BOOK REVIEW : Regal Legals: Final Sentence Passed on a Fallen Law Firm

SHARK TANK: GREED, POLITICS, AND THE COLLAPSE OF FINLEY KUMBLE, ONE OF AMERICA’S LARGEST LAW FIRMS by Kim Isaac Eisler St. Martin’s Press $18.95, 236 pages

Shortly after I opened my law practice in 1988, my partners and I stopped by the opulent but desolate quarters of a defunct law firm selling off its furnishings at fire-sale prices.

As we marveled at the silver service in the partners’ dining room, the private bathroom in the corner office, the collection of modern art, we understood why the once-mighty firm of 700 lawyers had collapsed under its own weight. We passed up the silver and bought a desk and two hatracks.

The firm was Finley Kumble Wagner Heine Underberg Manley Myerson & Casey--no, that’s not a joke, at least not an intentional one--and its rise and fall are described in fairly breathless prose by journalist Kim Isaac Eisler in “Shark Tank.”

The name of the firm itself is a clue to its sorry fate: Eisler shows us a law firm that grew too fast, attracted too many big egos and eventually devoured itself. Significantly, during its last days, the firm was known as “Finley Crumble” by lawyers who may have derived some secret satisfaction from seeing the big dogs go hungry.

Essentially, “Shark Tank” is a painstaking account of the comings and goings of lawyers who joined and then left Finley Kumble over a period of nearly 20 years.

Eisler makes a valiant effort to enliven his book with colorful asides (“ ‘Think Yiddish, dress British’ was the Kumble refrain”), snippets of dialogue that cannot be repeated in a family newspaper (“You call me a liar again, and I’ll call you a . . . again”) and oblique portraiture of the two heavies in the Finley Kumble debacle, Steven Kumble (“I don’t get heart attacks, I give them”) and Marshall Manley (“We come up against older guys who interviewed us for jobs when we were coming out of school, and we kick the . . . out of them”).

But “Shark Tank” is really not much more than a story of superheated office politics.

“Shark Tank” is cast in the patented journalistic mold of “American Lawyer,” a magazine whose editor--Steven Brill--played a self-appointed but crucial role in inflating and then puncturing the Finley Kumble bubble. Eisler confesses that he works for one of Brill’s publications, but insists that “Brill had absolutely nothing to do with the research, reporting, writing or anything else having to do with this book.”

And yet Brill is featured as prominently in “Shark Tank” as are the lawyers who actually sailed Finley Kumble into the iceberg of debt and dissension that finally sank it.

“Had Steven Brill been a licensed lawyer, he almost certainly would have been one of the scorpions or coral snakes inhabiting the Finley Kumble jungle,” Eisler writes.

From the glory days to the bloody end of Finley Kumble, Eisler insists, Brill and his publications were the “cannon aimed at the ship.”

“Shark Tank” is attracting a lot of interest among lawyers in Los Angeles, if only because the book touches on so much local legal lore. Then, too, the book is reassuring to lawyers who believe the law is still a learned profession--Finley Kumble prided itself on being the meanest and toughest firm on the block, and it failed.

As Brill himself wrote:

“Its failure will redeem the idea that there’s more to law practice than an aggressive business plan.” But I wonder if “Shark Tank” will reach much beyond the existing readership of “American Lawyer.”

I have a confession, too. The “American Lawyer” approach to writing about the practice of law--that is, a fascination with mega-firm politics and personalities, and an apparent lack of interest in what lawyers actually do --makes my eyes glaze over.

And so did “Shark Tank.”