Regretable but not surprising Tom Smith

This story that Michael Luttig is resigning as a US Circuit Court Judge on the 4th Circuit to become general counsel of Boeing is regretable, but one can hardly blame him.  His income will probably go up by close to a factor of ten, and the work will probably be fairly interesting.  Remember as general counsel of a big corporation, you are not doing the scut work of litigation, but rather commanding the law firms to produce work for you.  I think you would be high enough up the food chain that the awful part of litigation would be left behind.  Also, everyone will call you “Judge” most of the time, if they know what’s good for them.

I met Mike (I date myself here) when he was an associate at Davis, Polk & Wardwell, and I was interviewing there.  Yes, I did get an offer from them, but was so daunted by Wall Street hours that I decided to go with a DC firm instead.  The hours were dreadful there as well, but at least not horribly dreadful.  The Davis, Polk firm impressed the heck out of me.  Their level of fanatical attention to detail, for example, was truly spooky.  Interestingly, they took pride in their rather shabby, down at heel looking offices.  Absolutely none of the fancy art collections, antique furniture etc. etc. you see at Freid, Frank or Covington.  This was Davis, Polk’s way of saying, we are so good, we don’t need to try to impress you with our art collection.  Freid, Frank had a distinguished collection of very avant garde, post-everything art, much of it astonishingly ugly.