Page 371 - WhyAsInY

Do a JoB—Harvey tHe litiGator
being obvious about it. Gradually, something resembling a decent brief emerged, and the case was reversed as against Lehrich. It then promptly settled.
• Case without a Name. Okay, so I don’t recall the parties, but I did have to mention the one time that I actually took a deposition. Andy Schoen, a partner, told me that his client, a relatively big corpora- tion, was being sued by a former employee in a case that related to, or arose from battling interpretations of, six or seven documents. My job was to depose the plaintiff, and Schoen told me to make the session last as long as possible and to wear the witness down. So I spent an entire day questioning the poor guy about a two-page let- ter and succeeded in finishing two of its six paragraphs when we called it an afternoon. I thereby substantially increased my respect for the American system of civil litigation.
• The Blind Brother Case. I forget the name of this case also. It con- cerned a man who was squeezing his brother out of a corporation the stock of which they had inherited from their father, but I recall it fondly (a) because I felt very invested in what turned out to be a good result for our client, the unsighted sibling, (b) because I worked closely on the case with, and thereby earned the respect of and became friends with, Peter Nadel (who you will recall was one of my interviewers), and (c) mostly because—naughty me—I took advantage of that relationship to change the salary scale for all of the associates in prestige firms in New York City.
Peter, who was the fair-haired senior associate and everyone’s clear choice as the next litigation partner, worked closely with Sy Lewis, a senior partner who was Max Freund’s brother-in-law. Sy, in turn, was on the firm’s Management Committee and, as I knew, would consult with Peter from time to time about matters that related to associates. At the time, the “going rate” for starting associ- ates was $17,000 per annum. It was a rate that Cravath, Swaine &
• 353 •