies were very attractive. While I'm no judge of men, I assume that their dates were fairly attractive guys.

Our new friends seemed genuinely happy to see us. We went into the change room and all undressed together. Ute, our friend who had taken the initiative to talk to us the night before, explained that we had dinner reservations for 9:30 so we just had time for a brief swim first. As we stood at the showers along the wall of the huge swim hall, I stood between Ute and Sarah. Suddenly, Ute asked of me, "Bitte, wash back" and pointed to a spot between her shoulder blades which she obviously could not reach herself. Sarah smiled and nodded at me to go ahead. I wondered why Ute did not ask her date.

We had another wonderful meal. A bit more beer or, in the case of some of our new friends, vodka, was drunk. After a time, I felt the need to relieve myself or, as I say, "do something useful."

Ute apparently read my face, or she had gauged my beer consumption. She smiled and said "WC? Come with me." She took my hand and led me down a hall and through a door. Inside the unisex washroom were toilets on one side and urinals on the other, but no partitions.

Ute giggled and gestured towards a toilet, "I go." She pointed towards a urinal and said "you go." With that, she walked over, sat down, and began to piss.