“Lawyers didn’t make that much money in 1982, and it didn’t seem like a big risk,” says corporate attorney Nathan Assor of the venture that he founded with litigators Jeffrey Golenbock and David Eiseman. “If it didn’t work out, we would all just go get jobs.”
Their cramped three-room Manhattan office made meeting regularly easy, and during those early days the most important meeting was a weekly brainstorming session about generating business. A fourth partner, Lawrence Bell, who joined from Weil, Gotshal & Manges, brought a few corporate clients—a venture capital firm and a company that manufactured fiber optic scanners—but generating new business was the key to the firm’s survival. The lawyers took on relatively small matters—some referred from colleagues at Kramer Levin—for clients looking for discounts from big-firm rates. “Initially we did a lot of things for very small companies,” says Golenbock. “Our first litigation involved a dispute for $100,000.” Over those first 12 months, the lawyers managed to gross $371,800. And ultimately, their compensation that first year was on par with what they made as senior associates, which Assor pegs at about $50,000.
