Not Forgotten

In the last 20 years, New York Metro Super Lawyers has written about the careers of more than 200 attorneys. Here are thoughts from a few who are no longer with us.

“Someone once asked me, ‘Isn’t a criminal trial a search for the truth?’ And I said, ‘It’s a search for the truth, but I’m not part of the search party.’”

—Murray Schwartz, Employment & Labor, “Q&A with Murray Schwartz,” 2009

“It’s a fascinating field to be in. You get such a significant feeling of helping people. There are people in their 50s who are losing their jobs because of age discrimination. A female client of ours was in a situation where everybody received a bonus in the year in question and her bonus was reduced. And when she went to see her supervisor and said, ‘Why is my bonus reduced?’ he said, ‘Why don’t you look in the mirror.’ How do you handle that?”

—Gerald Shargel, Criminal Defense: White Collar, “The Don of Criminal Defense Attorneys,” 2011

“The biggest difference today is that [hostile takeovers], now nonconsensuals, are accepted as perfectly normal business practice. I can remember a time when if you’d taken a survey at the business roundtable, two-thirds, three-quarters would say, ‘Hostiles should be banned. They’re bad ideas.’ Today, almost every major corporation—the white-shoe, old, establishment companies—have done a hostile, and don’t regard any of it with opprobrium anymore.”

—Joe Flom, Mergers & Acquisition, “The Fourth Lesson of Joe Flom,” 2010

“This was an area where labor law, contracts, torts, landlord-tenant law all came together. You had a chance to be different people—a litigator one day, an administrator another day, a negotiator the next day. It was living a fantasy, it really was.”

—Harvey Miller, Bankruptcy, “A Minor Deity in the Bankruptcy Arena,” 2009

“In college I studied the Bible. And in the Bible, in some 34 instances, probably the most repeated mandate is ‘Love the stranger.’ I have found that as a kind of byword in my professional life. … Essentially, we’re all immigrants here.” 

—Leon Wildes, Immigration, “Lennon Law,” 2009

“I am in a service profession.”

—Bettina Plevan, Employment Litigation: Defense, “The Dean of the Employment Bar,” 2015