ON POLITICAL BOOKS: Lawyer's Poker
Lewis, Michael
ON POLITICAL BOOKS LAWYER’S POKER A national law firm charging outrageous fees: what a bad idea by Michael Lewis I once had a wicked but satisfying dream. I had rented a boat on a winter...
...he was “thoroughly arrogant and stunningly impolitic...
...So did I. There’s not much in this book about the practice of law, and not even a very clear explanation of why the firm failed...
...Partner Roy Gutman nicknamed his firm “Finley Swine...
...I floated my dreamboat, this Ark of Vice, far out onto a deep sea...
...Myerson is the “Agent Orange of the legal profession...
...it tells-or attempts to tell-the story of the sinking of a law firm, Finley, Kumble, custom-built by the author to accommodate only revolting human beings...
...Tonduct Unbecoming: The Rise and Ruin of Finley, Kumble...
...Even one of its own partners termed Finley, Kumble a “scuzz pile...
...Even though he paid himself $1.7 million a year, there was no end to his demand for money...
...Harvey was Evil...
...Another former colleague adds that Harvey is “like a cockroach...
...He not only wants us to loathe his former partners...
...He is “built like a fireplug . . . short, stocky and perpetually bathed in sweat...
...And he has it in different sizes, shades, and lengths...
...The obligatory photos in the middle of the book are of the author with the various political celebrities-Hugh Carey, Joseph Tydings, Russell Long, Paul Laxalt-he persuaded to join his firm...
...He wears a curly black toupee that looks like one of those old football helmets that Knute Rockne used to wear, the leather ones...
...Although Kumble melodramatically accuses many of his former partners of both “destroying the firm” and trying to “kill” him, it is Myerson he blames most of all...
...Steven J. Kumble and Kevin J. Lahart...
...What Kumble wants mainly is to settle old scores...
...Finally, at least a few lawyers, like more than a few bankers, really believed they were playing to a crowd...
...As the month would go on, he’d change the toupee and then say something about needing a haircut...
...But they make less money...
...For while the cockroaches are merely greedy, spiteful, and treacherous, our would-be exterminator is greedy, spiteful, treacherous, and hypocritical...
...When Kumble is deposed, his first concern is “what public posture I should take...
...Until I read the work under review* it hadn’t occurred to me that my dream could come true...
...There I watched the monsters mingle...
...he wants us to like him...
...At last, when the irritation became unbearable, I pulled the plug (my boat had a plug) and slipped ever so quietly over the side, into a waiting skiff...
...And most of this book is one long, tedious illustration of this point, as Kumble unburdens himself of his hitherto concealed distaste for the men he invited onto his dream boat, and who, in 1987, one year before the firm sank, staged a mutiny and tossed him overboard...
...There were no survivors...
...There’s a reason: By pointing out the deficiencies of his former partners, he hopes to persuade us that the messy bankruptcy of his firm wasn’t really his fault...
...It seems that somewhere back in the late seventies, Steven Kumble acquired the dubious conviction that corporate lawyers were underpaid...
...Probably you’re beginning to wonder what is the point of all this...
...And then there was Harvey Myerson...
...Carroll & Graf, $19.95...
...Then he’d start the cycle all over again...
...In doing this there seems no depth to which he will not sink...
...Comanaging partner Andy Heine leaked damaging stoMichael Lewis is the author of Liar’s Poker...
...Finley crumble Herein lies one of the two major dramatic flaws of the tale...
...but then he “always exhibited a lack of sensitivity toward other human beings...
...The reader is meant to see tragedy in the collapse of Finley, Kumble...
...It demonstrates that the behavior we’ve come to associate with the 1980s wasn’t peculiar to the world of high finance, but spilled over in the most unlikely ways into the practice of law...
...And here is the book’s second major dramatic flaw: The villains are more likable than the hero...
...I mean, if his former partners were so awful, why did he hire them in the first place...
...It was a convenient pose that helped them justify to themselves and to their clients their unusually high pay-a dozen partners of Finley, Kumble earned over $1 million a year...
...He’ll never die...
...Why,” writes Kumble, “should a lawyer work very hard and not get paid for it...
...Most of the lawyers I know are better educated, brighter, and work harder than the people they represent in the business world...
...But after about 25 pages of Kumble’s descriptions of his fellow partners, I was rooting for the ship to be torpedoed...
...Pity the poor schlepps on page 2. Like so many of our fallen idols, Steven Kumble seems the sort of fellow who reserves his highest admiration for Donald Trump...
...The guests were chosen to include the full range of offensive qualities-hypocrisy, self-obsession, arrogance, greed, spite, etc...
...Conduct Unbecoming is the result of a similar experiment...
...The little that is useful about this book is unintentional...
...If not stopped, [he] would push and push and push and take and take and take...
...I believe I even scribbled notes for a Vanity Fair profile or two...
...ries about the firm to the press...
...In building his firm, Kumble would correct this travesty of natural justice...
...The 750 lawyers who reached for Kumble’s shimmering gold-plated ring were not, it seems, uniformly admirable...
...he dredges up everything from adulterous liaisons to the suicide of a partner’s wife...
...The reader, forced to choose, sides with the cockroaches...
...When his firm collapses, Kumble tries to impress us by telling us that the story ran as the lead business piece in The New York Times...
...The idea was to build a truly national law firm...
...When Finley, Kumble declared bankruptcy in 1988, it owed $83 million to its bankers...
...The bile brought forth by the merest mention of Myerson inspires the liveliest prose in this otherwise poorly written book (by a Harvard educated lawyer . . . with help...
...I am reserving seats for both in my next dream...
...Even stranger is the way in which lawyers, like investment bankers, began to think of themselves less as members of a sedate profession than as risk-loving entrepreneurs...
...Just as Wall Street firms expanded in vain, so did Finley, Kumble grow more out of the partners’ lust for power than for any sound economic reason...
...A lot of the money behind the promises was, like the money behind so many recent promises, borrowed...
...ON POLITICAL BOOKS LAWYER’S POKER A national law firm charging outrageous fees: what a bad idea by Michael Lewis I once had a wicked but satisfying dream...
...I had rented a boat on a winter evening and invited aboard a selection of the most repellent people I knew...
...When Myerson became famous representing the United States Football League in its 1986 antitrust action against the National Football League, “his runty swagger became even more pronounced...
...Co-managing partner Marshall Manley kept a telescope in his office, pointed towards his home, through which he ensured the fidelity of his wife...
...Over the course of the past decade, Kumble, by promising to make his partners rich, persuaded dozens of small law firms around the country to combine with Finley, Kumble...
...It still hasn’t dawned on Kumble that borrowing huge sums of money to buy revenues-in the form of established lawyers-might be just a tad unsound...
...It was Harvey who led the coup de scuzz pile and ran Finley, Kumble into bankruptcy...
Vol. 23 • January 1991 • No. 1
