While job recruiters may tell candidates to go with their gut, it has often been Richard J. Birns’ counter-intuitive choices that have led to his successful career in corporate law. An early example came during Birns’ 2L year, when his civil procedure professor Hans Smit summoned him to his office.
“I thought I’d done something wrong,” recalls Birns, who today is a partner in the corporate practice group at Boies, Schiller & Flexner LLP, where he concentrates his practice on mergers and acquisitions, commercial banking, and securities law. Smit wanted to know why Birns hadn’t applied for a clerkship.
“Clerkships are usually associated with future litigation careers, and I was interested in corporate law,” Birns says.
Nevertheless, Smit dispatched his student to the chambers of the legendary Judge Milton Pollack of the Southern District of New York. Appointed in 1967, the Columbia Law School alumnus (Class of 1929) had presided over noteworthy cases ranging from the Weather Underground to junk-bond maven Michael Milken.
“Accepting Judge Pollack’s clerkship offer turned out to be a great decision,” Birns says. Not only did the young law graduate observe the workings of a respected judge in an exciting district, but he also worked closely on cases involving transactionsgone bad.
“That experience provided me with first-hand impressions of the importance of careful structuring, drafting,and due diligence in corporate work,” says Birns.
Among Birns’ latest projects was advising Goldman Sachs on its investment in RevolutionCard, a newly-launched, general-use credit card with 400,000 subscribers that is the brainchild of AOL founder Steve Case. Birns’ has been spending significant time of late counseling clients on matters related to the global liquidity crisis.
“We’ve been helping our clients, whether institutional investors, high net individuals or companies, in working their way through arcane instruments and complicated structures,” says Birns.
“I enjoy the mostly collaborative nature of transactional work,” he says.
Birns’ decision to join Boies Schiller after five years at Cravath Swaine & Moore LLP was also somewhat counter-intuitive, he says. Boies isknown more for its litigation expertise than for its corporate know-how. Nevertheless, Birns signed on, intrigued by the opportunity to help grow a corporate practice. It was a wise move. He and other firm partners have built the corporate practice group to approximately 25 attorneys.
Birns has also made some wise decisions that are not so counter-intuitive.
In April, he accepted an invitation to join the Columbia Law School Board of Visitors, where his ideas, as one of the youngest BOV members, will be of great value to the School.
There was also Birns’ decision to jettison plans to attend medical school after graduating from Georgetown.
“I come from a family of lawyers,” he says. “Sometimes, you learn to like what you grow up around.”
For more on Columbia Law School in the news, visit our homepage. For more on alumni events and news, visit the Alumni website.
