Approximately three years ago, I got laid off from my job as a lawyer at a big new york firm. At the time, I was devastated, because I LOVED my job. Sure, it had its stresses and its late hours and its…personalities, but by and large, I liked what I did and I was good at it. The story at the time was that, since I wasn’t going to make partner, it was time for me to leave. In a recession. As I understood it at the time, they were trying to avoid getting tarred in the legal press for mass layoffs, so they started with the most senior associates and tried to tie it to ‘other’ explanations. The decision was made by someone (or someones) in upper management without consultation with the team I actually worked with, as the partners I was actively working on deals with had to find out from me that I had been canned. That made things a bit…awkward, particularly given that one partner had a ‘state of the relationship’ meeting with the GC at one client only a day earlier, where the GC apparently spent time talking about how glad she was that I was back on the team after returning from overseas.

I spent two years unemployed, looking for a job. Happily, about a year ago I started working again at an ‘alternative’ legal services firm that seconds its employees full time to companies, so I spend my days doing interesting work up in Stamford at a big multi-national company.

In the past few weeks, the firm that laid me off, Dewey & LeBoeuf, has been in the news quite a bit. Because they’re imploding in a spectacular fashion. On the front page of the New York Times. From what has been reported, as well as what I’ve heard from a few former colleagues that I remain in touch with (who have all managed to find new firms, thankfully), it’s largely due to gross mismanagement on the part of the post-merger firm.

Some background. I worked for Dewey Ballantine, which merged with LeBoeuf Lamb in 2007. As the story went at the time, Dewey had a bunch of debt but a stellar name, and LeBoeuf had solid financials. Even though the Dewey name came first in the post-merger firm, that was due to a quirk of Thomas E. Dewey’s estate requirements, and the merger was really a takeover by LeBoeuf – as evidenced by the fact that the post-merger leadership was headed by the LeBoeuf team.

So – to the current day. In order to attract some top talent from other firms, the leadership handed out a few payment guarantees. A few of these things are typical at any firm, but they should be limited because they otherwise undercut the entire nature of a partnership structure. But the vaunted, fiscally conservative post-merger management apparently decided to start handing out these guarantees left and right, including to incumbent partners. When they did their unusual bond offering in 2010, they didn’t disclose this. They apparently DID disclose that they ‘eliminated’ 300 lawyers post-merger, so their attempts at obfuscation discussed above were clearly just that. The Dewey debt pre-merger pales in comparison to what was apparently run up in the post-merger environment. As the story has been reported, none of the partnership were informed of the guarantees until last October, at which point there was mutiny. The Manhattan DA is apparently investigating the leadership to see if they did anything criminal.

What’s come out in the press is that they gave out 100 of these guarantees, then ran out of money to pay them as the economy took time to recover and more and more clients got stingier with external legal spend. So guarantee-less partners stopped getting paid altogether. Those partners, obviously, were going to look for any reasonable exit plan, creating a vicious cycle where the firm had less and less income (because a law firm has no ‘assets’ other than its legal talent). Earlier this year, FedEx apparently cut them off and the cafeteria stopped accepting the in-house payment system. And as partners start leaving, the chances that their clients (who move with them) will continue to pay outstanding bills to the old firm drops dramatically (sure, they have an obligation to pay, but they’ll focus on the new firm that they want new work from).

I’m torn between extreme sadness for a 100-year reputation that I helped contribute to for a few years, and the schadenfreude that comes from seeing the people who decided that I was an expendable resource that they could brag to investors about cutting get hoisted on their own petard. Mostly sadness. And horror at watching the slow-motion train wreck wreaking havoc on peoples’ lives (particularly the staff) because a few people were so freaking greedy.

What a shame. I now count myself lucky because at least I got some severance and COBRA coverage during my unemployment. In any event, I’m not spilling any secrets at this point, given how much of this has been written about in the press, but I just felt the need to get my thoughts down on (virtual) paper.

I’m also starting to feel a little weird, as I moved to Dewey from Thelen Reid & Priest, which went bankrupt about 3 years after I left there as well. My resume is starting to look like a graveyard.

Pretty beginning foliage:

Keeping the cows in, the old fashioned way:

really green lawn:

really blue sky:

and some perspective on a bridge:

I’ve tried to keep the pricing reasonable, while not undervaluing my work (such as it is). I’m still working out the kinks on how the ‘buy prints’ link actually looks, because it’s defaulting to something kinda ugly in the lightbox, but it’s functional.

In any event, this isn’t an attempt to push sales or anything, it’s just to address an issue that has come up a handful of times over the many years that I’ve been posting photos.

Plus, a bonus shot of Ollie. As cute as ever.

Taken at 125th and Lenox.

It was interesting enough that I didn’t give up on it, but certainly nowhere near as captivating as Larson’s other books, and quite boring given the subject matter of the rise of Nazi Germany. Larson’s other books show a real dexterity in juxtaposing historical events with individual evils going on in the same place at the same time (i.e., Chicago serial killer during the Chicago Worlds’ Fair in Devil in the White City). Perhaps he thought that the inherent evil of the Nazis was enough to sustain the book, and in theory, it should have been, but it was just…flat. At a certain point, I just couldn’t give a crap about how many lovers Martha took or whether Ambassador Dodd got to work on another chapter of his book glorifying the racist antebellum south. Oh well.
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Happy one year Sadie – you are a monster, but are most certainly my monster.

I know.  I’m a terrible terrible blogger.  And I’ve already posted this pic on twitter, but I was so struck by how it looked when I was waiting for the train home tonight that I felt compelled to take a picture of the sunset and save it somewhere with a bit more permanence than my twitter feed.

While 2011 was certainly a better year than 2010, what with becoming a gainfully employed member of society again, I’m strangely glad for it to be over. Here’s looking forward to 2012, when we can finally disprove those mayan calendar prophesies once and for all!

But today, I took a trip down to the 9/11 Memorial. I got my ticket a few months ago and had almost forgotten about it, but I didn’t want to let it go to waste (even though it was free, there is a lengthy wait since they’re limiting entrances). It was a little jarring to be in the middle of what is, essentially, a giant construction zone, but the memorial itself is just…beautiful and moving. And my ticket was for 4 pm, so i got to see the lights go on at dusk.

Some pictures…

The tower was actually quite fun. The beefeaters who give the free tours are clearly chosen for their personalities, because our guide was a complete blast. As usual, pictures of the full days will get posted when I’m home, but here’s a sampling of a beefeater guarding the jewel house and an entrance at covent garden.

So then, in search of something to see and/or eat, we ended up walking all the way down Thames walk to black friar bridge, back across, and taking a tour of LSE, before having a classic pub lunch.

Again, more pictures will follow once I arrive home, but today’s photo of the day is the view of the millennium bridge and st. Paul’s. And I didn’t even edit this. It’s really this beautiful out here.

So anyway, I’m in London, ostensibly to visit my brother, and to see a few other folks, including meeting some people I actually work with but have never met in person, and catching up with a few former colleagues on this side of the pond.

Today, since my brother had a conference to go to, I took myself to the British museum. A full set of photos will get uploaded once I can edit them properly on my computer, but I thought I’d start off by testing my camera to iPad adapter by showing photographic proof that I’m actually here.

But that started me down a wonderful journey of discovering that there was some sort of script error in my blog installation, which forced me to spend the last three hours venturing further down the rabbit hole of wordpress reinstallations, backups, “emergency” password fixes after wordpress decided to no longer recognize me…fun stuff.

it all appears to be (hopefully) working again, at least insofar as I can actually log in and write a post, but I had to delete a lot of plugin customizations particularly around stats. Not that anyone reads this thing anyway, so I guess that’s no great loss!

Anyway…on to the original point of this post. Labor Day weekend, as usual, was spent in the Berkshires. This year it was very rainy, so we ventured up to The Clark in Williamstown to check out some of the art. The coolest thing was an exhibit by El Anatsui, a Ghanaian artist who refashions the multitude of liquor bottles foisted upon the local population into beautiful wall hangings. So this is mostly that. As always, click on the thumbnail to get the full image.