Bill Zabel

My old friend and former law partner Bill Zabel died on July 7 after a long illness.

After my service as an Assistant United States Attorney in the Southern District of New York I began my private law practice as a single practitioner. Fortunately I soon acquired a client who controlled a Fortune 500 company.

As a one-person shop, I had to hire a number of large New York law firms to service the client. I became a private attorney general, assigning tasks to these firms.

One firm I hired was Cleary Gottlieb. Bill was a senior associate there doing estates and trust work so he didn’t work on my Fortune 500 client.

Lawyers from the firms I hired, all of whom were senior associates on the partnership track, approached me to start a small full-service firm. The associates from Cleary Gottlieb who worked with me wanted Bill to join the new firm.

I met Bill and we hit it off. He joined the new firm which was then called Baer & McGoldrick. (One client insisted on calling it “Tommy Baer & McGoldrick.”)

Thereafter, I came to know the extraordinary Bill Zabel.

Bill was from Sioux Falls, South Dakota, graduated from Princeton and then Harvard Law School.

The Sioux Falls origin was highly significant in Bill’s practice. While a genius in his legal specialty, the folksiness and hand-holding that he used so effectively to represent numerous very rich clients came from Sioux Falls. He knew it and so did they.

Bill’s practice was, at heart, a family law practice. The disposition of enormous wealth during lifetime and after death, so dictated by tax considerations, requires a first-rate intellect, encyclopedic knowledge of the law in the field, and counseling for often indecisive clients who want help in leaving how much, to whom, in their respective lifetimes or after death.

The typical conundrum Bill faced was a parent-testator or putative trustee who was angry at one offspring and excessively solicitous to another. Family members can be manipulative especially when billions are involved. Seeking advice on what to do is typical in Bill’s field.

Significantly, in counseling clients, Bill never told clients “what to do.” Rather, he pointed to the path to rational decision making and let the client decide.

Bill was consulted in most contentious estates and trust matters throughout the country.

But there was a whole other side to Bill: his dedication to civil right and human rights. Early in his career he wrote the main Supreme Court brief in Loving v. Virginia convincing the Supreme Court to permanently end the ban on interracial marriage. Similarly, Bill was involved in numerous cases upholding rights that governments or companies sought to restrict.

I count myself lucky and blessed to have known Bill Zabel.

I will miss him.