In the fall of 1990, during his third year of law school, David Kaufman got a job offer from the five-lawyer Washington, D.C., firm where he had clerked the previous summer. Then, a few months later�in fact, the day after hiring season ended�Kaufman got a telephone call from the firm telling him his job offer was being withdrawn.
Seems that the two name partners had gotten into some sort of physical altercation over money. "I heard that one of them actually threw a punch at the other," Kaufman says.
Kaufman managed to secure another job offer from a politically connected Washington firm. But that firm blew up a few weeks later, he says, in what he describes as a "sea of acrimony." He managed to land yet another position, this time with the D.C. office of a big out-of-state firm. But when he showed up on a Monday morning for his first day of work, he found out that 10 of the office�s 13 lawyers had been dismissed the previous Friday. The problem? Money again, he says.
By the spring of 1992, he was the only lawyer left in the firm�s D.C. office. A few months later, he too was asked to leave. "They didn�t have any business for me, and I didn�t have any clients of my own," he says.
Kaufman ended up with an eight-lawyer D.C. firm, where he spent three relatively uneventful years. But on Christmas Eve 1995, the managing partner�s wife, who was also the firm�s office manager and a partner, left her husband and sued the firm for her share of the partnership, he says. Within a year, that firm also was history.
"I�ve been on my own ever since," says Kaufman, now a solo practitioner in Fairfax, Va. "With that kind of history, you can probably understand why."
Kaufman says his experience has taught him an invaluable lesson: "You�ve got to have your own clients�otherwise, you�re fungible."
Details here from the ABA Journal.