In the midst of all this talk about Romney and Bain Capital, I've been reading IN THE SHADOW OF THE LAW by Kermit Roosevelt (Farrar, Strous and Giroux, 2005). I don't know whether Roosevelt is a descendant of Teddy's (who had a son named Kermit). I can confirm that he's still at Penn Law School, where he was when he published the novel. http://www.law.upenn.edu/cf/faculty/krooseve/ A Yale law grad and Supreme Court clerk, he worked for several large firms, says the dust jacket.
Roosevelt's mythical Washington firm is characterized by him as having reluctantly joined the ranks of the corporate raiders and their hired guns. Of the firm's aging founder, he writes on pages 140-41, "He had made two mistakes, Archie thought. He hadn't seen that the corruption of the businessmen could spread to the bar, and he hadn't seen that the corruption of the bar could spread to the firm. That some lawyers would come to admire bankers, that his own partners would admire those lawyers. And now all the bulwarks on which he'd relied were cast down; the mercenary world whose yappings he's disdained from the security of his keep was within the walls, and he was powerless to resist."
When I read this last night, it really took me back... to 1988. With Reagan's second term coming to a close, the big industrial unions had suffered wounds from which they would never recover and the corporate raiders were in their glory. The movie "Wall Street"(1987)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0094291/
tells the tale to near perfection.
I myself got caught up in a leveraged buyout... of New Jersey's then-largest convenience food store chain. I made a little money in 1989 and returned to the law firm with my mortgage paid off. I returned to a firm I hardly recognized. As a member of the labor department (which I had previously headed), I was assigned by the new partner in charge (an outsider) to manage the departures of some 20 partners, associates and of-counsel attorneys who no longer pulled their weight.
With regard to the partners, they were mostly corporate attorneys whose clients had been gobbled up by bigger fish in the mad rush to liquidate or consolidate myriad such medium-sized firms, as is described in Roosevelt's novel.
"New blood" had been brought in to revitalize the firm. The old guard was leaving the stage, and with them departed a gentlemanliness, a sense of propriety, the notion that law is a profession, not just (or primarily) a business.
I recall the managing partner telling the class of new, first-year associates that the billable hour was the greatest thing to ever come to the private practice of the law. A decade later that same attorney pleaded guilty in federal court to filing false tax returns [http://articles.philly.com/1999-12-03/news/25479957_1_guilty-plea-irs-tax-fraud] and was disbarred.
[http://fedbbs.access.gpo.gov/library/sc96otxt/051297a.zor]
I left the firm in 1993, first joining the faculty of Widener Law School and three years later moving to my current job as counsel to a New jersey university.
Reading Roosevelt's novel --- which I had the great good fortune to run across in a local bookstore --- rekindled those memories from two decades ago, when I was a witness to the decline of the legal profession in Philadelphia, as the big firms signed onboard the pirate fleet that has harassed and pillaged the AMerican economy ever since.
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