Private practice lawyer
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People Anatomy™
A spotter’s guide to the men and women of finance.
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There is a rake’s progress of attorney from private practice lawyer to inhouse counsel to structurer (with sickly branches peeling off towards human resources and head-hunter: whether those latter feeble strands are some kind of nascent Darwinian evolution we are witnessing in real-time, or simply a descent into decadent madness is a question on which the different constituents have their own opinions). But those who stay the course, who don’t evolve, or adapt, but keep within their partnerships, thriving in that darkened, gloomy environs are a tough breed. They are like cockroaches, or more flatteringly, Toyota Hiluxes: they will do whatever you ask, and will just keep going until you tell them to stop. The more tedious, the more compendious, the more leaden with complexity, the better. They may not sleep for three days; they may go green, subsisting on tea, pizza and prescription amphetamines, but they will endure, their massive command of structural and documentational complexity intact. Even when it all goes pear-shaped, and deals like this often do, one will not be able to trace that failing back to them. How could anyone? The germ of dissolution, if it is their fault, will be so deeply buried in some third side-letter to the series proposal for the fourth tranche of the mezzanine part of the financing leg that no-one else has a hope of finding it, let alone seeing it for the smoking gun it purportedly is.
Private practice lawyers are prone to say things like: “This time line is very aggressive. We don’t have time for a term-sheet: let’s go straight to docs”.