Reprising My Year
This week is almost always a moment of reflection as the year winds down and thoughts about the new year come to mind. Reflection is an important element of learning and we are never too old to learn, so I have decided to look back upon my year in 2023 and consider what exactly are the highlights worth reprising and thereby memorializing to help me sort out how to do better in 2024. My long-gone step-father Irving used to say when asked how he was doing, “Better and better”, which I always thought was a sign of one of the best attitudes I have had the pleasure to witness. I first met Irving when he was only a bit older than I am now, so he represents the closest thing I have in my life to an aging role model. My reprisal is an attempt on my part to get better and better, so here’s to you, Irving.
My year started out somewhat like my year in 2024 is destined to start. I was called to New York for an expert witness deposition. That is a case about a high-earning partner is a large private equity firm that left the firm and “stole” intellectual property from the firm he had been with during a time at a place where he accumulated a massive personal fortune due to the success of the firm. My job was to make the case for the damage that was inflicted upon that firm by virtue of that partner’s activities, specifically with regard to his outside partner in his attempted new collaboration. That partner had also been with an affiliate of the original firm, so this was a case of two guys (and a gaggle of associates) trying to better their position by taking what they had learned at their original firm and using it to create their own firm where they could presumably make even more money. It may be one of the purest and most clear-cut cases of snowballing greed I have ever seen. Given that I had run more than a few businesses like that of the private equity firm and the proposed new firm, my value added to this case was in the ability to explain the full value of the proprietary nature of the information that was being taken and the harm that its use and divulgement outside the firm would bring to the firm. The firm I represent is a tough firm and is known to be litigious, so few would assume the best of their motives, but having looked at the case in detail and actually knowing the principals well, I have an easy time being supportive of their position and feel very righteous about how aggrieved they have become. This case is slotted for trial not in 2024, but all the way out in 2025. My commitment to the client is that I will do my best to stay sharp and alive to follow through on this expert report and deposition that I have made.
This coming year, I will also travel to New York in mid-January to give a deposition in yet another case. That one is about a highly complex financial structure called a CDO. Without getting into the specifics of this billion dollar lawsuit, the instrument is the cause of much of my late-stage career drama in that CDOs were at the center of the hedge fund collapse at Bear Stearns that I presided over fifteen years ago and more or less brought my Wall Street career to an end. Reliving those times and doing it via one of these complex and somewhat pernicious instruments is an interesting trip down memory lane for me. Yet again, the case revolves around protecting the interests of a large financial operator who is being attacked opportunistically by someone who should know better in that they are also a large sophisticated financial player. It is said that when elephants are dancing, the monkeys should stay in the trees. But this monkey is out of the , so I am happy to help with this cause. Once again, the people I am representing are not widows and orphans, but rather moneyed elite of the finance world, but that does not mean their cause is not righteous. In fact, I feel quite strongly that the circumstances of the attack on them is driven once again by greed and is purely opportunistic. My guess is that this is somewhat of an attempt to extort someone who was shrewd enough to make vast amount s of money during turbulent markets. That is simply not cause by itself to give someone the right to take a share of that gain. This case will likely go on for some time after this deposition. The most interesting part is that several of the opposing experts are people who used to work for me. That alone is somewhat gratifying to me since it reminds me that I was quite a senior player in the game and that the opposition will have a hard time hitting me over the head for my involvement in a troubled space like CDOs.
The next big event of the year was our trip with Mike and Melisa to Rome, Egypt and Jordan. I have written in the past that it was a wonderful trip that should be on everyone’s bucket list, but as the events of 2023 have unfolded in that part of the world, I am even more happy that we made the trip when we did. We were not more than 50 miles form where the fighting in Gaza is taking place right now and yet we were able to go to the places like Petra and Wadi Rum and enjoy the bountiful history and culture of the region before it became engulfed in war. Since my guiding light movie for that trip was Lawrence of Arabia, and that epic saga was about skirting the effects of WWI, it is interesting to think that we have skirted yet another war over a century later, a war that in many way symbolizes the dichotomy of the world today. I dare say that more holiday tables have been silenced this year over the disparate views held over who is in the right and who is in the wrong over this current Middle East crisis.
This coming year, at more or less the same time, we are heading with Mike and Melisa (with the joyous addition for Faraj and Yasuko) to Southeast Asia to visit Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Laos, Vietnam and Cambodia. Those places were equally the scenes of great warfare in the past century with the most notable being the WWII Pacific theater where Japan had expanded its reach into the area and in so doing imprisoned whole regiments of American and British soldiers. The movie that will guide my visit this year will be The Bridge Over the River Kwai and we will indeed visit its site outside of Bangkok. Once again it will involve the British, but this time the colonialists will not be fighting the locals, but rather the expansionist efforts of the Japanese. It should be interesting to make that visit with our friend Yasuko in tow. We will also visit the sites of the big war of our youth in Vietnam, going right to the heart of enemy territory in Hanoi. None of us served in Vietnam, but we were all very mindful of those events and that should provide for some deep reflection.
The summer this year was about family gatherings, this time in Utah. Next year we will do much the same but it will be a split venue with Virginia Beach with my kids and then here in San Diego with the bigger and extended family. That family gathering to watch all the kids and their kids get to know one another and connect their very different lives is classic good fun and will be repeated in one form or another every year forward that we are able.
The fall this year brought travel to the Hudson Valley to witness the marriage of sone Tom and Jenna, but cancellation of not one but two motorcycle trips to Morocco and Spain. This coming year, I will try to make up for it with a planned trip through the beauty of fall in the Maritime Provinces of Canada where we will ride through Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick.
I am pleased to think that I can still reflect on the pleasures of the past year and plan more pleasures for the year to come. That will not always be the case, but for now, I hope that my ability to reprise my year in such a positive way will be something Father Time allows me to do again next year during this same week.