Sir Ernie of Glen Burnie. Lawyers who won’t take a stand is a time-honored tradition. Our hero, Ernie from Glen Burnie, who is not such a lawyer, is a life-long friend. He’ll stand up for people who pay him–and people he just met on the subway.
It’s his nature.
He stands up.
Ernie’s “available” and “comes to play”. He will tell you what he thinks. He will act. He is a trial lawyer with business sense.
Ernie played football for one of the Ivies. He thinks in terms of both collaboration and getting things done. He’s smart but friendly. Guys’ guy. Ladies’ man. Lawyer’s lawyer. Renaissance Human. Charmer. Playful rogue. A reveler in words.
He’s a partner in a well-known DC law firm.
He does not like “cookie cutter” thinking or people. If you need him, he’s there. Things you have to think about for a long while? He just does them.
Even though he does securities litigation, if you are a GC, you can call him in the middle of the night with your insider-trading problem, or report that your kid at Dartmouth just thrashed a waiter and both Hanover cops.
He’s very well-paid, our Ernie. But if you–you are an associate, client, paralegal, receptionist, messenger, street person–want, say, a cup of coffee, he does this amazing thing: he just gets you a cup of coffee. Just because. What a character, you think. And, best of all, as the M Street crowd will tell you, when he’s not working, he’s the kind of guy who never hits on married women over 40.
You can read Ernie’s story–it’s about an old parchment he claims was discovered in Alexandria, Virginia around the same time we both began practicing law in The District–at “The Seven Habits of Highly Useless Corporate Lawyers“.
The rest of this is also a true story, mostly. So listen.
Above: Stand-Up Guys. Ernie, a dead-ringer for 1950s icon Neal Cassady, and WAP, in a photograph global sleazebozos Getty Images will no doubt claim as its own, during their pre-lawyer Beat years at Nathan’s, a D.C. saloon for older players until July of 2009.