Page 618 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
plentiful. I spoke to a few Wall Street houses, but that did not turn out to be fruitful, and as I came to realize, Wall Street would not have been a good place for me. The prospect of going back to a law firm did not excite me; I had left with good reasons. But now I did not have much of a choice. So I rationalized: I was even more seasoned than I had been seven years earlier, and I had the prospect of bringing in government- related projects. I could not consider going back to Rosenman, a fact that disappointed me. (I had given them a lot of work when I was in D.C.; returning would have been awkward, if not barred for two years, for that reason. Also, I had reason to believe that Donald Siskind, who was now quite powerful there, might have been opposed to bringing me back in.) However, opportunity, in a strange and unanticipated form, did knock.
As I said earlier, Charles Goldstein had lost a power struggle at Weil Gotshal and then had moved almost his entire Real Estate Depart- ment to Shea & Gould. It transpires that whatever lessons Charles might have learned from his failures to get along at Weil were not fully absorbed (at least, so I thought), and it now appeared that, possibly cata- lyzed by Charles’s personality (did I mention that the imperious Sir Charles was known for being difficult?), Shea & Gould was on the brink of breaking up. Moreover, Charles and his first lieutenant, the attorney who actually ran the practice, Larry Lipson, were going their separate ways. Charles called me and, in his nicest way, asked if I would be inter- ested in stepping into Lipson’s shoes and being the lead lawyer in his large real estate–based practice once he and his team found a new home. He also said that he had a significant contact at Sutherland Asbill & Brennan, a nationally famous firm with its origins in Atlanta.
Sutherland was an expanding full-service firm that had been a leader of the civil rights bar in Atlanta as early as the 1930s and was renowned for its prowess in tax law; one of its partners had been the Commissioner of Internal Revenue. Its two largest offices were in Atlanta and Washington, D.C., with each having about one hundred attorneys. It had recently acquired a firm of about fifteen attorneys in New York City and was looking to expand its already large presence in the national real estate bar. Charles, for his part, would retain a substan-
• 600 •