In the Dead of the Night
There are many things you can call 4am. If you are staying up late to party or for one reason or another, it is the wee hours of the night. When you wake up in the middle of the night as I often seem to do these days, it is right on the cusp at this time of year of being early enough to go back to sleep but not so early that you can dilly dally before the light starts to poke its head and sleep eludes you. But if you are waking up early to get an early flight East and relying on an UberX driver (not the higher-priced Uber Black Car or SUV) to get you down the 15 to the 163 to the San Diego International Airport before the morning commute rush hour jams things up, it is the butt-crack of dawn. I’m not so sure why JetBlue has lost its more reasonable morning departure slots from SAN, but they have and our normal transcontinental flight #90 is now taking off at 6:45am. On the other end of the equation, it arrives at JFK at 2:58pm, which means that even with the usual nasty JFK Terminal 5 baggage arrival and taxi queue bullshit, we still stand a fair shot at getting into midtown Manhattan by 5pm. Kim will have used the 5 hour flight time in the lap of JetBlue Mint lie-flat seating luxury to get 3-4 hours of make-up sleep and I will have spent the time a.) grading papers, b.) writing a story, c.) reviewing my expert witness report for Friday’s deposition prep session, or d.) watching one or more movies…or some combination of a.) through d.). We will arrive at the Cornell Club on 44th and Fifth in time to get a table in the restaurant for their weekly steak dinner. I’m a little scared that it won’t meet my Morton’s or Bobby Van’s NYC standard, but we’ll give it a house go. And then I will crash hard for what I hope will be a good night’s sleep without any dead-of-the-night wake-up calls.
Our last stay at the Cornell Club in late October was quite pleasant, so I feel like I know what we can expect. By Friday, I will have been doing a daily morning walk with Kim and Betty for two full weeks, so I think I will try to enlist Kim to go on the equivalent number of blocks worth of walk around midtown just to keep the habit going and the blood flowing. There is no point in building up an exercise program only to just have it backslide on the first trip away from home. After all, Manhattan is the ultimate walkers’ paradise given that it is both more or less flat (at least compared to likes of San Francisco) and with temperatures in the 40’s, it should be a good brisk morning constitutional accompanied by a latte pick-up at Starbucks to get Kim’s morning engine running.
I have business meetings both Friday and Monday from 10am-2pm (real lawyer’s hours if you ask me) to do deposition prep for what is scheduled to be a mid-January return for depositions. I am unclear what the testimony scheduling looks like yet or whether there will be the usual back-and-forth report sniping of rebuttals and answers to rebuttals that often characterize such cases. I am working for a very diligent and serious big firm represented by a very serious and big law firm. They seem quite happy with my work product and efforts so far, but I can tell that they are the sorts that don’t want to leave anything to chance. Depositions can get nasty and very technical. I do not foresee this one being a technical issue for me since it has mostly to do with confidential information misappropriation with that information being in a set of arenas in which I am very familiar. But never underestimate the ability of litigators to throw low punches and my career has had enough ups and downs, I would expect that there will likely be some attacks on me and my professionalism with the weight of that aimed at two things, the time since I was actively in the Wall Street game and the one or two missteps during my years on the street. The good news is that I have good responses to both and, I like to think, a toughened Wall Street skin that is used to the wages of battle. I may not be one of those battle-thirsty warriors that grins wider with each assault, but I am pretty damn stoic and feel that in my 45 years I have seen it all and had most of it inflicted directly on me at one time or another.
Those meetings, which will likely be mock questioning to sharpen my responses and make sure that I am leaning in the right way to improve our collective arguments, will provide a nice bookending to a weekend spent in family and friends activities around and about Manhattan and Brooklyn. The highlights will be on Saturday with our Christmas luncheon en mass and our Sunday spent skating (or watching skating, in my case) at Rockefeller Center Ice Rink. We will shuttle here and there for dinners out with friends and even a show or two, including son Thomas’ cabaret show. There will be some holiday shopping and undoubtedly some wandering and window shopping as is seasonally expected. It’s also possible that my other two active expert witness cases might want to see me while I’m in town, but that will be for them to decide. I will fit it in if it is something that they want. If not, I will find something to fill my dance card.
What’s interesting to me about all aspects of this visit is the extent to which everything I’m doing dredges up one old memory or another. The kids and the Cornell Club are one whole set of memories. The midtown location sits only a few blocks from my Bankers Trust, Deutsche Bank and Bear Stearns office locations. Way too many memories lurking in those canyons. What is really adding to that sense of deja vu is all the expert witness stuff. The team I am joining on Friday and Monday are one of the big PE firms, specifically one that tried to hire me twenty years ago and then lent money into one of my restructurings about a dozen years ago. I can recall spending many a day in their offices, the same offices we will be meeting in this week. I’m sure the people will mostly be different, but as happens more often than I care to recount, I may well bump into some old acquaintances as well. The world I worked in is a pretty small one when you come right down to it. Then the other case whose team I will not be meeting with on this visit is focused on a type of financial instrument that was at the root of our big debacle in 2007, so to say that I know a lot about it from every conceivable angle is an understatement. My unit bought more of that stuff than anyone in the world and I’m being asked to opine about how investors thought about the product when they bought it. It doesn’t take too much imagination and almost no deep memory to bring that all back to the surface. And then there’s my third case. It involves a financing process that I’ve literally spent forty years handling and it involves a defendant of which I knew several board members (long since gone). It all makes me feel like I really am heading back to New York, even if for only five days. And here I thought I was sneaking into town incognito and in the dead of the night, but I guess there is no such thing when you’ve spent forty five years running around in the shadows of the big bad canyons of the City that never sleeps.