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the office, for it was on that day that my right knee would be replaced at Beth Israel North (formerly, you’ll recall, Doctor’s Hospital).
Then, the worst occurred: Joe died on May 8. I stood on crutches throughout his funeral on May 9 at Beth Israel Synagogue of West- port/Norwalk just two days after I came home from the surgery. Although I would be at Rosenman for another six years, I mark that day as the end. A friend and implacable counterforce had been lost, and Rosenman was no longer anything like the Rosenman that I knew, nor was it likely to be.
Within a few weeks, the real estate partners at the newly combined firm met to talk about those “synergies.” To me, it was yet another tedious and useless time for people to seize the opportunity to brag about their own practices.
And about six weeks after that meeting, I learned that the New York Real Estate Department was going to have two new partners, one of whom, Marc Shapiro, I had met when he was a junior associate at Weil Gotshal and I was the general counsel at Coronet. Consistent with Kat- ten’s general approach, nobody had bothered to consult with me. (When Rosenman was Rosenman—and I will also refer to the merged firm by that name, notwithstanding its current title—new partners were vetted, at least by partners in the affected department, and admission required a vote of the entire partnership, even if that vote was sometimes politi- cally difficult to challenge.) Neither did they ask me how I felt about their decision to replace me with Shapiro as head of the Real Estate Department (although the firm’s managing partner, Vince Sergi, swore up and down that he thought that one of the New York partners had talked to me about it and that he, Sergi, had been told that I was fine with the idea).
Then, at the end of the year, Sergi, who ruled the firm like a poten- tate, came to my office and offered me the “chance” to become “of counsel” again. (This was done with a lot of original Rosenman partners for, among other reasons, the purpose of increasing the firm’s published average compensation per partner and thereby move Katten up in the
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