The Comfort of Analysis In the expert witness business there are four basic functions that one must be able to handle. The first involves reading large quantities of evidence, testimony and reports. I have never been a particularly fast reader. I didn’t get glasses until I was in fourth grade. For some reason, my mother didn’t notice my vision deficiency until it was quite debilitating in school. I just could not see what was on…
Everyday Ethics For the first time in several years, I am not teaching ethics this semester. In fact, I’m not teaching at all and may have hung up my teaching spurs for life at this point. What I remind myself is that teaching ethics was much harder than I ever thought it would be. That is much like the degree of difficulty we all face each and every day with ethical dilemmas that present themselves…
Ignoring Reality Last night I watched the third Republican Debate. The issues in any of these debates revolve around a combination of social policies, global defense policies and economic policies. Everyone in politics is pretty clear that social and defense policies can stir people up, but nothing gets them more riled up than economic policies. It is fair to say that Republicans have always (at lest since WWII, which is the timeframe I can at…
The Sphere We have come to Las Vegas to see the new extravaganza called The Sphere, brought to us by James Dolan, the owner of Madison Square Garden, Radio City Music Hall and much more. I figure that anything worth putting $2.3 billion into to change the attractions landscape is worth a look. So, I gathered some enthusiasm for an excursion from San Diego by convincing Mike and Melisa to join me and Kim for…
The Full Spectrum I have written before about my old problem’s with Verizon and AT&T and trying to cancel services that these companies simply don’t want to cancel. They seem to have a business model predicated less on keeping customers happy than on making sure that it is as hard as humanly possible to cancel their service and thus stop paying them their monthly tariff. Usually, after holding incessantly on the phone for a representative,…
Going Back to Work When people ask me if I’m retired, I usually start by saying yes, then I sort of hedge myself by saying that I keep active by teaching and doing expert witness work. I think I am done saying that I teach, but I am busier than ever with expert witness work, having, at least for the moment, a very regular flow of activity from a handful of cases. Since May of…
The Gift That Keeps On Giving In the fall of 1998, twenty-five years ago, my long-time friend and partner, Bruce had an idea. A group of us had invested with Bruce in a company founded and run by two of his friends a year or so earlier, and now that our firm was selling itself to the big German bank Deutsche Bank, most of us were thinking about our next act. To put it into…
The Big Fidu My expert witness firm is expanding its footprint and as one of the original horses in their stable, I am called up to support the initiative an whatever ways I can. What’s good for SEDA has pretty much been good for me. So, after seeing my name attached to three noteworthy case outcomes and remembering that I have previously written two articles for the firm’s newsletter, I decided that I needed to…
Cashing the Check For my many years in senior management on Wall Street, friends would regularly tell me that I was too nice for Wall Street. That was a polite way of saying that I was a pussy and refused to treat people harshly. Don’t get me wrong, I have had to downstaff thousands of people over the years, but I also always gave people the benefit of the doubt and tried never to take…
Little Maxie Back in 2012 (hard to believe that was 11 years ago!) I was just starting work on the New York Wheel project. That seems like a lifetime ago at this point, but then I was living with Kim at our South Street Seaport condo and as of late July, I was on payroll as the CEO of New York Wheel, which had offices at 19 State Street, a curved glass high rise building…