Page 350 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
ence room (later in the newly built cafeteria), sometimes playing bridge or, when Fischer played Spassky in 1972, chess, and worked until, say, 6:30. If they were working late, which was a frequent occurrence, they would take as much as one and one-half hours to dine out in a group at the client’s expense (dinner was “on the client”), sometimes having a drink or two (I didn’t), before returning to the office, working until 10:00 or so and taking a taxi home (also on the client). The atmosphere was convivial, and there was little sense of competition, except perhaps when the time for decisions as to who “made partner” came around, which was roughly in the eighth year. By the time at which I retired, people ate at their desks and the camaraderie that I experienced as a younger lawyer seemed to have all but vanished. The pressure to bill, bill, bill was con- stant and affected not just the associates but the partners as well.
My real concern was not the hours. Everyone seemed to put them in, and no one had to tell you to work hard. No, my real concern was that it was a fluke that I was at Rosenman, that I would not be able to measure up to the highly credentialed lawyers around me, and that my superiors would soon discover that I just didn’t belong there.
That concern was reinforced when I was told about my first assign- ment. Max Freund, who I later discovered was regarded as the toughest and most tenacious attorney at the firm, was a graduate of Harvard Law School (Class of 1932), where he was rumored to have been number two in his class. (I believe both that the rumor was true and that he was the one who persisted in keeping it alive.) He headed the Litigation Depart- ment, which comprised more than half of the fifty or so attorneys then at Rosenman, and was more feared than loved. When Arnold Roth called me and told me to see Mr. Freund, I put on my suit jacket, put out my Marlboro, and left my single-windowed office, which was located on the nineteenth floor at the back of the firm’s file room, in search of Mr. Freund’s more than somewhat larger office on the twentieth floor, where all of the more senior partners sat. I discovered Max’s office near the southwest corner, where it was separated from Judge Rosenman’s corner office by a paneled antechamber that was twice the size of the space that I had just exited. After I figured out which of the two secretaries who
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