wanted one thing only, and that was to get the class of ’68 off their backs and out the door. “Anything goes” was the slogan for first- and second-year students too.If you showed up for the exam, you got a passing grade. If you actually wrote something in the exam book, they gave you an A. We’ll have to watch this carefully, announced Dexter Wood to the accompaniment of Hear! Hear! and some pounding on the table. The golden age of the university was over, and with it the sanctity of law school class ratings and elections to the law reviews; a global contagion was spreading, as those who had followed the May events in France through the periscope of the W & K Paris office were prompt to predict.
An associate of Verplanck’s quality would have always been considered a feather in the firm’s cap. His arrival at a time like this, however, was particularly welcome, and the older partners greeted him with an unusual outpouring of affection. He was an example of the best that the familiar and beloved system of education and selection could produce. Thus quite naturally, without a word having been uttered by Mr. Wood or any of the other firm elders, a general understanding took hold: until the happy day when—provided he didn’t stumble—Tim would be taken in as a partner, he was to be put only on the most challenging projects and spared mind-numbing tasks such as updating surveys of state blue-sky laws or combing through files of a client in antitrust hot water or any work at all for members of the Racquet Club Patrol. That was how the partners doing trusts and estates work were known to W & K wags, an allusion to the midday hours they put in at that institution ingesting their daily preprandial martinis, and, unless the roof fell in and someone had remembered to tell them about it, their habit of returning to the office not more than two and a half hours before the 5:52 left Grand Central for Greenwich and New Canaan.
A first-year partner like Schmidt should have had little hopethat this paragon might be assigned to help him. But Schmidt’s own reputation and standing within the firm were high. The group of great insurance companies he serviced were then the firm’s crown jewels, and their private placements—heavily negotiated long-term loans with intricate restrictions on dividends, investments, and borrowings—were financial sonnets in the composition of which Schmidt excelled. Even before he became a partner, the fuddy-duddies who ran those clients’ legal affairs from offices in Boston, Hartford, Newark, or New York skyscrapers had frequently made a point of asking that Schmidt work on their new deals when they telephoned one of the two firm seniors, Mr. Jowett or Mr. Rhinelander, to say they were sending over some work. With his new status as a partner, Schmidt’s standing as these clients’ preferred lawyer became official, and when a series of proposals for very large and novel loans arrived that autumn and winter, he obtained a first call on Tim’s services.
They realized from the outset that they suited each other. It wasn’t only a matter of Tim’s brains or superb legal training, which enabled him to see through problems clearly and rapidly. He was also possessed of common sense, without which an associate as bright as Tim might allow himself to be sidetracked by problems with little practical impact on the client’s objectives just because he found them fascinating to explore. And he wrote well, an essential quality so far as Schmidt was concerned, guaranteeing the precision without which those same objectives could not be attained with a sufficient degree of certainty. It was also a matter of having fun, enjoying drafting as an art. Oh, Schmidt had never doubted that his own preoccupation with the aesthetic aspect was something that some at the firm laughed at behind his back, but Tim andhe had the same understanding that their commitment to it was not only justifiable but essential. They
An associate of Verplanck’s quality would have always been considered a feather in the firm’s cap. His arrival at a time like this, however, was particularly welcome, and the older partners greeted him with an unusual outpouring of affection. He was an example of the best that the familiar and beloved system of education and selection could produce. Thus quite naturally, without a word having been uttered by Mr. Wood or any of the other firm elders, a general understanding took hold: until the happy day when—provided he didn’t stumble—Tim would be taken in as a partner, he was to be put only on the most challenging projects and spared mind-numbing tasks such as updating surveys of state blue-sky laws or combing through files of a client in antitrust hot water or any work at all for members of the Racquet Club Patrol. That was how the partners doing trusts and estates work were known to W & K wags, an allusion to the midday hours they put in at that institution ingesting their daily preprandial martinis, and, unless the roof fell in and someone had remembered to tell them about it, their habit of returning to the office not more than two and a half hours before the 5:52 left Grand Central for Greenwich and New Canaan.
A first-year partner like Schmidt should have had little hopethat this paragon might be assigned to help him. But Schmidt’s own reputation and standing within the firm were high. The group of great insurance companies he serviced were then the firm’s crown jewels, and their private placements—heavily negotiated long-term loans with intricate restrictions on dividends, investments, and borrowings—were financial sonnets in the composition of which Schmidt excelled. Even before he became a partner, the fuddy-duddies who ran those clients’ legal affairs from offices in Boston, Hartford, Newark, or New York skyscrapers had frequently made a point of asking that Schmidt work on their new deals when they telephoned one of the two firm seniors, Mr. Jowett or Mr. Rhinelander, to say they were sending over some work. With his new status as a partner, Schmidt’s standing as these clients’ preferred lawyer became official, and when a series of proposals for very large and novel loans arrived that autumn and winter, he obtained a first call on Tim’s services.
They realized from the outset that they suited each other. It wasn’t only a matter of Tim’s brains or superb legal training, which enabled him to see through problems clearly and rapidly. He was also possessed of common sense, without which an associate as bright as Tim might allow himself to be sidetracked by problems with little practical impact on the client’s objectives just because he found them fascinating to explore. And he wrote well, an essential quality so far as Schmidt was concerned, guaranteeing the precision without which those same objectives could not be attained with a sufficient degree of certainty. It was also a matter of having fun, enjoying drafting as an art. Oh, Schmidt had never doubted that his own preoccupation with the aesthetic aspect was something that some at the firm laughed at behind his back, but Tim andhe had the same understanding that their commitment to it was not only justifiable but essential. They
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