The American Lawyer today takes note of the last opening day of the season of baseball’s New York Mets to take place at their home stadium since 1964, Shea Stadium.
It was simpler days when Shea opened, and days when a mere lawyer-cum-power broker could actually end up with his name on a stadium. (The new Mets stadium, now under construction a parking lot away, will be known as the denatured, mispelled, and potentially transitory "Citi Field," after the bank.)
I write to summarize the type of lawyer Bill Shea was, and also as a tardy way to memorialize, in brief form, my own short years at Shea & Gould as an associate in the 1980’s.
The story of Shea and his stadium began when the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants both left for California after the 1957 season, and New York became bereft of a National League club. Shea thought that baseball was a sort of social glue holding together different classes across the city ("What am I going to talk to my doorman about now?!") and he resolved to do something about it.
But, as well-connected as Shea was, he couldn’t persuade any National League franchise city to cede a team to New York, nor could he persuade the league to open a new expansion franchise for New York.
So he turned to Plan B.
With Branch Rickey as his ally (the former Dodgers executive famous, among other things, for breaking the color barrier by signing Jackie Robinson) Shea formed the "Continental League," immediately granting a franchise to New York and reaching out to Florida, Minnesota, and Texas, among other places, to seed new franchises. He was calling the National League’s bluff, and the National League blinked.
So were born the New York Metropolitans, with their signature colors of Dodgers blue and Giants orange.
But that’s not why I’m writing about Bill Shea.
He’s a model of a law firm leader the mold for which may have been permanently broken.
I won’t talk about his technical expertise, which certainly entitled him to the platform he ultimately enjoyed, but he was actually a gifted banking lawyer. Beside the point. His genius lay elsewhere. Simply put, he knew everyone. The stories are legion about his Rolodex, but I’ll add only one small one of my own.
Early in my days at Shea & Gould, I was assigned a very short and limited task: Try to find an interpretation of a particular Hawaiian tax statute that would be more rather than less favorable to our client. The diligent but unskilled associate that I was, I came up with an array of inconclusive regulations, letters, and tangentially related cases, and went back to the partner somewhat disconsolate with the miserable fruits of my labors. His immediate response was, "Let’s go see Bill!"
We walked into his office, described the dilemma very briefly, and without saying a single word to us, he yelled over the intercom to his assistant, "Get me Inouye!"
Probem solved; Inouye is the senior US Senator from Hawaii.
But a few last thoughts on Bill as leader of a law firm:
"When I was a fourth-year associate, [Shea] and Milton Gould lent me and my wife money to make a down payment on our first home," says [Richard] Spinogatti, who was in the U.S. Army Reserve at the time [and who’s now a senior counsel at Proskauer Rose]. "It was an interest-free loan made out of their pockets—not from the firm—and they did that for a lot of people.
“Bill was a bear of a man with bright blue eyes, and while he could appear gruff and rough, he had an absolute heart of gold,’ he says. ‘He would always listen to anybody’s problems and deal with them as his own.’"
In retrospect, it came as no surprise to me–although I had left and was only a lowly associate when I did leave–that very shortly after Shea’s ultimate retirement the firm imploded.
Is there still room for such law firm leaders?
Yes, of course; we are minting them every day, if we care to notice, and if we care to cultivate them and let them thrive with all their idiosyncrasies. Which of Shea’s winning characteristics bear attending to? His office door was always open, to the high and the low alike. The Spinogatti story alone demonstrates it was not an empty gesture. And when he exercised his power on your behalf, it was his personal touch, not a favor bestowed from the firm’s resources at no risk or expense to him. From a business perspective, he realized that combining his infinite Rolodex with Milton Gould’s celebrated courtroom talents could be the basis for a powerful firm. And he proceeded to build a firm that was a great New York institution in its day.
It’s a tragedy it couldn’t survive his and Milton Gould’s retirement. Is there a moral in that? Not having been privy to the inner circle, I hesitate to draw one with any degree of confidence. But to all appearances, the Harvard Business School case that has not been written about Shea & Gould, but could be, might be titled "Failure of Succession Planning". When the benevolent rulers must retire, who of their stature is in line to take their place?
I choose to focus on the institution they built while they were in charge. You could do worse than to aspire to what they achieved.
