Reliving My Life
I have for a long time prided myself in saying that I have no regrets. That is my way of saying that I feel I have lived a good life and that I have learned form every step I have taken, whether it turned out well for me or badly. I can point to a number of setbacks in my life, but none of them cause me to regret having gone down the paths that led to them, much less than choosing to engage in whatever went badly. This is not my form of denial that I have made mistakes and missteps, quite the contrary. It is my acknowledgement that those things are inevitable in anyone’s life and that the important thing about life is that you take those things in stride and get up briskly from them and carry on. It is obviously also helpful to your accumulated wisdom if you can learn from your mistakes, which I believe I have.
There are moments when I wish I had set aside more pennies here and there and put them in some version of a tin can buried somewhere, but I don’t categorize those so much as regrets as wishes. I think wishing we had done something is very different from regretting that we did it. I would not be the man I am had I not come away from life with a few bruises and scars. And here’s the thing, I like who I am, so I truly harbor no regrets.
Nevertheless, I am engaged in activities that constantly serve to make me reopen my history and review things gone by. Teaching has always caused me to refresh my understanding of things that I have forgotten somewhere along the way. I have often said that the best way to really learn something is to be forced to teach it. In my most recent teaching incarnation I have had to structure and organize an advanced corporate finance curriculum and a law, policy and ethics curriculum. The first of those was a real pucker moment for me because I view corporate finance as an arena that many people know better than I do. My friend and partner (in my primary venture capital fund), Bruce, is perhaps the most intuitive and experienced finance guy I know. I would be intimidated to argue any points of corporate finance with him, but he doesn’t choose to teach. When i was asked to put that sort of course together, I leaned heavily on my network of friends from the banking world. I found that by chopping the subject up into specialized blocks, I could find lots of specialists to address those topics. That means that my biggest challenge was setting the agenda list and then explaining the connectivity between the topics so that the course all had a logical flow. What it did reliving my career in terms of corporate finance was dredge up lots of experience and personal reflection about how many of those topics were more in my bailiwick of experiences than I had ever realized.
The expert witness work I do has elements that are very much like teaching. It requires the same amount of research and then layers on an analytical assessment of the facts of the case that lead to distinct opinions. I suspect that is a very similar flow that is required in good teaching even though the labels are a little different. For one thing, in expert witness work, opinions get automatically converted into written reports whereas in teaching, those opinions may just get tossed out to students or they may get converted into published material. But in either case, the process of reviewing the facts of the case tend to draw me back into my history in a n interesting way. At this moment I am on four cases. One is about a partner at a private equity firm that up and left and took all sorts of confidential information. He went so far as to leave behind an associate to funnel more information to him as he needed, all in contravention of the firm’s proprietary information and non-compete policies. Actually, that issue was dispensed with in arbitration and this case is about the team he was joining forces with (both of whom had worked at an affiliate of the private equity firm) and their efforts to aid and abet the other team’s nefarious activities. All through my career on Wall Street I was confronted by people who thought the way to get ahead was to do the sorts of things that these private equity players were trying to do. The lack of ethical basis for what they do does not enter into their thinking as much as the prospect for a big score. This is not unique to Wall Street, but the dollars tend to be bigger so the temptations are that much greater. I all of the managerial spots I held I ran into these sorts of people almost every day. It was, in many ways, the biggest challenge of my career since those people who are the most aggressive are often the same ones most drawn to cross these sorts of ethical lines.
The next case is about a high net worth family that was a real Horatio Alger story. They literally went from rags to riches in a small Midwestern town that they still lives in, and lived in the same houses they grew up in. They were like Hubble Gardner in The Way We Were, everything came easy to them. When they were taken into an investment strategy that was a little be afield from their normal conservative path, they were allowed to wet their beaks on easy money. This led them to gain unwarranted confidence in a very dangerous area and thereby caused them to ratchet up their investment until the market took them to the cleaners. They are still a wealthy family, but they lost a small fortune in the process. I ran a global private bank and understand how these things happen, but I also know that it is the responsibility of the fiduciary to protect their clients from such things whether the trades were discretionary or not. I have settled more than a few of these situations where the trades were different but the circumstances not so much. It matters not that if the family wins they win and if they lose it is not entirely their fault. That does not absolve the intermediary of his duty of care to keep the client safe from this sort of harm.
Those are the two cases I am expecting to come back onto my plate later in the year when they each go further forward in the process. Meanwhile I have two other cases. One is a classic widows and orphans case where their investment interests have been abused by a financial services behemoth that is more focused on its pocket than the good returns of the small clients. That one happens to be in an ERISA pension plan, which is the highest order of care that the law recognizes in the financial arena. I spent a lot of my career managing pension assets and acting as the senior fiduciary, the Big Fidu as we used to call it. This case is about a topic I spent much of my Wall Street career working on and I cannot work on a case like this without reliving a big part of my life over.
The last case on my roster right now is a complex structured product case involving billions of dollars of institutional money invested in these structures. this is a case of one large predatory beast choosing to attack another predatory beast. If either party were anything less in scale or predatory nature, this would be a cut and dried case of David and Goliath, but this Goliath versus Goliath’s brother. I have seen my share of vulture capitalism as well and this case is the epitome of that dark and very nasty sport. I do not consider either side as being an innocent, but there is a right and wrong and I feel we are on the right side. That will be determined by the adjudicating body, but my wandering down that path with them is like remembering how it feels to walk into the middle of a battlefield where the giants play.
I do not do this expert work to remind me of my days in the valley. I like keeping my skills tuned and I must say I enjoy the action, but reliving my life is not my goal, but rather an unintended consequence. What I won’t say with certainty is whether this is all collateral damage or fun. I want to think its the later.