On a recent afternoon, some 30 lawyers gathered in an elongated conference room in the New York offices of Debevoise & Plimpton to listen to firm alumnus Gerald Shea discuss his recently published memoir, Song Without Words.

"This is the kind of room that used to terrify me," Shea said, "but now that I’m the one who’s speaking, it’s not bad at all."

Those fears ran deeper than the typical case of lawyer jitters. For nearly the first decade of his career—spent as a Debevoise associate, first in New York and then in Paris—Shea practiced law without knowing that he was partially deaf.

Stricken with scarlet fever at age 6, Shea did not discover until he was 34 that the illness had damaged his hearing in both ears and severely limited his ability to make out spoken words. High-frequency sounds, including most consonants, were virtually inaudible, so that most of what he heard were vowels communicated at low frequencies. He was also plagued by a constant buzzing that he refers to as "the locusts," and no longer experienced such natural sounds as birds singing, crickets chirping, and crashing waves on the shore.

"[T]he words of most people—teachers and professors in classrooms, children in a courtyard, characters on a stage, actors in a movie, and lawyers and bankers sitting around a table—were all puzzles to be solved," Shea writes in his book, which was published last month by Da Capo Press. "I believed others had to solve them too but were simply better at it than I."

A hearing test administered when he took a job as an in-house lawyer at Mobil in 1976 finally alerted Shea to the source of his problems. With the use of a panoply of hearing aids, practicing law became slightly easier for him. Even so, the partial deafness turned every day into a kind of stressful riddle to be unlocked, and in 1995, eight years after returning to Debevoise’s Paris office as international counsel from Mobil’s Saudi Arabia operations, Shea resigned from daily law practice.

"I think (practicing law for) 20 years with hearing aids, and 10 years without, made me happy enough as a human being to feel as if I had done all that I could," he said in an interview with The Am Law Daily.

Shea’s book is part personal tale, part history of deafness, and part analysis of how society has dealt—or failed to deal—with those afflicted by it. Elegantly written, it encapsulates the struggles Shea faced by living in the hearing world while saddled with a disability he was for a long time unaware of. Shea artfully weaves in what he calls "lyricals," the phrases he hears and translates when others speak, to give the reader a sense of how he copes with his daily challenges.

In his first few days of law school, for instance, Shea recalls hearing, "While thus protory is topical require sections in appliance?" when a professor asked "Why does promissory estoppel require action in reliance?" When his then-girlfriend, while urging him to show more affection, said, "We are still young," he heard "Clearasil sung."

The incomprehensible nature of his classroom lessons soon led Shea to adopt a practice of furiously scribbling down his lyricals and then working all evening to decipher their meanings. Good grades followed—as they had at Andover and Yale—and on-campus interviews led him to a job with Debevoise after graduating from Columbia Law School in 1967.

Within a few years, Shea’s strenuous coping methods and constant all-nighters literally began to make him sick. "I found that the physical environment at Debevoise, with its large conference rooms, noisy offices, and whooshes, was slowly becoming a nightmare," he writes in the book. Shea wryly quipped during his Debevoise talk that to combat recurring ulcers, he regularly took liquids to coat his stomach, the drug pro-banthine to limit the production of liquids, valium to calm down, and coffee to counteract the valium. Just as the stress was becoming almost too much to bear, he says, one firm leader overhead him mutter, "I wish I were dead," in the office bathroom and came up with the solution of sending him to what was at the time the much calmer Paris office for three years.

“I think one of the problems that was difficult to reconcile for the people I worked with was how great a gap there was between what I could produce on paper and the way I performed in meetings," Shea says.

Indeed, the extent of Shea’s troubles was virtually unknown within Debevoise, even after his diagnosis. His colleagues recall him as a brilliant lawyer and draftsman whose work product—on complex mergers and acquisitions, privatizations, and joint ventures—elevated every transaction.

James Kiernan, a now-retired Debevoise partner who led the Paris office when Shea returned to the firm in the 1980s, recalls that the partners were amazed when they heard about his hearing loss but thought that its detection meant it was a problem that was largely resolved.

After reading the book, "I think a lot of partners at Debevoise that knew Gerry were somewhat surprised by the difficulties he had, because you didn’t really see that," Kiernan says. “You knew that he had a problem hearing, but he was very upfront about that. You’d repeat yourself. . . . Then he’d then go away and do a wonderful job."

Now 70, Shea is living a life far removed from the pressures of corporate law. He and his wife, Claire de Gramont, live in Paris most of the year and spend their summers on the North Shore of Massachusetts. Some days they play tennis, or a round of golf. On other occasions, they go for a walk in the forest or take out their sailboat.

Even with the relaxed schedule, Shea can’t shake the work ethic that carried him through three decades of practicing the law. Most days, he says, he writes from 9:30 in the morning until 7:30 at night, breaking only briefly for lunch. Sticking to that schedule is what enabled him to produce Song Without Words, his first published book, which has received high praise in early reviews in The Boston Globe and The Washington Post.

Because Shea’s hearing loss occurred after infancy, it did not affect his ability to speak. He was even able to master French, though he says that reading lips and understanding lyricals in foreign languages is nearly impossible. Throughout his life, he adds, music has also been a great influence, and he still sings regularly and plays the piano.

And despite all he’s learned about his own affliction and deafness more broadly, Shea never tires of learning more about the topic. As he puts it, "I think the drive to understand language continues undiminished throughout your life."