Top Lawyer Wins Clients With Her Homey Touch
NEW YORK. The small circle of top Wall Street takeover lawyers is a highly competitive bunch, and for good reason. “If you get one big deal, it can mean a multi-million dollar year,” says Gotham Bar Talk editor Matt Stratford, “and that’s not including photocopies at six cents a page.”
So the success story of Gwen Furst, who wrote poems for a greeting card company before she went to law school and landed a job at a top corporate firm, has drawn kudos from clients but more than a little envy from competitors. “Gwen gets clients by being nice to people,” says Mike Blodgett, a lawyer at another firm who has butted heads with her in the past. “I’m not sure that’s entirely ethical.”
“I’m going to tear you apart like a catnip mouse!”
As a copywriter for Felton Hall Cards, Gwen spent her days composing cutesy rhymes about kittens and daffodils in springtime, a job that left her feeling unfulfilled after a few years. “Don’t get me wrong, I loved working in a positive, upbeat environment,” she says. “It’s just that some of my adversaries make me want to stomp them like a bug just to see what color juice comes out.”
Stinkbug: Squash this little bugger and you’ll pay for it.
Gwen says she was the first Wall Street lawyer to use colored paper clips, an innovation that clients applauded. “I get so tired of the same old same old from all my law firms,” says James Borwein, who as general counsel of Waterfall Partners, a New Jersey-based hedge fund, oversees an eight-figure budget for outside lawyers. “When I get one of those little peppermint-striped babies from Gwen, I don’t mind paying her outrageous bills.”
Neat!
But lawyers who oppose her say the saccharin style that endears Gwen to the hearts of business people is unprofessional at best, and intentionally annoying at worst when it is directed at them. “One Friday afternoon she sent me a poem about a client of mine who she was trying to oust,” says Gerald Fishbein of Case & Stearns. “It made me so mad it ruined my weekend.”
“Don’t you ever try to be funny with me!”
The poem, in the sing-song meter Gwen perfected in the greeting card industry, was subsequently referred to the Board of Bar Overseers:
I hope that you won’t wear a frown
Just ‘cause your client’s going down
Your CEO’s a worthless clown–
We’ll run that sucker out of town!
Gwen told the hearing officer who investigated the ethics charge brought against her that she intended no offense, and was only trying to bring a smile to the face of Fishbein, a lawyer who has been known to bill 27.6 or more hours in a day in six-minute minimum intervals. “I work fast,” he says, “so I can fit a half hour’s work into fifteen minutes.”
Copyright 2007, Con Chapman
