Page 620 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
and Orwellian J. Edgar Hoover FBI Building for my taste. It housed the same number of attorneys as were housed in Atlanta, and it had approx- imately the same number of partners as worked down South.
The Washington reception duplicated Atlanta’s. There was the normal discussion of clients, present and prospective, but the move- ment of Charles et al. (et me) to the New York office was treated as a fait accompli. I was, for the most part, as impressed with the Washington partners as I was with those in Atlanta. The D.C. partners were bright, sophisticated, seasoned, knowledgeable in a wide range of fields, digni- fied, and cordial.
So, our next step was New York, where some negative signs appeared. Not negative about us (although there was a modest confrontation con- cerning Charles’s well-known potential for being difficult) but negative about Sutherland itself. While Atlanta and Washington had exuded solidity and had handled themselves as you would expect an established big firm practice to do, the New York office gave off a different “vibe.” The small and dark space to which we would be moving housed what had been a stand-alone firm until, two years earlier, it had been “merged” into Sutherland. And there was a clear undercurrent of resentment about the controls that the New York office was subject to now that it was part of the larger Sutherland culture. Their leadership, Burt Haimes and Roger (whose last name is lost to me), spoke as one as they made their independence from Sutherland clear to us. Burt and Roger had good things to say about the D.C. office but were unmistakably less than positive about the Southern leadership.
The image that I would identify with the New York meeting was a matter of fashion. In a time when most attorneys wore dark suits and somber, decorous ties, a young partner, Dean Fensterstock (the only name in the meeting that was more difficult than Harvey Yaverbaum), chose for an important, serious, and dignified occasion to sport a broad blue tie that featured a not particularly lawyerly, very dominant, shiny bright red, black, white, pink, and yellow insignia:
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