Expert is as Expert Does
Last night was a glorious last night in Rome for us after a little more than a week of enjoying the wonders of Italy. There were several things that made it so special, not the least of which was the venue itself. We had been invited by my Italian partner, Damiano, to join him at a restaurant owned by a childhood Palermo friend of his. That restaurant is on the rooftop of a boutique hotel in an off-the-beaten-path nook near the Piazza Nazionale in central Rome. Piazza Nazionale if famous for several reasons. The first and oldest is that it is prominent enough to be the home of Villa Napoleon, the villa where Napoleon’s mother lived for many years. That alone makes it a pretty interesting spot. But it is also the place where Il Duce, Benito Mussolini, used to stand on his balcony to give his fiery speeches. That balcony is attached to Plaza Venezia, symbolic to Mussolini as a man who came from humble beginnings near the patrician city of Venezia. Piazza Venezia is also the place where perhaps the most notable modern attraction of the city of Rome sits, the monument to Victor Emmanuel II. This white marble edifice is often called Vittoriano or Altare Della Patria and it is not only where the body of the first King of United Italy sits, but is also where the tomb of the unknown Italian soldier sits. It is, indeed a special place to Italians, but its gaudiness has also earned it the nickname of The Wedding Cake for all its dripping white neoclassical glory.
The monument is fully illuminated at night and has been for eighty years since the end of WWII. That means that it is quite a sight in the evening sky if one has a good spot to view it. And the venue where we were celebrating had exactly the perfect place from which to view the monument. It was there that we gathered with Damiano and his Sicilian wife Marina and Sergio and his Brazilian wife Leda. Sergio and Damiano are the founders of an expert witness consulting business they have called SEDA Experts to signify the conjoining of their two names in the pursuit of consulting nirvana. I was introduced to Sergio and Damiano three years ago by a mutual friend and litigator by training, Jeff Brown, who had been on my team at Bear Stearns Asset Management. I believe he felt he was doing Sergio and Damiano a favor by introducing a strong resume holder to join their early-stage stable of experts in the financial services arena. What he inadvertently did was to do both me and my SEDA partners a great favor.
Consulting businesses are very much businesses of process, but to get assignments you have to have drawing power. Advisory services like consulting and expert witness work are driven by people of substance who have resumes that speak to their years of experience and reputation. My resume happens to be a killer resume by almost anyone’s standard, somewhat because of the positions I held and the companies I represented, but mostly because my career trajectory across many businesses has spanned the fullness of the arena of financial services which has dominated the financial world for the last forty years. Almost every major trend in fiancé and banking is captured in the assignments I have taken and the leadership positions I have held. You see, most Wall Street professionals are what I call “left-eye specialists”. Wall Street thrives on in-depth functional specialization. When things get hot, everyone wants the best of breed in their stable on that subject. This breeding of specialists is also emblematic of the Wall Street tendency to ask “what have you done for me lately?” Specialists come and go into and out of vogue with great alacrity. The nature of arbitrage, which is the “money for nothing” business that Wall Street loves the best, is by its nature, fleeting but very intense. Specialization is the natural outcome of such a system and most Wall Street people are therefore keen specialists. Specialists also earn the big bucks while their specialty is hot, hot, hot. When things cool, not, not, not so much.
The realm of consulting is the perfect place for specialists, but from a business flow perspective, a broad experience has its advantages as well. Because I ran so many different businesses, it is relatively simple for me to convincingly claim expertise in a very wide array of arenas. So far in the last two years I have taken on cases in 401(k) participant investment prudence, artificial intelligence quantitative hedge fund investing, private equity valuation, securities lending and short-selling, investor suitability for short-selling, project finance and advisor dismissal for cause. If someone asked me to list my areas of expertise, I would say investment management (traditional active, passive and alternative), private equity and venture capital, hedge fund operations and management, broker/dealer finance, emerging markets finance, private banking, advisory services, banking operations and many more areas too numerous to bother listing. This breadth has proven to be very valuable in being considered for and securing mandates. I sometimes say that I am about as senior a professional as would likely choose to bother working in the expert witness field. I do it because it interests me and the money is pretty good too.
I think Sergio and Damiano feel fortunate to have me in their stable and I currently enjoy the top left position in their expert array. That spot is like getting the pole position in a Formula 1 race, it means you are a serious contender, a lead horse in their stable, a player. I like that positioning because it allows me to Re validate my choice along the way to remain as a generalist. Some might say a jack of all trades, master of none. I would say a jack of all trades, master of many. The financial markets may change a lot, but the fundamentals largely remain the same and the circumstances of business conflict are not so very different today than they were fifty years ago.
My teaching over the past twelve years has greatly enhanced my expert witness chops. To begin with, an expert is only more seemingly an expert if he is also a professor of the subject matter (in my case at the graduate level). It helps to validate ones current connectivity to existing trends and new products. On the other hand, my expert witness work greatly enhances my teaching by giving me live current cases to prove my points. Nothing is more in synch with this than a course like the current business ethics course that I teach.
And all these good things revolve around my partners Sergio and Damiano. They find most of the cases for me. They administer the cases and negotiate the contracts. I do the analysis with their help and quantitative work behind it. Furthermore, while I do most, if not all, of the writing, they edit and annotate with references, which is a tedious task I would rather avoid. In other words, our work synthesis very nicely and it forms a strong and enjoyable partnership. I will stay doing expert work as long as it is available and I am relevant because, to paraphrase a popular thought, expert is as expert does.