Page 642 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
Those were projects that, much like Portman’s Marriott hotel, made being a real estate lawyer a pleasure: they either changed the face of the globe, served a good purpose, or both.
Out of Practice
Sometime around my sixtieth birthday, I decided that I would not be spending the rest of my life as a real estate lawyer. As I’ve repeatedly noted, chairing the weekly real estate seminars and working through extremely complicated problems aside, I had never loved practicing in a big firm. As I looked around Rosenman, now Katten, I saw very few happy attorneys, and I saw many older lawyers coming in to work every day because, as it seemed to me, they knew how to do little else. Many in senior status seemed merely to be withering away. This was not a future to which I looked forward. And it certainly did not pass the Rock- ing Chair Test.
As I’ve also repeatedly noted, I was fortunate to be married to Kathy (in many more ways than one), and that fact provided me with both the psychological and economic permission to retire early. Kathy was wholeheartedly in support of the idea, and, for whatever reason, we chose the end of the summer of 2008, about three years later, as the right time. August 29 became the target date. Kathy would retire three years later, when she, too, would be about sixty-three, my retirement age. We could comfortably afford that course of action. Knowing that a plan was in place made life easier for both of us. Now that we had an apartment on the West Side (see Chapter Thirty-Three), I could walk across Cen- tral Park on my way to the office and fantasize about model train layouts for the lower level of our new home in Roxbury. And I could better tolerate things at the office that otherwise might not have been tolera- ble. Moreover, Kathy could better tolerate me.
One of my last major projects involved the representation of Lehman Brothers, then the fourth-largest investment bank in the United States. Although I did not know it at the time, the experience said a lot
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