Page 519 - WhyAsInY

CroWninG aCHieveMent: Harvey, tHe General Counsel
Flora assured me that Norman was not complicit and that he had taken the fall for his older brother, who had been IFC’s chairman of the board at the time. (When I arrived at Coronet, I was told that Norman had stopped speaking with that brother.)
I must admit that I wanted to believe her. For further due diligence, however, I called Ed Abramson, Dave’s brother, a senior partner at Her- rick Feinstein, who represented and, as it turned out, invested with Norman. He confirmed Flora’s story. Now I was even more ready to take the job if it was offered to me. As I said in Chapter Twenty-Five, I had accumulated a number of good reasons to get out of big firm practice and to leave Rosenman, but the impetus was not just negative. Ask virtu- ally any lawyer who has been with a firm whether he or she would like to serve as a general counsel, and he or she will ask you what you’ve been smoking. Of course, he or she would love to: being a real part of the action, seeing how the business people really did it, having law firms work for you, having outside counsel treat you as if you’re God, and having no more responsibility to fill out time tickets—I could go on— were all the stuff that dreams are made on. (I should add that I did not leave Rosenman without first placing the assessment of the move firmly in the hands of what I—and I’m sure others—refer to as the “Rocking Chair Test”: I asked myself to try to imagine that unimaginable time, decades and decades hence, when I would be retired and sitting in my metaphorical rocking chair on my hypothetical porch. How would I feel if I had passed up the opportunity—assuming that the job was offered to me—that had come my way, way back in the 1980s?)
So, it was with all that in mind that I had my first direct encounter with Coronet, via Arthur Beckerman, who struck me as someone whom I could talk to. I must have passed his test, as we enjoyed lunch and drinks for about two hours, and he invited me to go to his offices to meet with Norman “as soon as possible,” which, I was not surprised to learn, turned out to be one of Arthur’s favorite phrases.
The next day at 10:00, I was at Coronet’s offices at 505 Park Avenue, where I was escorted into a large office the entrance to which was flanked by two signs: “LEND!” and “BORROW!”—which would pretty much
• 501 •