In memoriam, #JacquesVerges
« Je savais que les 39 confrères que j’avais contre moi, plus le procureur, ne pouvaient me donner de leçons. Parce qu’à l’âge de 17 ans, j’ai rejoint les Forces Françaises Libres ».
1987, Jacques Vergès défend le nazi Klaus Barbie à Lyon.
i turn 30 today
here’s what i learned:
1. prestige is a drug, closer to heroin than anyone admits. a respected title, income security, a luxurious environment, existing as "superior" in other people’s eyes. once that identity sets, leaving is almost impossible. it feels like the suicide of the ego. that’s why brilliant people stay decades in positions that quietly kill them. I watched it in the best law firms
2. my cancer at 24 broke a curse. when you should be dead, social artifacts stop working. I needed something bigger to keep going: a quest. that’s what carried me through the bar, through the top firms, and then out of all of it
3. I have always suffered disproportionately from my own risk-taking. I’m an introvert; in high school I entered public speaking competitions because I’d read you must seek difficulty on purpose. nausea, cold sweats, stomach pain, every time, for ten years, through law school. it never became comfortable.
when you look at athletes, it doesn’t hurt less after a thousand sessions. they just read the pain differently
4. everything in the universe drifts toward dispersion. being alive is the one rebellion against that law. so is attention. so is building. the day you stop choosing voluntary discomfort you’ve started disappearing
5. you can fall in love with failed iterations. multiplying errors is the fastest form of learning that exists. obsessing over the end goal is a beautiful way to stay frustrated forever
6. what actually remains is the emotion. the works, games, movies that marked you young. friendship. love. almost nothing else survives. and here’s the paradox that took me longest to accept: the quest gives you a direction but you can only ever live in the present step. anticipation breeds pessimism and guaranteed disappointment. presence is where the whole thing actually happens. meditate. contemplate the moment. celebrate every win
- Est-ce que c’est supportable pour un Président de la République de recevoir toujours des instructions des organisations internationales ?
- C’est TRÈS insupportable ! C’est TRÈS insupportable !
Honoré d'être nommé Grand Chancelier de l’Ordre National du Lion par le Président de la République 🇸🇳 En partance pour ma tournée internationale, la distinction m'a été remise par le Général des Forces Armées. Merci à eux pour ce privilège.
Cc @lesaintarchi ça te fera plaisir
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« Ceux qui, de simples particuliers, deviennent princes par la seule faveur de la fortune, le deviennent avec peu de peine ; mais ils en ont beaucoup à se maintenir. […] Ils n’ont aucune difficulté à s’élever, parce qu’ils volent ; mais ils en ont beaucoup lorsqu’ils sont au sommet. »
Le Prince, Chapitre VII – « Des principautés nouvelles qui s’acquièrent par les armes d’autrui ou par la fortune »
Machiavel
[PROFESSION] L'attractivité de la profession d'avocat, entre représentations et réalités professionnelles - Retour sur le rapport de l'Institut Robert Badinter 👉 https://t.co/keTWRdseDJ
En la abogacía -y en la vida- el optimismo no es una virtud; es una herramienta de trabajo.
Porque cuando estás rodeado de problemas, es lo que te impulsa a seguir buscando soluciones.
In memoriam, #JacquesVerges
« Je savais que les 39 confrères que j’avais contre moi, plus le procureur, ne pouvaient me donner de leçons. Parce qu’à l’âge de 17 ans, j’ai rejoint les Forces Françaises Libres ».
1987, Jacques Vergès défend le nazi Klaus Barbie à Lyon.
freshly graduated, you sign your first M&A associate offer at 150k a year. years pass, it climbs 250k, 350k. you take out a mortgage on a beautiful apartment.
you're deeper in every month. the days get longer. you love the work less and less
it destroys your body, 13-15 hour days of artificial light. but no other job will pay like this, and you can no longer scale down your lifestyle.
if you're exceptional, you make partner: first non-equity, then equity. you hit $ 1M a year. if you're a superstar, $ 5M+.
then at 55 you disappear from a stroke. the firm stops for five minutes to post a LinkedIn tribute. then goes back to work.
you're forgotten forever. you didn’t even notice the beauty of life.
this is a true story
It was 1am during one of several all-nighters I pulled working on a complex cross-border finance deal. I was a first year associate at Debevoise and the senior associate on the deal strode into my office and dropped off some markups for me to process. She flipped to one of the 27 sets of signature page packets I had prepared and pointed emphatically at one of my mistakes, which she helpfully encircled using half a red Bic's worth of ink. In one of the signature blocks, I spelled the entity name as "ENTITY HOLDINGS, INC." when in fact it should have been "ENTITY HOLDING, INC."
"Clients pay us what they pay us so they can sleep soundly knowing that we will execute with dogged perfection" she explained. The smallest mistake, however insignificant, was an indicia that the higher stakes elements of the deal may not be airtight either. And that would be fatal to a client's confidence in your work product. The craft was the craft, regardless of whether it was a critical covenant or an entity name on a signature page.
13 years later I still think about that night. It's easy to dismiss the tasks of a junior associate as valueless, menial grunt work, but the unglamorous work compounds in counterintuitive ways. Checking and rechecking section cross-references, tracing through a maze of nested defined terms, and yes--compiling signature pages--were often forcing functions to do more important things like *actually* reading a complex contract from top to tail. Over time, these thankless tasks built a rich latticework of mental models and a pattern-matching library that to this day I draw upon when facing new and unusual legal issues. Even when using AI (which I do every day), this decade-long scaffolding of knowledge I've cultivated helps me ask the right questions, prod with the right followups, and curate and assemble the best answers. I'm sure, just like generations of old men futilely yelling at clouds before me, I'll be proven wrong, but man, I'm worried (and a little sad) for the new generation of lawyers.
The firm, whose partners bill more than $2,000 per hour in bankruptcy cases, apologised for multiple AI-generated 'hallucinations' in a high-profile case. https://t.co/H0jDKbKX8E