Once upon a time in Portland, Oregon there was a small law firm located in a refurbished building near the downtown core. I was first introduced to this firm while a partner in the Seattle firm in which I began my legal career. The senior partner in my firm and the senior partner in the Portland firm had gone to law school together at the University of Chicago, but otherwise had little in common. The Portland senior partner was tall, intelligent, charismatic, and a veteran of World War II, while mine was none of those things.
I became friends with many in the Portland firm as we shared referrals across our state boundaries. Each firm thought of the other as its principal go-to firm in the other’s jurisdiction, even though we had no exclusivity arrangement. Friendship was the glue that bound us to one another, and the attachment was loose and flexible. I found myself envying the atmosphere of the Portland firm as it was collegial and warm, while that of my own firm was hostile and competitive.
Why I stayed in my first firm for 16 years is beyond my present day comprehension, but it had something to do with loyalty and with my inner determination to always try to make something better. I became its managing partner and strenuously worked at making its culture more like that of the Portland firm, but, in the end, I failed since the named partners distrusted and actively disliked one another. Following a sabbatical after my last term as managing partner, I returned to find that the culture had snapped back to its original form like a rubber band with retained memory – despite the strenuous efforts of myself and others to achieve lasting change.
Within a few months of my return to my first firm, I realized that I was the odd ball and that everyone else liked the drama and angst that ruled the day. It had taken me 16 years to arrive at this conclusion, which says something both about my determination and my willingness to engage in futility. With the encouragement of my wife, I decided one day to simply quit. I hadn’t anywhere else to go. I had looked around in a desultory manner, but had been unable to put much effort into a search for a new home due to a misplaced sense of loyalty to the firm that had hired me right out of law school.
Once my announcement of departure was made and I had survived the one hour of harangue I had allotted to my then-senior partner about the mistake I was about to make, I found myself ready to look for work. After all, I wasn’t independently wealthy and without a job I would be up the proverbial creek without you know what. As I thought about what to do next, it seemed logical to talk to my friends in Portland who had once said to me that they might want a Seattle office. So I called.
Two days later, another Seattle lawyer and I were in Portland cutting a deal to open a Seattle office for the Portland firm. It was the only interview I had; the only interview I really wanted. The deal that we cut for the first year of operation of the new Seattle office was special within the context of the Portland firm’s compensation program, as we decided to share the risk of the new venture for the first year in such a way that if the Seattle office was successful I and my fellow Seattle lawyer would be paid well, but if it wasn’t we might find ourselves back on the street. But we would be fully supported in our efforts to make a go of it – while we discovered whether or not we had it in us to balance on the high wire and make things happen. The acceptance of that risk was the final push I needed to become who I am today.
I won’t bother with a description of the various quests upon which we set out as a firm. Suffice it to say that I was warmly welcomed and that everyone pitched in to make the Seattle office a success. The Seattle office was profitable that first year and we became a part of the regular compensation system thereafter. More importantly, I was embraced by the firm’s members even if a few of them thought I might be too much of a cheerleader for my own good – or theirs. But after the dankness of my first firm, to discover an environment where the usual mode of communication involved respect and laughter rather than gloom and distrust, who could really blame me for my enthusiasm?
Thus began friendships that survive to this day. They were forged in good cheer and tempered with common sense; they were maintained by an atmosphere of mutual concern and respect and enlarged by out-of-the box thinking that believed that no dream was so huge that it could not be chased. The fact that we were small in size had no impact upon the size of the quests we undertook, and we were successful in chasing our dreams because we listened to one another, shared our goals, and worked in concert to achieve them. It was fun; the most fun I’ve ever had – for shared quests after collective dreams are heady stuff, no matter how elusive those dreams may ultimately prove to be.
And the principal reason for all of the fun we shared was that tall, intelligent, charismatic senior partner I had first met so many years before. He was the kind of leader who came to leadership naturally; the kind who would argue that he hadn’t too much to do with anyone’s else’s success even when he was the principal mentor, motivator, and instigator of so much of it. He was also something I was not – a veteran of World War II while I was someone who had never served in the military, and a draft dodger in the eyes of some misguided cranks.
Instead of letting this basic difference come between us, we made it into a bond of friendship. We shared our war stories – his were literal and real and reeked of the front lines of combat, while mine occurred inside a courtroom safe from bullets and gore. But we found a kinship in our respective passages through fire, and our mutual respect yielded that rarest of things – the holy grail of abiding friendship.
My former partner and constant friend is now in his 90s. While his footsteps have slowed somewhat, he still, literally and figuratively, takes one step at a time in pursuit of both his daily walk and the new ideas and concepts that he might find lurking along its way. He is still searching for the Holy Grail and has come as close to finding it as anyone I know.
On Tuesday of this week, he hosted a lunch in Portland for many former members of that long ago law firm. I wish I had been able to attend, but old age is a tough son-of-a-bitch and demands your full attention. Given Helen’s medical condition, I was unable to be present. But a funny thing happened Thursday morning. My phone rang while I was out to breakfast with one of my own mentees, and when I answered I found my friend – my life long mentor and former senior partner, Bob Weiss – on the other end wanting to tell me all about Tuesday’s lunch. I had to put him off for a time since it wouldn’t have been fair to my breakfast companion, a young Chinese friend and lawyer who, when I told him that my own mentor had been on the phone, said that I should pass along his gratitude to Bob for teaching me much of what I was passing along to him.
When I was finally sated by my Oktoberfest breakfast, my mentee was sent out to do battle on his own while I returned home. As soon as I got home, I called Bob to find out how Tuesday’s lunch had gone. And as he talked, a curious thing happened. As I heard about old friends and was reminded of laughter and warmth and mutual respect and easy relationships resulting from the shared battles of life, I was transported through the magic of storytelling to an invisible stool near a luncheon table in a restaurant somewhere in Portland where I sat watching and listening to my long-time friends laugh, joke, imbibe, and bring Camelot to life yet again.
On Tuesday morning, I had thought about the impending luncheon and had wished I could be present; on Thursday morning, I discovered that I had been.
