Page 633 - WhyAsInY

CoMinG HoMe?
in the eighties, got me involved working closely with him and other members of the Trusts and Estates Department in connection with a war between members of the second generation of a wealthy real estate family the scion of which had recently passed away. There were three significant consequences of that involvement.
First, I became the “go-to guy” whenever the firm took on a matter that pitted wealthy real estate inheritors against one another, a phenom- enon that, it turns out, is quite common. So I had a whole new and very interesting dimension to my practice—and that was good.
Second, I became the person to whom the (very busy) Trusts and Estates Department would turn whenever there was any real estate involved in an estate, which meant virtually all of the time. That too was good.
Third, and arguably not so good, Rubenstein, acting for the Man- agement Committee, stunned me by asking if I’d be willing to take over the chairmanship of the twenty-attorney Real Estate Department, which was quite an honor. If I accepted, I would have to become a part- ner in the firm—for the second time. Against my better judgment, I did. So, not only was I busy with transactions, my first love, but I was now sitting in or running more meetings than I could count.
The meetings that I did like involved those with the associates, where I undertook to keep them current on existing matters and to teach them basic overarching economic and legal concepts that would otherwise be lost to them in the press of getting their work done. (I had found that, just as I had loved to teach softball and other vital subjects to young campers and—in a more serious vein, of course—to try to teach the ways of the world to my own children, I loved to teach young lawyers, both formally and informally. My real formal teaching career in a law firm context had come many years before when I hosted a departmental luncheon the purpose of which was to teach young prac- titioners not legal concepts but, more important, the meaning of scores of mystifying buzzwords and phrases that they would encounter along the way—and would look really professional by adopting to their own use—for example, equity in the wrap, cap out, waterfall, drop, trigger, REA,
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