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CoMinG HoMe?
way in which the transaction could survive. (Lenders took over the property in 2010, in the largest mortgage default in U.S. history; as I write this, a new sale is pending.)
More meaningful was the meeting that occurred later in 2006, when Donald and I jointly predicted the collapse of the housing market and the likely disastrous domino effect to follow. Too bad that neither of us had the courage to place a financial bet on the economy-shattering out- come that we now refer to as the “Great Recession of 2008”—or, more simply, “2008.”
But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
Sometime late in 2001, Joe, with whom I was working closely, came into my office, stood in front of my desk, and said, calmly but emphati- cally, “Are you sitting down?” Which I was. Then, with a very straight face and a level voice, Joe announced, “I have lung cancer.” I was stunned. How do you respond? What do you say? Well, I waited for a beat or two, hoping that Joe would follow with his prognosis, a presumably positive one. Joe was Joe. He did. He said that he was going to have a lung removed in a matter of days, that he would rest and recuperate at home, and that if, as he assumed, the operation would be sufficient to eliminate the cancer, he expected to be “back in the saddle” soon. I was devastated, but, if Joe was hopeful, I would be hopeful.
His absence, which would last for months, was very difficult for his friends. And it might have been a bad thing for the firm as well. Starting in the 1990s, and continuing to today, the law-firm world has been engulfed in a tsunami of mergers—most significantly, mergers that combined firms in New York City with “out-of-town” firms, sometimes to form mega-firms with more than one thousand attorneys and offices throughout the world. In the autumn of 2001, discussions addressed to a potential merger had commenced between Rosenman representa- tives and representatives of Katten Muchin & Zavis, the Chicago firm that, you might recall, I had first encountered when I was at Squire Sanders & Dempsey about five years earlier. Rumor had it that the cur- rent talks were moving forward in a serious fashion. Joe, whose voice was important, would not be heard. Katten had not impressed me when
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