Simon Rifkind Takes On the $11-Billion Case : Fighting Pennzoil’s Legal Battle With Texaco May Be His Last Great Challenge

Wriggling uncomfortably in their chairs, the law students looked on as the professor mercilessly scolded one of their own for misstating a point of New York law.

Only one took exception. “Sir,” the budding lawyer bravely began, “I believe you are mistaken.”

By the time he had finished, Simon Rifkind had extracted a rare admission of error from the Columbia Law School professor and won the awe of his classmates.

“If an argument was faulty, it wouldn’t get by Rifkind, even as a student,” recalls New York lawyer Merwin Lewis, who witnessed the episode and was, at the time, Rifkind’s roommate. “The professor, and all of the rest of us, were open-mouthed while Rifkind laid out the professor and analyzed the law.

“Si had been my friend for a long time,” Lewis continued. “From then on, he has been my hero.”

Some 60 years have elapsed since that day. Rifkind has advised presidents and generals, helped shape Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, served nine years as a federal judge, allocated the waters of the Colorado River among the Southwestern states, helped rescue New York City from bankruptcy and defended such luminaries as Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and the late Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas.

Dean of New York Law

And at age 85, he is still winning accolades for his knowledge of and eloquent argument of the law. The man who all but his closest friends call “Judge,” even though he left the bench 36 years ago, is widely acclaimed as the undisputed dean of New York law and as one of the most gifted trial lawyers ever.

“The most outstanding (courtroom) advocate of them all,” Douglas said of Rifkind in his book “The Court Years,” citing his “powerful and animated” style in the courtroom.

It is his combination of skill, knowledge and esteem that earned Rifkind his latest assignment, one that many are saying may be the octogenarian’s last great case: Pennzoil versus Texaco.

Pennzoil enlisted his help in May, six months after a Texas jury decided that Texaco owes Pennzoil $11 billion for wresting control of Getty Oil from Pennzoil in 1984.

When oral arguments in Texaco’s appeal of that decision begin Thursday morning before a three-judge panel in a Houston auditorium, Rifkind will be found arguing one of the most critical portion’s of Pennzoil’s case: his specialty, New York law.

New York’s is the pertinent law in this, the largest civil case in the history of the American legal system, because New York is where the alleged wrongs occurred. And in citing 90 “points of error” in the trial, Texaco hits particularly hard on what it considers serious misstatements of New York state law by the trial judge.

Rifkind has had only two months to prepare for a case that has produced hundreds of thousands of pages of court documents, a situation that Rifkind acknowledges creates “a very special challenge.”

But Lewis, his former roommate and friend of 70 years, says the quick read is another Rifkind specialty.

“Columbia was a hard-task school. But Si had to support himself, so he didn’t have the time for studying most of us had,” Lewis recalls. “He would go to class all morning, supervise the activities of a parochial school . . . the entire afternoon, study a little here and there. And despite that, he was still the best in our class.”

Rifkind also has a support staff that is intimate with the case. The Wall Street law firm that has risen from a tiny team of 20 lawyers in 1950 to one of the nation’s largest and most prominent with 325 attorneys--Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison--has been an integral part of the Pennzoil team from the beginning.

It was Paul, Weiss partner Arthur Liman, a Rifkind protege and one of the nation’s best corporate litigators, who represented Pennzoil in the Getty negotiations. And it was Liman who advanced Pennzoil’s arguments in a New York federal court earlier this year on the question of how much bond Texaco should have to post for its appeal.

But because Liman was also a key Pennzoil witness in the 4 1/2-month trial, he excused himself from this assignment.

‘Just a Taxicab’

Rifkind says Pennzoil hasn’t told him why he got the nod. And he didn’t ask.

“I’m just a taxicab,” he says. “People hail me.”

It is clear to almost everyone else familiar with the case, however, that Pennzoil was looking not only for someone well versed in New York law but for a name that the Houston appellate judges will recognize.

“When he walks into a courtroom,” says one attorney who has argued against Rifkind, “the judges all know him by reputation. They call him ‘Judge.’ And that can be very intimidating to the other side.”

Joseph D. Jamail, the Houston personal injury lawyer who was Pennzoil’s chief trial lawyer and who continues to head the legal effort as the battle moves through the Texas appellate system, says that “we needed someone renowned in the law of New York, and I think anyone would tell you Judge Rifkind is Mr. New York law.”

Jamail’s counterpart on the Texaco team, Cravath, Swaine & Moore partner David Boies, is also a fan. “If you were ever in very serious trouble of any one of a number of kinds, Rifkind is one of (a) very few lawyers you’d want to get to help you.

“I like to think of myself as a general purpose trial lawyer,” says Boies, who is best known for his leading role in defending CBS against libel charges by General William C. Westmoreland and for defending International Business Machines against government antitrust charges--and who, at age 45, is himself one of the hottest properties in corporate litigation circles today. “But Si Rifkind has a wider range than I do.”

Rifkind, Boies says, is “an outstanding trial lawyer” because he can persuasively argue either side of any case, and with equal zeal. Rifkind himself once conceded that he would “accept an engagement from Lucifer to resist his eviction from heaven unless I had previously accepted a retainer from the archangel Gabriel to bring about Lucifer’s expulsion.”

The law was a profession that Simon Hirsh Rifkind fell into by accident. But the rudiments of law and order were instilled in him at an early age.

As a child in the small village of Meretz, perched on a hillside above the River Neman in Lithuanian Russia, Rifkind was told precisely when to rise and retire, what and when to eat and drink, how and when to read and study. His behavior, as was that of millions of Europeans at the turn of the century, was dictated by the Bible, Talmud and a collection of writings by the great Rabbinic scholars that was published in 1554 and followed to the letter by the Meretz villagers.

Those aren’t years that Rifkind remembers fondly. “I was born in the 16th Century,” he says. His family burned wood to stay warm, made all of their own clothes and drew water from a well in the middle of the village by a bucket lowered on a long balanced beam.

Even the letters to his father, who had immigrated to America when Simon was an infant, were regimented. They were written once a week, in Hebrew, on a postcard that, at his father’s insistence, carried precisely 60 lines.

Gradually, his father, a scholar, sent for his family. And in 1910, the 9-year-old, accompanied by his mother and his two sisters, joined his father in New York.

Life remained orderly and pious, however. His parents were chiefly concerned that young Si’s religious instruction not be interrupted. So he was enrolled in a parochial school where instruction lasted 11 hours a day and classes were conducted chiefly by Hebrew scholars.

From 8:30 a.m. until 3:30 p.m., Rifkind studied religion. And from 3:30 until 7:30 every evening, he was exposed to arithmetic, grammar, American history and English composition.

It was in high school where he discovered his talent for using words. Every evening, he taught classical Hebrew to young children in religious schools. And when he wasn’t studying or working, the patriotic Rifkind, who was too young to enlist in the world war that was breaking out, pitched Liberty bonds.

Earned Phi Beta Kappa

Rifkind never went to war. After finishing high school in three years, he enrolled in the only college he could afford: New York’s tuition-free City College. He joined the student Army training corps, taught Hebrew at night and pursued his chief interest of philosophy.

In his third, and last, year of college, Rifkind was still searching for a career when a professor approached him. Rifkind, who had enrolled in a commercial law course just to fulfill a requirement, was told he had an aptitude for the law and should consider pursuing it.

He did. Having earned a Phi Beta Kappa key, he had no trouble getting accepted to the school of his choice: Harvard Law School. But to pay for his schooling, he had to work, and he couldn’t find a job in Boston. So he returned to New York and applied to Columbia.

By then, however, school had already been in session for two weeks. The assistant dean turned him down. Undeterred, Rifkind found the dean’s office, argued his case and was admitted to the class of 1925, one that also produced William O. Douglas and Thomas E. Dewey. The dean was a man who would later become chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court: Harlan F. Stone.

At Columbia, the Rifkind style began to develop. Classmates remember him as more scholarly than most and more articulate, witty and imaginative than anyone in the class.

Rifkind’s college years were devoted almost entirely to scholarship and work. Because of his teaching job, he was even forced to miss several classes and to take some in backward order, so there was virtually no time for play. But for exercise, he rode horses in Central Park every Saturday morning, a habit that he continued until 1957, when he suffered a serious heart attack in San Francisco.

Only a year out of law school, Rifkind landed what his classmates considered a plum job: aide to Robert F. Wagner, then the newly elected U.S. senator from New York. In Washington, he helped draft bills, wrote committee reports, ran Wagner’s law practice and learned “what it means to work seven days, 12 hours a day.”

And of importance to the Pennzoil case: “I lost the fear of big numbers.”

Judgeship in 1941

Among Rifkind’s assignments during his 15 years in Washington was drafting bills that would form the foundation of Roosevelt’s New Deal economic and social policies. His bills created the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the U.S. Employment Service and the National Industrial Recovery Act.

In June, 1941, Roosevelt appointed Rifkind a judge of the U.S. District Court of the Southern District of New York. Always an avid scholar of the law, Rifkind quickly earned a reputation as a fair and skillful judge.

Rifkind loved being a judge and vowed that “on the bench I would remain for the rest of my days.” It wasn’t to be. Money ultimately would be the deciding factor in his decision to leave the bench. But the first of his many roles as a public servant gave him a taste for rewards that the judiciary couldn’t offer.

In 1945, when Germany was in a state of war, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower needed an on-the-scene adviser on Jewish affairs. Rifkind took a leave of absence for an assignment that would win him the Medal of Freedom from President Harry S. Truman.

Sizing up the situation, Rifkind quickly concluded that there was only one practical solution to providing a permanent home for Europe’s displaced Jews: create a Jewish homeland in Palestine. So, in December of that year, he arranged the first meeting between Eisenhower and David Ben-Gurion, who would become Israel’s first prime minister.

Rifkind’s six months in Germany were among the most taxing of his life. “If I live to be a thousand, I will never be able to expunge from my mind the scene of human desolation, of human wreckage, of inhuman degradation, which opened before me,” he told a group of new immigrants in 1974. “Dante’s description of hell is a picture of a joyous society in comparison to the horror-strewn panorama that I beheld.”

But the experience also “shaped a lot of his thinking” and prompted him to become more active in Jewish affairs and to spend more of his time on public-service duties, says Rifkind’s son Richard, chairman of the Sloan-Kettering Institute for Cancer Research in New York. (His other son, Robert, is a litigator at Texaco’s lead law firm in the Pennzoil case, Cravath, Swaine.)

Rifkind stayed on the bench five years after returning from Germany. But money was becoming a serious concern. Federal judges at the time earned only $15,000 a year, a sum that Rifkind says allowed him only enough after taxes to pay for prep school tuition for his two sons.

So, in 1950, he resigned and joined the Paul, Weiss firm, then a fledgling concern with virtually no litigation practice. Rifkind became a litigator, winning attention for the firm with some highly publicized successes.

Defended Douglas

He brought a libel action against popular commentator Walter Winchell for branding the New York Post’s then-editor, James Wechsler, a communist. He represented Mme. Chiang Kai-shek, wife of the Chinese Nationalist leader, when she sued writer Drew Pearson for allegedly defaming her. He defended William O. Douglas against an impeachment attempt led by then-Rep. Gerald Ford. And in perhaps his best-known private practice case of all, he was Jacqueline Kennedy’s lawyer in her effort to have portions deleted from William Manchester’s book about her husband, President John F. Kennedy.

As he became a force, Rifkind recruited even more prominent men to the firm. Former presidential candidate and United Nations Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, former Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg, former IRS Commissioner Jerome Kurtz, former U.S. Atty. Gen. Ramsey Clark and former Kennedy confidant Theodore C. Sorensen are only a few of those that Rifkind enlisted.

His tour de force, however, was an assignment from the U.S. Supreme Court. How, he was to decide as a special master of the court, should the waters of the Colorado River be allocated among California and the other Western states?

It was an emotion-packed and highly controversial issue dating back to the building of the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River between Nevada and Arizona in the 1930s. His 433-page report essentially found in Arizona’s favor and was adopted by the Supreme Court.

It was Rifkind’s most far-reaching undertaking and the assignment that he still calls the “the peak of satisfaction” of his career.

“It was a great learning experience. Some of the law was brand new, and it was an issue that deeply affected all of the Southwest.”

Also on his list of most challenging assignments was his role in the New York City financial crisis of the 1970s. Then-Gov. Hugh Carey recruited him to serve as counsel to the Municipal Assistance Corp., the vehicle that Carey set up to rescue the city from the brink of bankruptcy. And Rifkind, in turn, helped recruit the man who is usually credited with having saved the city: Felix Rohatyn, now a prominent partner at the investment banking firm Lazard Freres.

“I maintain that every trial is theater and every trial lawyer is a producer of a good, bad or indifferent play,” Rifkind told the New York City Bar Assn. in 1949. “If you will think of your case as the raw material of a play, your imagination will suggest a hundred relevant lines to pursue which otherwise you would neglect.”

The scripts for his courtroom plays are usually written in his mind during his 25-block walk from his Fifth Avenue apartment to his 28th-floor Park Avenue office every morning. He insists on always walking alone so he can muse over and rework questions and arguments until, he says, “I get just the shape, weight, aim and direction I want.”

Once in his office, whose walls are lined with autographed pictures of presidents, generals and judges, he either scrawls notes on a legal-size yellow pad or speaks into a small tape recorder that he keeps in his desk.

Although he says he has cut down on his hours because he doesn’t have the energy he once had, his partners say he is in the office by 7 or 8 a.m. each day and leaves promptly at 6 p.m. He also works Saturday mornings, then works out in a gym before joining his usual Saturday lunch club, a group of lawyers, judges and other friends that has been meeting regularly for years.

“He almost never is not working,” says his son Richard. “My wife and I finally prevailed upon him to get away from the office and spend some weekends at an out-of-the-way, lovely spot we found in the Hamptons on Long Island. We proposed four. He agreed to two. And both times he has found a reason to break them.

“I have never seen him so happy as to report that much to his great dismay, he couldn’t take some time off.”

Rifkind won’t talk about his fee from Pennzoil, or even his yearly earnings, except to say that “I don’t draw a salary” and that his annual income isn’t anywhere near the $1 million that Boies is reputed to earn. “I wouldn’t be interested in making that kind of money,” he says. “What would I do with it?”

As for the speculation by many in the legal profession that the Pennzoil case will be his last hurrah, Rifkind says simply, “I’ve never thought about retiring.”

Pennzoil vs. Texaco, he says, “is not a very complex case.” In fact, he says, if it was a $1-million case instead of the $11-billion matter it is, “I would take 20 minutes to scribble some notes on the back of an envelope and go into the courtroom fully expecting to win.”