I turn 72 in a few weeks and I’ve been living out here for six years, which means I’ve been retired for at least five years. Retirement is one of my favorite topics to write about for some reason, and always has been since I started writing for fun forty years ago. I am not sure where this obsession with retirement comes from, but it probably originated just about forty years ago when I took over responsibility for a grouping of businesses at Bankers Trust Company which I ended up labeling the Retirement Services Department. We were actually the largest retirement services bank in the world at the time by virtue of two measures. We were in the top three banks that acted as corporate defined benefit pension trustees, which involved being custodian to those assets, acting as independent fiduciary, and even doing things like taking on the task of sending monthly checks to retirees in those plans. That alone was a huge business with thousands of employees working in it. But then we were also, by far, the largest record keeper of defined contribution plans (including the up and coming mutual fund companies like Fidelity). That business had sprung from our practice in the employee benefits business where we managed corporate employee savings plans back when the transition to things like 401(k) plans came into vogue with the advent of the Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) in 1973. I’m not sure if someone at Bankers Trust Company saw the retirement handwriting on the wall or whether we just got lucky to be in the right place at the right time, but it all meant that we got very big in a very interesting and growing business at just the right time. It suffered from all the normal growth pains of any business, just as the financial markets were equally going through their own growing pains. It made for an interesting business challenge and that is why I was assigned the task of finding a better way to manage the growing behemoth. It forced me to learn a lot about the dynamics of retirement and that caused me to have to think a great deal about the human lifecycle, global demographic trends and how people and investments interacted with one another over time. I found it all very fascinating.
There were perhaps three assignments that really shaped my career over its fifty years. One was being assigned to build the bank’s futures and options business, the equivalent of being told to find a path for an AI business in today’s world. That led me to help build the derivatives business, which is probably the most impactful financial invention of the modern world. The second was being assigned to take over the bank’s $4 billion of defaulting sovereign debt in 1985 during the beginnings of what was called the LDC Crisis. That exercise taught me to be a problem solver in distressed markets…in grand scale and with existential import. That was a “trial-by-fire” job that had me traveling to exotic parts of the world and dealing with fascinating people of all kinds, temperaments, and ethical foundations. It was all a great life lesson and broadened my perspectives about righteousness and evil and foreign affairs in general. The last of the three impact assignments was in that Retirement Services business, because it forced me to become an expert in investments, both individual and institutional, and led me to the pinnacle of my career, running asset management businesses. All of these foundational assignments have fed into my current “business”, which is acting as an expert witness in litigation. In typical fashion for me, I got into the arena pretty early by most standards and find people are always asking me how I got into it. It’s like when I met a friend’s adult son recently and learned that he worked at Nvidia as a systems programmer. It caused me to ponder and ask him how he was so prescient as to find himself at the center of the new age universe. His response was pretty much like mine has always been…a shrug of the shoulders and a sense that you just put one foot in front of the other and you are where you are.
There certainly is more to being a leading edge person than that, but its simply too hard to decompose and explain what it is in our being that causes us to be at the leading edge of the innovation cycle. What I do know is that it is not an accident altogether. There may be lots of luck and chance involved, but some people just gravitate to that end of the work spectrum while others are happier not being on the front lines. I have often declared that I like walking point, as they say in the military. There is something about being out front that appeals to me. It just seems like a more interesting place to operate.
As for my current expert witness work, that still seems to be the case. I am now the lead expert in a stable of some 75 top-flight financial experts, all with a better resume than the next. We are all accomplished financial professionals who have left out main arenas and yet still want to work in the space where we accumulated so much expertise and knowledge. The work has appealed to me so much that I have actually taken on the role of the professor of the practice and I teach a Masterclass for new, incoming experts in our firm. I guess that makes me the “old man” of my current game, which has both good and bad connotations. I currently have a book of about ten cases that are signed to me and another five that are pending final assignment, which means that I may or may not get them. It is a very global business and while regional expertise is often required, there is more and more cross-fertilization of effort and I work on cases in a varied list of venues, still predominantly in the U.S. (by far the largest litigation arena in the world), but not exclusively.
When we start a case we start with a budget negotiation because expert work is never cheap. With that budget and some version of an anticipated timeline, I scope out an estimate of how many hours I will be needed over several months. That allows me to better understand my capacity at any moment to take on a new case. It is one of the questions one must be able to answer at any moment when being considered for a new assignment. All that planning…and things then, naturally, change. The nature of litigation, especially as it relates to expert work, is that positioning and chest-beating are all part of the kabuki of reaching a favorable outcome. If you line up top experts and issue forceful reports and perhaps even scathing rebuttals, you are better positioned for a favorable settlement. If an expert is strong, he or she can force a settlement and thereby lighten their own workload by working themselves out of a gig before ever going to trial.
I had a big case that started six weeks ago and into which I have put 60 hours. It was expected and budgeted to take up 190 hours through the deposition. I was just starting to write the report and had outlined the opinions and read all the discovery materials, when I got notified yesterday that the parties had reached a settlement. This is the second big case in a row where that has happened to me. I don’t know if I contributed to those outcomes or if I was just a pawn in the lawyering process, but I find myself suddenly more free than not with my time. Naturally, another case just heated up and looks to be getting more engaging and yet another wants to have a call to assign me anew. These are the peaks and valleys of this business and reminds me that the very nature of work is that it is a pleasure and a struggle all at the same time. Onward and upward.