On Top of Their Game
from July/August 2006
She's Not Kidding Around
by Myles Callum
Alexandra Korry, of Sullivan & Cromwell’s New York City office, has successfully handled some of the toughest merger deals. She’s worked with giants—and sometimes troubled giants—including Adelphia Communications, Eastman Kodak, Microsoft, Philips Electronics, and UBS. One secret of her success, she says, is that she’s the mother of two: “Women who have children tend to know how to handle potential conflicts quite well. If you can handle situations with toddlers, you can translate those skills into negotiation sessions.”
Korry, 47, is the daughter of Edward Korry, a former U.S. ambassador to Chile. The diplomatic equivalent of an Army brat, she had a peripatetic childhood that included being born in London and living in such diverse locales as Ethiopia, Chile, New York City, and Washington, D.C. After graduating from Harvard, she worked as a journalist for the
Washington Post
; after that, while a student at the London School of Economics, she was with
Newsweek
. Next she got some background in commercial banking as a financial analyst for Chemical Bank, and then attended Duke University School of Law, where she met her husband, Robin Panovka, now a real estate attorney in mergers and acquisitions at Wachtell Lipton Rosen & Katz. In her own work, mostly in mergers and acquisitions, Korry’s practice areas include corporate governance, environmental issues, financial institutions, intellectual property and technology, and private equity.
Her experience with her two daughters—Rebecca, 12, and Sarah, 6—has led Korry to conclude that “mothering and dealmaking are both arts. Basically, in both, you’re trying to get to a win-win situation. The best way to win in negotiating is to make everybody feel like they got something—even if you haven’t really given away very much at all. And I find it’s almost exactly the same with children. If you make your child
think
that they’ve won, they’ll be happy. You want people to feel like they’ve won a lot, even if they have only won a little. This is true of toddlers too. And you don’t want them to feel like you’ve won too much.”
In thinking about the topic, Korry has jotted down some key points. “I made a list of things that work with both being a mother and being a negotiator. Patience is at the top of the list—you need that with children and in a conference room. Then, listening carefully. In a negotiation, I want to observe and figure out who are the real decision-makers. I try to read body language. I remember once dealing with a lawyer who was making an incredibly impassioned argument about some issue. Unfortunately, sitting right next to him was a client whose expression clearly indicated that he thought his lawyer was off base. This helped me figure out what the soft points were going to be—what’s going to work with somebody versus what’s not. Again, it’s the same thing with a child. You’re trying to figure out what it is that makes your child tick.”
Another quality high on Korry’s list: a sense of humor. “When parents freak out with their children,” she says, “it really doesn’t help. ‘I want you to do this!’ You start making some loud demand, banging on the table and making your child do it—it’s not going to get your child to where you want. And similarly in a conference room, standing and banging your hand on the table does not get you to win. Whenever Sarah had a meltdown tantrum, I would just wait for it to pass, our eyes would meet as she tested me, and then I would crack a joke or somehow make light of it. I wanted to provide the mechanism by which she could give up without feeling defeated. I try to do that in negotiations too. Recently, in a very tense negotiation where the businesspeople on both sides were getting very angry with each other—so much so that the deal appeared to be at risk—I cracked a self-deprecating joke while making my client’s point. This provided what I think was a necessary breather. When you are often up very late and have had rounds and rounds of argument, a little levity always goes a long way.”
In the corporate world, Korry says, you also have to learn when to be tough and when not to. “Many people in my world probably think I’m pretty tough. But I think I’m very careful about when I choose to be tough.” She offers an anecdote from parenthood: “When Sarah was a preschooler, she could be terribly stubborn. She’d say, ‘I’m not going to school!’ One morning I said, ‘Would you please get dressed?’ But she wouldn’t get dressed. At first I tried to cajole her and give her all the good reasons why she’d want to go. But nothing worked, and finally I had to put my foot down. I said, ‘We’re going. I’m taking you out of the car, and if you want to go naked, you can go naked. If you want to bring your clothes, bring your clothes.’” And what happened? “She got dressed, because I picked her up naked and started carrying her out—as I fought back the tears.”
With children as in negotiating, says Korry, “you have to keep your eyes on the prize. When Rebecca was in her last year of preschool, the teacher was having the kids do ABC workbooks at the beginning of the year. Rebecca balked at that. She preferred to walk around and observe what others were doing. When the teachers informed me, thinking I would be upset that she wasn’t doing her ABCs, I told them to leave her be, that she would learn her ABCs in due course. Now, at 12, she is a voracious reader, reading adult fiction, and last summer she wrote a musical on her own about Anne Boleyn. So I think we did okay. The analogy: Often in negotiations you need the patience to let others go where they need to go on various issues. Keep focused on what’s important, and you will do fine.”
Rebel With Many Causes
by Sasha Issenberg
The George Washington University Law School catalog lists John F. Banzhaf III’s most celebrated and notorious course as Legal Activism. The professor refers to this central part of his syllabus by a less scholarly title: Sue the Bastards. His license plate once rendered the same sentiment semaphorically as SUE BAS.
The course—in which students are encouraged, within the confines of the legal arena, to raise hell—is an undertaking that perhaps once would have seemed odd to Banzhaf, who approached his own law-school experience without much of a rebellious spirit. Banzhaf, 65, got an undergraduate degree in engineering from MIT, attended Columbia Law School in the 1960s, and sat out demonstrations about Vietnam and civil rights. “I had no interest in it whatsoever,” he says. “I would have been voted the person least likely to go into public-interest law.”
He graduated from law school, clerked for a year, and before taking on his first full-time job went to work on a cruise ship as a gigolo. (“In the original sense of the word,” the lawyer specifies. “A man who’s paid to dance with women, and no more.”) He was home with his father at Thanksgiving, watching football games, when the rash of cigarette commercials caught his attention. “It brought back to mind something I learned in law school, and that I might be able to do something about it,” he recalls.
Sitting in a ship’s cabin the night before he departed from New York on a 92-day cruise, Banzhaf wrote a three-page letter to the Federal Communications Commission and—without having performed any legal research on the subject—invoked the fairness doctrine and asked whether the commission had a responsibility to balance tobacco advertising on the air. By the time the FCC replied to his complaint, he was back from the cruise and a few weeks into his first job as a patent lawyer at a prominent New York City firm. The FCC announced that TV and radio had to run ads warning about the dangers of smoking, and Banzhaf received word that his firm’s senior partner wanted to see him. “John, do you know who our major client is?” the rookie associate was asked. Philip Morris was not only a client but also the firm’s landlord. Says Banzhaf, “He went on to explain to me that what I was doing was not pleasing the client very much.”
Nevertheless, Banzhaf pressed on. His letter-writing effort touched off a revolution of antismoking reforms, arguably the most influential public-health movement of its era. Banzhaf was an accidental crusader, drawn less to his cause than to the challenge of making sure a pricey law-school education didn’t go to waste. “It was an opportunity to use something I had learned in a real context. At the time I had never been involved in a public-interest case, although I had a lot of book knowledge,” he says. “Had I suddenly seen a way to use some legal principle to save the whales or fix the ozone lawyer, I would have used that.”
He quickly found the opportunity to enlist others in his wars. When he began teaching at George Washington a few years later, Banzhaf was an obvious pick to oversee a class on consumer-protection law. He gave his students an unusual opportunity: Instead of taking a final, they could bring an action based on what they had studied. To students, that was an appealing option, and the project eventually became the central element in the new Banzhaf class called Legal Activism. It was enough of an innovation in stodgy legal academia that Banzhaf’s colleagues voted to deny him tenure when he first came up for it.
True to his teachings, his students revolted, and the tenure decision was later reversed. “It was a time when people believed change was possible,” he says. “Many people believed the only way to bring change was to break the law. I showed it is possible to work within the system.”
While most of Banzhaf’s students choose to act by prodding regulators, as he did with his first FCC letter, some also sue. The professor sets out several criteria for the students’ legal actions: They must be in the public interest (“You can’t sue your dry cleaner because he popped a button”), be dependent on a legal approach (as opposed to community organizing), involve primarily the writing of a legal document, and be largely completed within the semester. Also, students are not allowed to sue the university, the law school, or the dean.
Over 30 years, the accomplishments of Banzhaf’s Bandits, as they’ve become known, have amounted to a formidable assortment of reforms, from the weighty to the seemingly trifling. Students have toughened automotive bumper-safety standards, pushed Washington’s prestigious Cosmopolitan Club and Metropolitan Club to go coed, and forced dry cleaners to charge the same for laundering men’s and women’s shirts.
Banzhaf still maintains a public-interest practice in an office across the street from the law school. A recent personal crusade grew out of a classroom project. A vegan student had eaten McDonald’s French fries, relying on an advertising declaration that they were cooked in 100% pure vegetable oil. (“He’s one of the few vegans I’ve ever seen, by the way, that are kind of fat,” Banzhaf observes.) The student felt betrayed when the fast-food chain was forced to admit that the potatoes had been precooked in beef tallow. Banzhaf and his student located a Hindu lawyer in Seattle, who helped organize a class action on behalf of those whose religious dietary restrictions had been violated. McDonald’s, after originally dismissing the suit as frivolous, settled for $12.5 million and agreed to issue a public disclosure and apology. Banzhaf continues to take on the public-health dangers of fast food and other causes of obesity, such as sugary soft drinks sold in schools, attempting to replicate his success in using the law to tame the tobacco industry.
He says he grades the work of the class’s dozen or so students by the same standards he would apply to a paper or law-review article. “Many students have gotten high grades for projects that were not successful, usually for reasons not their fault,” he says.
A Pipeline Into How Federal Actions Will Affect You
by Sasha Issenberg
A lot of lobbyists work Capitol Hill, hanging out in its committee rooms and stalking its hallways—and when not exerting influence on the sausage-making process, they often pass the time by trafficking in gossip and speculation. Elliott Portnoy, 40, a veteran of Hill politics, has managed to take this scuttlebutt—and the kind passed over lunch at the Palm and over cocktails at fundraisers—and turn it into a commodity. It is as if he has developed a turbine that can marshal the windiness of Washington political culture and convert it into sellable energy.
Three years ago Portnoy, a lawyer and lobbyist at D.C.’s Sonnenschein Nath & Rosenthal, helped start up a new practice whose product is known by various names: information capital, information arbitrage, and, at the risk of oxymoron, political intelligence. He describes the specialty as offering “customized political intelligence ahead of the news cycle.”
The firm’s information-capital team of 25 people tracks news, trends, and developments around Congress for corporations, investors, banks, and hedge funds. “Most of our clients don’t generally have a strong view as to what Congress should do on the energy bill or the asbestos-liability reform bill, for example,” says Portnoy, “but they want a strong and succinct assessment of what Congress is likely to do.” This job of “translating K Street for Wall Street,” as he describes it, takes the form, ultimately, of predictions.
Analysts monitoring the effects of policy on business are often assigned by industry or sector, but Hill decision-making is not so simply siloed. “You’re having a meeting on health-care issues, and in the middle of it an offhand reference is made to something in an energy or telecom bill,” Portnoy says. Sonnenschein aims to synthesize the information from disparate sources so that connections can be made and patterns discerned. “Clients don’t just want to know that it is coming up tomorrow, but what it is and how it will affect their industry,” says Portnoy.
The assessments go on a website that clients can access. But most of the information flow consists of an ongoing give-and-take in the form of daily phone calls, regular e-mail updates, and conference calls. “It’s rare that clients simply want something in writing,” Portnoy says. “They want it in writing, and then they want to probe the strength of the information to see how confident we are.”
The more than two dozen clients sign six- and 12-month contracts for $10,000 to $50,000. Because the information group does not lobby, Sonnenschein doesn’t have to—and doesn’t—disclose clients’ names. But most of its work has been focused on energy, telecom, financial-services, and health-care issues. When the Chinese energy giant Cnooc tried to purchase the oil company Unocal, for example, Sonnenschein received inquiries from clients seeking a forecast of what was likely to happen. The team pulled together facts and intuitions about the energy industry and the process by which foreign investments in the United States are authorized. But it also had to weigh the effects of political players whose names do not show up on legislative flow charts but who can wield influence, like CNN’s protectionist preacher, Lou Dobbs. “We advised clients early on that this transaction would not be consummated,” Portnoy says.
An Insider's Game
by James Chitwood
It is the paradox of the working world: Everyone wants to talk about his or her job, but nobody wants to listen. Unless, that is, Leonard J. Elmore is doing the talking.
Len Elmore can’t go anywhere without someone wanting to discuss his work. People talk to him in train stations, at corporate meetings, on airplanes, at conventions, and many want to know the same thing—how to fill out their bracket for the NCAA basketball tournament office pool. To which Elmore can only smile and shrug. “There’s no science to it,” he says. “But everybody wants to talk about the Final Four picks. In any general conversation, basketball will invariably arise.”
For good reason: Elmore played four years at the University of Maryland, two in the old American Basketball Association, and eight in the National Basketball Association, after which, in 1987, he graduated from Harvard Law School. Since then he has (deep breath) worked as an assistant district attorney in Brooklyn; started his own sports agency, Precept Sports & Entertainment, representing clients such as NBA stars Sam Cassell and Walt Williams; been CEO of an educational-testing company, TestU; served since 2002 on the board of 1-800-Flowers.com; and, in his most high-profile position, spent 17 years as a college-basketball analyst for CBS and ESPN. At 54, he divides his time between broadcasting games and his day job as senior counsel with the New York City firm LeBoeuf Lamb Greene & MacRae. There he focuses on litigation, dispute resolution, and bringing in new clients like the United States Tennis Association and the venture capital firm Shamrock Holdings, whose stars Roy Disney and Stanley P. Gold led the attack that toppled Michael Eisner at Disney.
As one might imagine, his life can be rather busy. During basketball season, he keeps up with the office using his laptop and BlackBerry or, in the case of winter board meetings, participating via conference calls. “I try to incorporate client development with some of the basketball trips,” he says. “I have to develop a schedule where if I have something pending, then I have associates who can handle it. I’ll be traveling and clients will call, and they’ll want an opinion letter to take to their board of directors or we have to file a last-minute answer to a motion received. Here I am on the road and I have a game to prepare for, and I get it on my BlackBerry. I’ll work it through till I get it done.”
Elmore has found that basketball is both a social lubricant and, in some cases, an important tool. “If we need to pitch our services, many times that is the hook that gets us in the door,” he says. “It gives people a level of familiarity with me.” When he worked as a trial lawyer, he remembers, a judge called to him, “Mr. Elmore, please approach the bench.” Elmore walked up, and the judge, in a conspiratorial tone, asked his thoughts on the Knicks. Just last year, when Elmore was being sworn in at the federal court for the Southern District of New York, the judge performing the ceremony gave him a nod. “He dropped in a little comment to let me know that he understood who I was,” says Elmore. “I never try to advertise it, but especially the male judges just love to talk basketball.”
He can be as imposing in court as he was on the court. While an assistant DA, he once prosecuted a police officer accused of wrongful shooting. Elmore put forth a compelling case, but the judge rejected the forensic science that was used as evidence. The defense attorney was so impressed, however, that he approached Elmore afterward and offered him a job. Says Elmore: “I guess he liked my style, and it was also an acknowledgment that we’d really won the case.” He turned down the job.
“Being an ex-player helped in trial work and negotiating, because people could relate to me,” he says. “It knocked down barriers that might have otherwise been erected because of my size, and in some cases my color.” He says he learned early not to stand too close to the jury box, so jurors wouldn’t be forced to lean back like moviegoers in the first row to appraise his 6-foot-91?2-inch frame.
Elmore grew up the oldest of four children in Brooklyn and Queens, where his father was a garbage collector and his mother worked as a clerk in the sanitation department. Both instilled in him a determination to make his own path in life. When he was in the fourth grade in Brooklyn in 1960, the teacher asked what he wanted to be when he grew up. Elmore answered, “A lawyer,” and the teacher suggested that maybe a plumber or carpenter would be more realistic. This did not sit well with Len or his mother. “In retrospect, that was a spark,” he says. “More because of how my mother responded. I felt like I had to do something now.”
He tries to use his influence to inspire others who might be in a similar situation. “I like the bully pulpit of television, particularly as it pertains to college education, and particularly communities of color,” he says. “That’s the legacy. I try to preach that from where I’ve come, I didn’t have a silver spoon embedded anywhere in my body. My parents were working-class folks who didn’t have a great deal of education. I tell kids today that I’m no different than they are. In the end, it comes down to the humility to rely on other people, in some instances, for guidance. It’s okay to ask for help.”
Elmore finds that navigating the corporate world calls upon many of the skills that got him into the NBA. “There’s still an element of grittiness here, whether handling a case or positioning yourself for the next big break,” he says. “There’s a certain level of infighting that goes on. You learn that just like in sports, you play hard but you play fair, and in the end you get your share of successes. That’s kind of my philosophy. Whether it’s individuals or corporate identity, you play inside the rules but you go all-out.”
Elmore is the chair of the nominating and corporate governance committee at 1-800-Flowers.com, so he has the power to help shape the company’s corporate identity. He has also been a member of the board of trustees of the University of Maryland at College Park since 1998. He believes that any board can benefit from diversifying—“not in the normal sense of different ethnicities and cultures, but different experiences,” he says. “I’ve been not only a college athlete and a professional athlete, but a businessman who’s counseled corporate clients. There are people out there like me who could add something to boards, major boards. Often you look at the cookie-cutter boards and it shocks me.”
Elmore stresses that this doesn’t mean boards should add people just because they’re different. “They need to have certain requisite skills,” he says. But he believes that many companies would benefit from expanding the idea of who serves on a board. “There’s a big, wide world of very talented people out there, people with nontraditional backgrounds,” says Elmore. “For example, just because someone was an athlete doesn’t mean that’s the way they will always be defined. After all”—and here he laughs—“my knees may hurt, but I can still get to a meeting.”
They Really Know How To Play
Dan Kaplan
In
the basement of Arnold & Porter’s headquarters in Washington, D.C., the sound of kids is background music: little squawks and giggles and happy screams as they romp, bounce, paste colored strips of fabric to pieces of paper, and show that they are still young enough not to be self-conscious. Upstairs is a different world—big-shot corporate lawyering, a world where 24/7 attention is required to satiate the needs of massively wealthy clients making massively expensive deals. And it is the place downstairs—an extraordinarily rare seven-day child-care center—that helps many of these attorneys put in the crushingly difficult hours their jobs often demand.
In 1963 the American Bar Association recommended that the average lawyer bill around 1,300 hours per year. In the 21st century’s big-deal law firms, citing that number would probably get you a blank stare or a laugh—almost any aspiring partner at one of these outfits can expect to put in 2,000 to 2,400 billable hours per year. That’s a minimum of nearly 40 hours a week, 52 weeks a year, and doesn’t include all the other work aspiring partners must do. Holly English, 50, a practicing attorney who wrote 2003’s
Gender on Trial: Sexual Stereotypes and the Work/Life Balance in the Legal Workplace
, clocks what she says is a “doable” 1,800 billable hours and thinks that aspiring to the 2,000-plus figures is nuts: “I just can’t imagine doing it and having a life.” One rabidly ambitious third-year female law student can’t imagine it either. She has been a summer associate at a major firm and entertains dreams of a wildly successful career. But, she says, “when I look at my future, if things continue as they are now, I feel like no matter how hard I try, I will be disappointed in my career or in my family life or both.”
The management at Arnold & Porter’s headquarters does not believe that its demanding practice needs to preclude a balanced life. Arnold & Porter has built a reputation as a family-friendly firm. It gives new mothers 12 weeks off at full pay, and new dads six. It has shown up on
Fortune’s
“100 Best Places to Work” list and has been on
Working Mother
’s list of the “100 Best Companies for Working Mothers” six times. It has taken serious steps to help its people resolve work and family pressures, including offering a child-care center and preschool open from 8 to 6:30 Monday to Friday, with extra backup hours (until 9:30 p.m. Monday to Friday, 9 to 5 on Saturday, and 12 to 4 on Sunday) available for when clients’ needs hit the fan.
In 1988 Arnold & Porter was one of two D.C. firms that established small part-time child-care facilities for parents who on any given day might unexpectedly need to keep their children close by. In 1995, when the firm grew out of its original headquarters and moved to a new facility, it decided to build and manage a full-time day-care center and nursery school capable of handling 55 children from 3 months to 12 years old.
Demand often outstrips supply. Each year the center gets 15 to 20 applications, mostly for infants, and availability fluctuates. This year, for example, in addition to requests for infant spots, the center received three applications for preschoolers (ages 3 to 4), and three for toddlers (12 months to 2 years). “I was able to accommodate the preschool applicants,” says the center’s manager, Sally D’Italia, “but not the toddlers.”
For parents fortunate enough to have their children accepted, the rewards are sizable. Justine Fitzgerald, 37, a senior associate who has a daughter in the program and has had two other kids in it from infant to pre-K, says, “I wanted to find a firm where I could make a family-career thing work. I didn’t know if it could, but I knew that if it was going to work, it was going to be here.” Justin Antonipillai, 33, a partner whose wife works part time for the firm, says, “It’s been pretty great. My daughter’s in the child care three days a week. My wife and my daughter and I come in together, and on those days when I have to travel, I can go down and spend a little time before I take off.”
The benefits of the on-site facility are many. Infants can be breast-fed between meetings; a father can take his lunch break to eat with his child. The center is awash with the sorts of things that toddlers and babies love: stuffed turtles to pound against tables, balls of play-dough to form and then smash. For the older ones, there are finger-painting and field trips to museums.
Arnold & Porter senior partner Fern O’Brian, who directed the creation of the center, says that the decision to build it “was not that difficult. It provided something people really want.” Yet a recent survey done by the National Association for Law Placement Foundation found that only 42% of large law firms have any sort of child care and that the vast bulk of the 42% offer, at best, on-site emergency backup for late nights at the office or those hectic days when the nanny bails.
When Arnold & Porter shows up on the “100 Best Companies for Working Mothers” list, it is usually accompanied by San Francisco’s Morrison & Foerster and maybe one or two other law firms. Why not more? Many city-based firms don’t have the space to accommodate a child-care facility and probably don’t want to pay to rent it. But more and more evidence says that helping employees manage the seesaw of the work-life balance bolsters the bottom line. This makes sense: Big-time law firms sink hundreds of thousands of dollars into training the young and burningly ambitious—most of whom take off before their value accrues to the firm, often because of family needs.
“Ever since women started finding their way into major law firms, the attrition rates related to family commitments have been enormous,” according to Holly English. But it’s not only women who leave. A study done in 2000 by the Law Placement Foundation found that up to 40% of all new associates left their firms by the end of the third year, and that 60% left by the fifth. Since Arnold & Porter will not divulge attrition numbers, it’s hard to know how much its day-care center helps stem the outward flow of talent, but management is confident that it does.
A
Fortune
poll recently found that 50% of male Fortune 500 executives wonder if everything they gave up on their way to the top was worth it. A full 87% believe that companies that allow employees to engage with their outside lives will have an edge in the market for rising stars. In this context, initiatives like Arnold & Porter’s day-care center aren’t just good for parents like Justine, coming down to snuggle with her daughter around noon, or Justin, grabbing a few moments with his little girl before hopping on a plane. They are the kinds of amenities that directors should consider encouraging, and not just at law firms, because it’s all too easy for a 24/7 company—in its rush to be everywhere, every day—to get left behind.
