Mazursky, Schwartz & Angelo:
To cure my dis-ease with the life of a corporate litigator, I took a modest paycut, agreeing to base my compensation on performance-based bonuses, and became an associate at the redoubtable plaintiff’s firm of Mazursky, Schwartz & Angelo in the East Tower in Century City. My office on the Seventeenth Floor of the triangular monolith overlooked the Beverly Hills High School athletic field.
Century City is a gigantic legal island between two great rivers of traffic – Olympic Boulevard to the south, and Santa Monica Blvd. to the north. From my secret lair in an underground parking garage I would emerge at all hours, a stealthy avenger, a trial lawyer on the hunt for justice. Working for MS&A was a workaholic’s dream. Not only did I handle a changing caseload of dozens of personal injury and employment files, I covered five counties, and solo-tried cases in San Diego, San Luis Obispo, downtown LA, and Pomona. I usually had one full time secretary and two overtime secretaries cranking out massive volumes of paperwork that I signed in a flurry of printing, copying, faxing and mailing. Trial work in LA is paper-intensive. Sometime in 1993, it all came to a screeching halt. I lost an expensive trial, the partners had a sit-down with me and said they wanted to scale back my trial involvement, and I was not into it. They said they could hire two people for the price of me. I told them that if they could find two people who could do what I was doing, they should probably hire them.