Family

As I sat at Dodger Stadium Wednesday night watching the Dodgers win game 1 of the National League Division Series from the Cardinals, it struck me as to how lucky I am to be so close to my family.  Picture this, four generations of Cohens, all wearing Dodger Blue and celebrating a Dodger victory.  Grandma (three days into her 87th year), dad, me, and my daughter– 4 generations.  This is the way it should be, the best part of being a family.

 Lately it seems that I have seen the worst when it comes to families.  In the past 5 years I have been involved in more litigation between family members than in any other type of litigated matter.  Brothers against sisters, children against parents.  Why?  Greed I think plays a large role, as does the age old lament, “Mom always loved you best.”  Sometimes it appears that people will run to court to litigate not just the division of assets, but the division of love. 

 Wills and trusts that don’t divide the assets equally amongst the children is one factor, but it can even be as “trivial” as selecting one sibling over the other to act as administrator of the estate.  The gory details that I have seen and heard would make you cringe.  Currently I am litigating a matter in which three children are alleging that their father physically abused their mother.  Last year I had a case in which a brother alleged that his sister attempted to defraud their father.  And don’t even get me started when the estate plan provides for a majority if not all of the assets to be distributed to one sibling, to the absolute exclusion of the other.

 It sometimes makes me sick, but more often that not it makes me sad.  Sad that not all families are as great as mine.  Sad that not all families can work out their differences over coffee or a beer but must turn to lawyers and judges.  Sad that the assets that mom and dad spent years accumulating are depleted by attorneys fees and court costs.  I guess you could say that it is a dirty job and someone has to do it, right?

 But what does it really instill in me?  A deeper sense of family, of dedication to that family, and a need to constantly be showing my affection.  Money comes and goes; we can (and will!) always be able to make more.  But once family is gone, all we have left are memories.  I prefer to make them good memories:  of celebrations, of birthdays, of vacations, and of Dodger victories.

 Your mission this week, should you choose to accept it: make one extra call or send one extra email this week and send out some love to those you care about.  It is a minor thing to do, but pays instant dividends…

What I Have Learned

Alright, time for some introspection.  It helps ever once in a while to stop and think.  Think about what you have learned, what has worked, what has not worked, and what needs improvement.  Otherwise, how else will we improve?  So I figured, as I approach 9 complete years as a practicing attorney, I share with you 10 things that I have learned, things that they never taught in law school…

 1) Litigation is expensive.  All of those cases that we had to read and brief in law school, that we were grilled on using the Socratic Method (seriously, I thought the law school professors knew all of the answers, why do they keep asking us students the questions?), the vast majority of them got to the Supreme Court through litigation.  Nine years of practice and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in litigation expenses I have seen pass through the courts says that our forefathers in the law have spent billions of dollars easily in creating the precedence law school students study and which serve as the basis for the everyday practice of law.  If you want to litigate, it isn’t cheap…

 2) Sometimes, probate may be the best choice for administration of estates.  We are seeing now a large influx of litigation associated with the interpretation and administration of trusts.  For as lengthy as some trusts are, and as detailed as they can be, remember that for each line that is written in an estate plan document, there are at least three different interpretations.  When the matter is in front of the probate court, there is one interpretation that matters:  the judge’s.  Sometimes the proverbial bang of the gavel by the judge lends an air of finality to what can be a very contentious and drawn out affair.

 3) Everyone expects lawyers to always have the answers.  We don’t always have the right answer, but we can certainly fake it, right?

 4) It isn’t like on television.  No, I have never successfully argued an appeal to reverse a death penalty sentence.  Mostly, it is a lot of paperwork.  Paper, paper, and more paper.  And even when you try to go paperless and help the ecology… they send you more paper.

 5) The practice of law is a business.  Don’t ever let anyone tell you otherwise.  You can fight the good fight and argue for the little guy, but at the end of the day, you have to get paid. (This one was hard to grasp.)

 6) Sometimes you can do a great job and the client is unsatisfied and sometimes the result can be poor but the client thinks you walk on water.  (You try to figure that one out.)

 7) The practice of law is a function of managing expectations.  It is about being dialed in with the client and keeping the client apprised of what is going on, educated, and on your same page.

 8) You cannot predict what a jury will do.  Imagine walking out of your home, finding 12 random people, all from different backgrounds and cultures, then try to convince them to take your side over someone else… like rolling the dice sometimes. 

 9) (Lean in close, because this one if a secret…)  Judge’s sometimes get it wrong.  (Shhh, I told you to keep this between us!!!)  I played baseball for most of my formative years and still play in an adult league today.  Umpires sometimes make the wrong call, and judges are no different.  I will grant that they are more right than wrong, but every part of the law is about interpretation and sometimes they get it wrong…

 Which leads to my #10:

 10) It is very difficult to take emotion out of the practice of law.  As attorneys we are trained to side with our client, the one footing the bill.  It is easy to get entranced by our client, to forget that the other side is just as passionate and “right” as our client is.  So what is the effect?  The victories are incredible highs and the losses (and don’t let anyone ever tell you that there are no losses) can be debilitating lows…  Reading the cases in law school, it all seems so clinical, so logical, so procedural.  We do not think that for every case we read in law school there is a winner and a loser and the winner is ecstatic and the loser is inconsolable.  It doesn’t mean that the practice of law has to be a competition, but in contested matters, someone always has to lose.

 Ok, one more, for good luck…

 11) You get to meet a lot of terrific attorneys.  Granted, some attorneys out there are the poster-children for all of those lawyer jokes out there.  But the vast majority are good, decent, hard-working, dedicated, and respectable attorneys and human beings.  Some of you reading this email right now know I am talking about you.  You are a testament to the practice of law and I wish you all of the success that should be showered on the good guys.

 And one more, for extra good luck…

 12) You get to meet a lot of terrific people.  My practice is not just litigation, but is also in the areas of transactions, business entities, real estate, and estate planning.  Sometimes, the client needs more than just an attorney, but needs a professional from a different sector of the business community.  I have been privileged to meet so many great people, from the accountants to the insurance agents to the financial advisors to all of the consummate professionals.  I would never have met such tremendous people had I not become an attorney, and for that I am grateful.

Do Not Give Up Ownership

If you are reading this on Monday, September 28, 2009, you are probably asking yourself how I could possibly have written this while I was in temple for the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur.  Well, you got me– no, I did not bring my Blackberry into temple.  The secret is this… I pre-write these emails, usually a few days in advance.  Thus, it is really Wednesday night, September 23, 2009, at 8:31pm… But do me a favor and don’t tell anyone.  I like it if people think that I get up Monday mornings before dawn to write these emails.

 Ok, now to the real stuff… Part 2 is called “DO NOT GIVE UP OWNERSHIP”

 Sorry, no pop culture insight this week but something that I am reminded of constantly and something that might actually be of some benefit to you, especially since many of you are trusted advisors to business owners. 

 Imagine that you are an entrepreneur with a great idea, a superb business model, but no start-up capital, or at least not enough to take flight with your business.  You go to your parents, your wife/husband, your wife’s/husband’s parents, brothers, sisters, friends… could you spare some change?   In return, you offer them something as a symbol of your gratitude and something that will pay huge dividends later when your idea takes off and the big-money suitors come knocking:  ownership in your business. 

 Next thing you know:

 CONGRATULATIONS!  The large publicly-traded company wants to acquire you.  Your hard work has paid off.  They want to write you a check for $3,000,000.  All you have to do is cross your “t”s and dot your “i”s and the deal is done.  In order to do so, your attorney tells you to have a meeting, take a vote, and make sure all of the other owners are on board.

 Of course, since you formed your business, you had some lean years and you rewarded your loyal employees with… ownership.  You now have 10 other co-owners, all of whom are entitled to vote on the proposal.  Oh, did I mention that in conjunction with the acquisition by the publicly-traded company you will have to move all of your operations to Ohio?  Did I also forget to mention that since that time, you and your spouse went through a messy divorce, but your ex-father in law and ex-brother in law are still owners?

 So you have this meeting and everyone attends.  Uh oh… some people are not so keen on the idea of moving to Ohio.  Others (your ex-father in law and ex-brother in law) see the dollar signs and know that they can make life very difficult for you if they refuse to go along with the acquisition.  So they all hold out… forcing you to take a drastic measure.  Time to re-acquire the ownership from everyone, bring it all back home, so to speak.  Since the publicly-traded company is going to infuse $3,000,000, even the owners with smaller percentages have valuable holdings. 

 Can you figure out the rest?  Fast-forward:  the deal is done and all of the other owners have consented; especially since you had to purchase the ownership interests from all of the dissenting owners to make sure that the vote passed.

 I tried to keep this relatively short and did not give you all of the details, but the moral of the story is this:  Do Not Give Up Ownership.  I constantly am advising my new business owners of this. 

 Ownership is your key.  It is the symbol of your own hardwork and your own passion.  The more ownership you give up, the more your responsibilities to the other owners, the more say “outsiders” have in your business…

 I am reminded of something a wifs prophet said (I think it was a prophet):  Keep It Simple Stupid.

 Don’t make life more complicated for yourself.  If at all possible, avoid giving away ownership… unless you have a really strong Buy-Sell Agreement.  🙂

The Natural

I am sure most of you can picture the scene… The Knights are playing the Pirates, game on the line, two men on, Roy Hobbs comes to the plate.  A new pitcher comes in, a young fireballer.  Roy hits a towering blast down the right field line that just barely goes foul.  The bat is broken (remember the name of the bat?)– “Wonderboy” is no more.  A new bat, the Savoy Special… A grimacing Roy Hobbs stands in, blood seeps out of his old gunshot wound, staining his #9 jersey.  Up in the grandstands, Roy’s childhood sweetheart (played by Glenn Close) stands up in support for her old boyfriend and the father of her child.  The pitch comes, a hard smash, going, going, going gone!  Into the lights, showering sparks and fireworks as Roy Hobbs trots around the bases and the Knights win the game!

 But wait!  (insert your own sound effect for screaching halt)

 Is that how it really happened or did you imagine it?  Well, the answer is neither… you saw it in color, up on that big screen; but try this one out…

 Before the game, Roy Hobbs goes to the office of the team’s owner and gets the proposition– lose the game, get a huge payday.  Roy thinks long and hard…

 Game time– Roy is having a difficult time of it.  He isn’t making any contact.  A heckler in the stands gives him a good one and Roy, angered by this, intentionally hits a foul ball at the heckler.  It glances off the heckler’s head and careens over to…?  Roy’s childhood gilfriend and the mother of his child.  She is hit in the head, down for the count.  Roy jumps into the stands to see if she is ok, and finally the game resumes.

 Here is the moment.  Two strikes, two out, the game on the line.  Here comes the pitch… Roy swings…….. and misses.  Strike 3, game over, Knights lose.  After the game, a nice envelope full of money is waiting for Roy in the locker room.  In a moment of clarity, Roy goes up to the owner’s office and raises a ruckus (no, not a reference to the Breakfast Club and I will NOT describe the ruckus), throwing the money back to the owner.  After some gunplay in which Roy is shot in the back (a flesh-wound), Roy leaves the office, walks out to the street where the newspapers already have the scoop that Roy sold out the team for the money… “Say it ain’t so, Roy…”  Roy walks alone, with the knowledge that he will never play baseball again, tears in his eyes.  Fade to black.

 Don’t believe me? Read the book.  The 1952 the novel “The Natural” written by Bernard Malamud didn’t have the flashy Hollywood ending.  It ended on the downer, a fable for how high our heroes can soar, and how mightily they can fall.  In today’s day, with so many of our “heroes” (not just athletes, mind you, but actors and actresses, and musicians) being felled by drugs, bad decisions, or other self-imposed and avoidable tragedies, innocence appears to be lost.

 Ahh, but being young and believing…. Believing that heroes do exist.  Our military– HEROES.  Our firefighters and policemen — HEROES.  Our doctors and nurses  — HEROES.

 I know that people don’t typically think of lawyers or accountants or financial planners or insurance representatives or other service providers as heroes, but I want to be a hero.  And I will take it one client at a time if I have to.

 Who is with me?  Heroes don’t have to exist as a product of Hollywood.

Twins?!?

If you have been a loyal reader since day 1, lo those many weeks ago, then you would know some things about me you may not have previously known.  I like to read, enjoy movies, and love baseball and the Dodgers.  But this one is a doozy and it may come as a total shock to many of you… I, Robert Aloysius Cohen (ok, so my middle name is actually Alan, but Aloysius sounds so cool!) am a freak of nature. 

 Remember when you were little and you thought about the chain of events that had to occur in order to lead to your existence?  Well, I can take that one step further.  Not only did I think about the chain of events leading to my existence, but I also thought about the scientific explanation for why I am who I am.  One possible definition is as follows:   a blastocyst collapsed, splitting the progenitor cells in half.   Or, you can just take the layman’s definition:  I am an identical twin.

 Yep, that’s right, there is someone else walking around out there who looks and sounds just like me.  Have you ever seen me out on the street and called to me, just to have me ignore you?  Could be that I just don’t like you, but chances are, you saw HIM and not me.

 First, let me answer all of your questions at one time, because I have heard them a million times:

 1) No, I do not feel pain when he does

2) Neither one of us is smarter than the other

3) He always had more power but I could hit for better average

4) He throws left-handed and that is the only thing he does lefty

5) Yes we did in the past switch classrooms

6) No, my wife has never mistaken him for me

 Consider this, identical twins are not hereditary, but are an anomaly that occur in birthing at a rate of about three in every 1000 deliveries worldwide and we represent about 0.2% of the worldwide population (I wonder if we get counted as one or two?).

 So why do I bring this up?  Believe me, I have a point.  My mom and dad were terrific with us, always calling us by our names (“Rob” and “Not Rob”) and never ever ever referring to us as “the twins”.  So from an early age we knew we were twins, but never identified ourselves that way.  It became more of a novelty for parties then it did a way of life.  We never dressed alike (except if by accident), we never went to twin conventions or belonged to twin support groups, and we never went to twin bars.  We were who we were, individually, and we also happened to be twins.

 But you know what?  I think having a twin put me at a considerable advantage (once I finish paying for therapy, that is).  I always had a best friend, a play-mate, and a built in support group.  More importantly, I also always had the motivation to stand out.  A need to be an individual and to promote myself for my own qualities so as not to be known as simply “one of the twins”.  And in business, we all have “twins”.  To the public at large, all lawyers look alike; all accountants look alike; all financial advisors and insurance representatives look alike.  As part of networking we are tasked with finding a way to make ourselves stand-out, apart from the crowd.

 My friends, I have had a 33 year head start…

 So for the next week, I challenge you to stand out amongst the crowd.  Separate yourself from your crowd of twins…

Brooklyn Days

You must be wondering to yourself by now where all of the baseball and Dodger references are.  You know I am a huge baseball fan and especially a Dodger fan (I named my daughter Brooklyn!), so you must be confused why the Dodger propaganda has not been flowing since day 1.  Well, your wait is over…  Ouch, I hope I didn’t just lose readership, although if you are a Giant fan, good riddance.  Bear with me, though, this one is a little longer than normal…

 On January 28, 1958, while driving home from a liquor store that he owned, Brooklyn Dodgers catcher Roy Campanella was involved in an automobile accident that left him a quadriplegic, his playing career over.  While in the hospital he wrote a book (obviously with assistance) chronicling his career, the accident, and his recovery efforts.  It was published in 1959 and called “It’s Good To Be Alive.”  It is one of my favorite books and certainly one of the most influential, so I would like to share two short passages with you:

 Page 297, discussing Roy Campanella Night at the LA Coliseum, an exhibition game between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the New York Yankees to honor him, attended by 93,103 people, the largest crowd ever to see an organized baseball game (up until 2008, that is):

 “My heart was filled.  I felt the people of Los Angeles were paying me a great honor, an honor I hardly deserved.  After all, I was no more than a name to most of these people.  I had never played a game of baseball in their city.  I wasn’t even a Dodger anymore.  Thousands upon thousands of them had never seen me play anywhere.  Yet they cheered me as if I had just hit the home run that won the pennant for the Los Angeles Dodgers.”   (I like this passage because it shows just how kind, caring, and considerate the people of Los Angeles were and, I believe, certainly still can be.)

 Page 251, discussing his paralysis:

 “True, I’m still paralyzed from the neck down, and I have no feeling at all in my legs, but I can move my arms and shoulders and I have a little movement in my hands.  I’ve learned to make the most of everything, and I’m grateful for the little things I can do.  You don’t know what you can do until you try it.  You’d be surprised what you can do when you have no choice.

 “I get around almost as much as I used to.  The only inconvenience is when I have to be carried in and out of my bed, my chair, and my car.  Otherwise, I live like I used to…

 “I may have to live with this a long time… and maybe all my life.  But I’ve got so much to live for — my family, my job, myself.  I’ve always enjoyed life and I’m going to continue to enjoy life even if I have to do it in a wheel chair for the rest of my life.”

 Roy Campanella died June 26, 1993.  I had a chance to meet him once; basically, I saw him at Dodger Stadium and before I had a chance to say much I was shooed away by his wife and an usher.  But I wish I knew then what I know now about his courage.

Parenthood

You remember the Steve Martin movie from the late 80’s about being a parent and all the hilarious and wild things that can happen?  Ok, let me take that back– it was a movie about being a parent (check!) and wild thinks happened, I guess (check!), but other than that I don’t recall the movie being that funny.  I think I was probably 13 or 14 when I loaded the movie (that I rented from the Video Super Shop) into the VHS at home and awaited the hijinks and hilarity that was sure to come from a Steve Martin movie (The Jerk, The Man With Two Brains, etc.) 

 Unfortunately, all I can remember is that I just didn’t get it.  A kid who had some form of behavior problems, another kid who liked to bang his head against the wall while wearing a trash can on his head, a third kid who told her mother she hated her so mom threw her out.  This is not a movie on par with what I came to expect from one of the wild and crazy guys.  This was like real life and stuff!  I grew up in a house that was more akin to Ozzie and Harriet and the Cleavers, not some household where the kids rebelled and ran away from home.

 So why do I bring this up now?  I caught about half of the movie on TV the other day and I had to stop and watch.  I figured that since I have a 3 1/2 year old the movie might make more sense.  Not so much.  Maybe I should check it out in 15 years or so, after the formative years of parenthood have passed. 

 Anyways, the one part of the movie that did resonate with me (now that I am a parent) was an exchange that Steve Martin’s character had with his son, Kevin, about 10 years old.  He was tucking Kevin into bed and Kevin said something about how when he grew up he wanted to go to work where his dad went to work.  And Steve Martin asks him why.  I will paraphrase what was said because I don’t remember it word for word (I know, one of the few movies I do not know every word to):  He said something like, “Because then we could see each other every day.”

 Yep, that did it for me.  I can only hope that my daughter feels that way about me.  Why?  Not because I want her to be a lawyer ( I DON’T!) but because it is clear from that statement alone that there is not only a love and trust for the parent, but that the relationship has transcended to one of deep friendship.  I am incredibly lucky that I have that with my parents and I only hope that I have that with my daughter and that she won’t take it too personally when I have to put her in time out.