For the better part of fifty years, my career was a moveable feast with me doing different things every few years. For many of those years this was not of my doing, but rather a function of moving where I was asked to go and doing what I was asked to do. Early on I adopted a persona of someone who liked new challenges and embraced change and that image became who I was. I went from domestic correspondent banking to handling multinational corporate clients of grand scale. I moved into a staff marketing job designed to actually invent new financial products. From there I was asked to start a futures and options trading platform of global reach. Suddenly, the responsibility for $4 billion of distressed sovereign debt was in my hands with a mandate to “find a better solution”. Then back to running the juggernaut I had helped to create in the global derivatives business. I took on the challenge of the intersection of actuarial and market risk management by starting the insurance derivatives business right before being asked to make a hard turn into the operational side of banking, reinventing the retirement services business with half a trillion dollars of assets under administration. When the global private banking business was left without a leader, I was plugged in to rebuild and run it, and that led me full-force into asset management, where I spent the more stable years of my career. I ran High Net Worth money, institutional money, endowment money, pension money, hedge fund money, private equity money, venture capital money…and almost any sort of money that existed. The only thing I really hadn’t run was real estate money, but that changed when I was asked to take over a $3 billion distressed real estate developer and keep it out of foreclosure and bankruptcy (which I did). Just before retiring and perhaps to prove my point one last time, I was asked to lead a start-up in the ammonia synthesis business, only to find that I needed to modify it into a hydrogen synthesis business. It was all quite a whirlwind of reinvention over forty years.
I transitioned from that active engagement to teaching for a number of years, teaching about how to do all the things I had learned how to do in the finance and investment arenas. That process forces one to think long and hard about all of the mechanics of the various businesses and then distill them down into teachable lessons. That forces an almost institutionalization of the reinvention process and makes one wonder if reinvention isn’t so very unique as suspected, but rather just part of the lifecycle of business. For six years now, I have been doing expert witness business, which is a perfect culmination of all of my generalized, yet specialized talents. The way I would characterize it is that I was a specialist in a great number of realms for brief periods of time, whereupon I was called on to move to other areas where I needed to develop new specializations which were some combination of entirely new concepts and redeployed older concepts and skill sets that could be modified to apply to new circumstances. It was a fascinating process or rediscovery, which I have now been forced to examine from two very different and enlightening perspectives. To teach, one must decompose an activity to its core elements so as to be able to explain all the whys and wherefores rather than to just “do it”. The expert witness process requires a very different approach. In this arena one must be prepared to rationalize and justify each and every action and parse the activities of others in a manner that allows you to opine on whether things have been done rightly or wrongly. That creates a whole new level of depth of examination and may actually be more rigorous than academia because a great deal of money is at stake and the people adjudicating the process are generally far less well versed in the science or art of the activity involved than would be the norm among practitioners.
Every week I am presented with a potential case that is seeking an expert witness to delve into and opine on the facts of one case or another. There are always at least two sides to every story, as we all know, but litigation is a place where those two sides are developed with great care and passion and where opinions must be based on a highly subjective array of factors ranging from experience and wisdom on the one extreme and facts and precedents on the other. Both require extensive documentation and evidentiary research, not to mention painstaking accuracy in laying out reasoning for opinions. Generally, I am asked if, given the rawest of facts of the case, I know enough about this particular arcane and specialized arena to be credible as a witness and give compelling opinions and testimony there on. At this point I am very familiar with all of my experience and expertise (which, as I have said, is quite broad and yet also quite specific in a number of areas). One’s first instinct is always to say that there are better specialists to be had, but then when one gets deeper into the facts of the case, one realizes that what is needed is usually both specialization and a bigger picture perspective to be able to make the testimony relatable to the adjudicators. This seems to make my unique blend of specialist and generalist more valuable than I might have realized.
Like everything in life, there is a need for advocacy and in this game it starts with me advocating for why my special version of experience and expertise is a good fit for the particular case. There is also a temporal element that presents its own unique balancing act. Experience and expertise are gained over time. Wisdom and credibility are cumulative, so having spent many years in an arena is very valuable to this cause. However, industry practices change and markets change, so current knowledge and up-to-date expertise is also important. It takes several years for most litigation to ripen to the point where expert witnesses are called upon, but the normal statute of limitations also prevails and rarely is litigation about events decades ago (I have a few which go back over twenty years, but those are the exception). Sometimes lawyers prefer that “you were there then” and sometimes they take more comfort in knowing you were either before those times or already beyond them so as not to involve any potential conflicts. They want you to be familiar with the players, but not too familiar and certainly not entangled with them so as to invoke conflict and/or bias.
When I am called upon to draft a proposal for a case, I find that I am like that engineer in the movie Apollo 13 when he dumps a box of parts on a table and says to his team, “we need to find a way to make this fit into that using only this stuff.” I dig into my bag of experiences and credentials and craft a proposal that is both truthful and yet creative in making my background fit (as best as possible) the circumstances and needs of the case. I am always surprised and most often pleased about how well my accumulated toolset can get the job done of reinventing myself yet again…and again.