Page 354 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
cluded (and I had the temerity to say that in my memo), Kern died a New York domiciliary.
That was no good, not the result that the clients would have desired. It was good, however, for me, because in short order I learned that Ambrose Doskow was telling people that I had written the best memo that he had read in years. The charities settled, and, on hearing what Mr. Justice Cardozo’s clerk had to say, I settled down and decided that maybe, just maybe, I might be able to cut it as a Rosenman lawyer after all.
Courting Disaster
For anyone who has the slightest interest in what a young litigator at Rosenman did in his first three years in practice forty-five years or so ago (as we shall see, my litigation career would last just about forty months), I will later give a thumbnail description of some of the matters that I still recall. Now, however, it is important to me to describe for posterity the first time that I actually made an appearance before a real judge in a real courtroom. It was, as we shall see, an appearance unri- valed in the annals of American jurisprudence, and, to my mind, it therefore warrants far more than a thumbnail description.
Remarkably, it was in a civil litigation the name of which I can’t recall. In fact, I’m pretty sure that I had forgotten its name and the name of our client within minutes after I put in the time ticket that, merci- fully, limited the description of my services to about five words. Accordingly, I shall refer to the case as Unimportant and Badly Intentioned Corporation, Inc. v. Our Slightly More Important and Clearly in the Right Client, Incorporated.
At or about 4:00 (that’s how real lawyers say, “at 4:00” or “at about 4:00”) on a Monday afternoon, Ambrose, with whom I had been working on a brief in another matter, called me into his office. He told me that we had made a motion that was number 87 on the calendar that would be called at 10:00 a.m. the next day downtown in New York Supreme Court.
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