Everyone told me how miserable law school was, so I decided that if I was going to be miserable, I at least wanted to be in a warm climate. That’s how I ended up in Florida, where I earned my LLM in taxation. This was around the time the US was changing its entire tax code and it was becoming an increasingly important area of law. I realised that if I knew more about it than other lawyers, I would be more valuable. I was always focused on scaling opportunity.
I got a job at a Miami firm called Fine Jacobson, which was the proverbial cat’s meow at the time. After I joined they merged with another firm, and that was the beginning of the end. I was only a baby attorney at the time, but it was clear that the integration was not going well, particularly on the cultural side. There was a sense of “them” versus “us” – and you never want that. It should always be a unified “us,” with “them” being external competitors. For any integration to work, there needs to be one profit pool, one management team, one chair, etc. It just doesn’t work if a firm is split into different factions. That was a key lesson I learned early on.
