Page 632 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
When I came “home again,” I quickly learned that the old saying is true. The Rosenman that I knew was no longer there. Joe Getraer, Bob Fisher, Peter Nadel, Joel Sternman, Bob Gottlieb, and Mark Fisher were still there and active, but most of the partners who were older than I was when I had left had retired, had passed away, or had taken senior status, meaning that they had offices that were located outside of the main- stream, which served as places for them to feel like they were going to work but not like they were working. Donald Siskind, who had been very powerful in the firm and who, I believed, had stood in the way of my return after I had left Washington, still maintained a sizable office on the seventeenth floor, where the real estate department was located, but he was now shunted aside to a nonworking “of counsel” status. All of his former partners from Marshall Bratter were long gone, and he was now well isolated from the management structure.
When I had first come to Rosenman in 1969, there were about fifty attorneys in the firm, and by the time that I left in 1986, it had doubled in size. We used to joke that no matter how large it got, when compared with all of the other prestigious law firms in New York, it remained just fine by Goldilocks standards: not too big and not too small; it was always, “just right.” In 1997, however, there were close to two hundred attorneys on board, and although it remained a midsize firm by New York stan- dards, it seemed to have changed into a very impersonal business, lacking the collegiality that I remembered and valued. New people were running the firm. They were younger and “laterals,” meaning that they had come to Rosenman from other firms. True, there were one or two younger partners from my first stint at 575 Madison who were now active in the firm’s management, but they were not seen as powerful. On the other hand, Joe Getraer, although not in a management role per se, had a lot of influence—positive influence—and for my purposes, that was more than sufficient. It wasn’t the Rosenman that I knew, but I had my own “deals” to work on, and I was quite pleased not to have to attend meetings or perform any administrative role.
That was soon to change. About one year after I arrived, Joshua Rubenstein, a managing partner in the office, who had worked with me
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