FLABBY FIRMS FIGHT FOR FITNESS
It turns out that the legal profession, from preparing briefs to eating expensive lunches with clients, isn’t a boon to physical fitness.
That’s why some firms are joining a fitness challenge offered up by the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, Mayor Gavin Newsom, The Fruitguys, the San Francisco Workplace Wellness Alliance and Equinox Fitness (it’s a workout just remembering all of them).
Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman and Littler Mendelson are among the San Francisco businesses putting together teams to take an eight-week challenge to improve their cardiovascular health, strength, abdominal endurance and body composition, said Noah Rolland, corporate account executive with upscale fitness club Equinox.
Rolland said that while younger professionals can be gung-ho about getting in shape, their older superiors are not. That’s why each team must include at least one executive, and that’s why it’s been dubbed the “Shape up San Francisco Executive Challenge.”
“I think that one of the reasons we’re seeing a lot of law firm participation is because the law field is showing a lot more interest in life-work balance,” said Rolland, who consults with law firms and other businesses to set up so-called workplace wellness programs.
Participants in the challenge will be measured in the four categories before and after the eight weeks at Equinox, Rolland said, but can work out wherever they want.
Pillsbury may have a leg up on the competition (although there are no winners or losers). The firm has already embarked on a wellness program that’s part of what the firm calls its Work-Life Balance initiative.
This summer, Pillsbury will host monthly seminars for its employees on things like nutrition, stress and time management and exercise � some will be hosted by Equinox. But it’s more than talk. In July, the firm is delivering a case of fruit to every kitchen in the firm’s San Francisco, Silicon Valley and Sacramento offices every week. In September, it will be veggie baskets.
Pillsbury lawyers also get points (not the kind that go toward compensation, but the kind that go toward prizes) by taking part in some of the firm’s fitness activities, like playing on the softball or tennis team or even taking a group walk.
� Zusha Elinson
LONG BOOK EATS SABBATICAL
While other law firm partners use their sabbaticals to travel to the farthest corners of the globe, Irell & Manella attorney Howard Steinberg stayed in his Century City office � and wrote a 3,750-page bankruptcy book.
“I was spending more time in the office than when I had been working,” said Steinberg, a Los Angeles bankruptcy partner. “It was not the idyllic sabbatical I had imagined.”
But a three-month sabbatical wasn’t enough to write the full book � a second edition of one he had published in 1989 called “Bankruptcy Litigation”� so Steinberg worked on it for nearly three years, spending nights and weekends at the office.
Fortunately Steinberg lives just two miles from the Irell office. He’d go home for dinner, coach his kids’ baseball or basketball teams, then go back to Century City, sacrificing sleep. Some associates offered a bit of help, but “it’s hard when you ask young associates to write a treatise.”
Steinberg’s project started in the late 1980s, when he was a young partner at a now-defunct bankruptcy boutique. He noted there were no books on bankruptcy litigation, and decided to spearhead the effort, which “turned out to be a lot more than I bargained for.”
The publisher had been after him to do a second edition, a plea that was intensified in 2005 when significant amendments were made to the federal bankruptcy code.
The three-volume edition, published this summer by Thomson West, provides an up-to-date review of corporate restructurings and bankruptcy from a litigation perspective.
Despite the lack of sleep, and weekends holed away in the office, the effort had offered Steinberg tactical advantages: “There is no way to learn law better than to write about it,” he said.
Steinberg has been able to use some of the material he’s researched in his own practice. For example, in a recent representation of a British company, he successfully argued that the fraudulent-transfer laws of the United States couldn’t be applied to a foreign entity if the transaction was conducted mostly in that foreign country.
“If I can get my knowledge so I know more than my opposition, it gives me a degree of comfort I otherwise wouldn’t have,” he said.
With the book behind him, life seems so much easier, Steinberg said. But, not for long: After a downturn, bankruptcy work is picking up again.
“My timing couldn’t be better,” he said. “I finished and now things are booming.”
Even though, at times, Steinberg felt like abandoning the project, he kept it going by focusing on the piece chapter by chapter. (though, he noted, that was tough when one chapter was almost 500 pages.)
“Luckily, I have a very understanding wife and kids,” he said. “If I hadn’t lived so close to work, I’d be writing a treatise on divorce law.”
� Kellie Schmitt
