Dan Tabak, Litigation Partner and Treasurer at Harvard Hillel

 

134. Dan Tabak

SPEAKERS

Dan Tabak, Will Bachman

 

Will Bachman  00:02

Will Hello and welcome to the 92 Report. I’m your host. Will Bachman, and I’m delighted to be here today with Dan Tabak. Dan, welcome to the show.

 

Dan Tabak  00:12

Thank you. And before we get to me, Well, I just wanted to say, you know, thank you to you. I’m sure you’re doing this because you enjoy it, at least, I hope so. But it’s, it’s really, you know, something you’re doing for for all of us, and it, you know, I, for one, appreciate it. So thank you.

 

Will Bachman  00:31

That’s very kind to say. It is the highlight of my week doing these discussions. So it’s very selfish, but thank you. I’m glad other people, get some benefit out of them. So we’ll start with the question, how tell us about your journey since graduating from Harvard.

 

Dan Tabak  00:52

Sure. So after graduating, I started right away at Columbia Law School. I spent my three years there. It worked initially the law firm of Simpson Thatcher as a as a litigator, took a year off to clerk for a judge in a federal judge in Brooklyn, the Eastern District of New York. Have to throw in that, I took a wonderful trip between clerking and going back to work, backpacked in Southeast Asia for a couple of months. Oh, wow. Okay, went back to work at Simpson Thatcher. Stayed there too long, and then moved on to where I am now, which is a firm called Cohen aggressor, primarily in New York City. We now have London, Paris, just opened Dubai, and have a DC office as well for anybody who needs legal services. And so that’s sort of the professional life. And personally, I live in Scarsdale, New York with my wife and two kids. We’re both at home for now, but starting in the fall, my son will be starting at Johns Hopkins daughters at finishing her sophomore year in a few weeks. Yeah, so that’s, that’s where, that’s where I am now, and where I guess, where I’ve been, how I got there.

 

Will Bachman  02:15

Congratulations on your son starting school. And you mentioned before we started recording that you’re also play a role at Harvard Hillel.

 

Dan Tabak  02:25

Yep, that’s right. So I’m the treasurer of Harvard Hillel. I joined, actually joined the board in the pandemic. And I think sort of voluntold that, you know, there’s treasure is never necessarily the easiest job to fill. Somebody had to do it. So I was willing to do that. You know, I wasn’t a particularly active member at Hillel when I was at Harvard. And I think probably over time, at first, I was interested. At first, our classmate, and Geraldine Acuna sunshine was on the board and got me involved. And it’s an intersection of sort of two things that are interesting and important in my life. Was, was Harvard and being Jewish, and to help, you know, current students at Harvard to, you know, live a Jewish life, I think was some felt like a meaningful way that I could give back to to communities that are important to

 

Will Bachman  03:27

me, if you were authorized to speak about it, maybe, maybe you’re not, because, like, you know, and you’re sort of officially, this is not the official, you know, statements of Harvard Hillel. But do you have any reaction to, kind of, the past couple years at Harvard, and you know, you know, has been in a lot of the news for the whole situation there? Do you have any kind of perspective on that?

 

Dan Tabak  03:59

Yeah, sure. And I think you’re right, at some level, I’m only authorized to say so much. And Hillel to the it’s odd enough, like we have to have sort of institutional policy on these issues. You know, we speak with one voice which, and it’s not, you know, authoritatively minded, in the sense that, you know, we have a diverse board with diverse viewpoints, which I think is, you know, wonderful thing. So we, you know, we do have viewpoint diversity without the federal government imposing it on us. On the board in general, it, it’s been, you know, I joined the board before, before October 2023 so what I was joining was an institution hoping to serve current students and not, you know, getting involved in in foreign and domestic policy, in the way that the last year and a half or so have gone and. But you know, my own personal views, as I said, you know, I have the intersection of of Harvard and Jewish and you know, from what we’ve heard from students and obviously 311 page report on anti semitism at Harvard, there clearly are problems and more problems at Harvard that were very different than what our class looked at. Students seem to have a very different way of interacting with each other that they did when we were students. In my experience, I could disagree with somebody politically and not only be friends with them, but, you know, be their roommate, live with them, you know, still be in touch with them and communicate with them. And that seems to be, you know, very much lacking in in the current students, which is, you know, it’s, it’s distressing, in its own way, to see that as students today don’t seem to be capable of disagreeing civilly with each other. That’s, you know, clearly, like, you know, one sense of the loss of what we used to have

 

Will Bachman  06:10

it’s been so I’m not Jewish, although with my last name, people often have thought I am over my life. So I don’t know how many people thought I was Jewish. But, like, even, like, in eighth grade, the teachers like, oh, Will, could you explain Hanukkah to the class Social Studies? I’m like, Well, you know, I’m not Jewish, but I’ll do my best, right? But, but, like, I was on the Harvard Crimson right, where maybe it was, like, a large percentage of my felt, you know, the Crimson editors were Jewish at the time. I don’t know if that’s still the case, but so it was like a What’s the opposite of anti-semitic was like, like, Philly, you know, like pro Semitic. Like, there’s like, so I got to know so many, you know, Jewish fellow students, like, or so the idea that Harvard be like anti-semitic is just weird to me. Does it feel to you like, you know, from talking to current students like the, you know, the attitudes have changed that they’re like a broadly across the student body, there is some kind of because at least when we went to school, it seemed like, if anything, like, there was such a high percentage of Jews students, like, it’s like a large percentage of my friends, right?

 

Dan Tabak  07:27

So I think the, I mean, I don’t know, and I think that the crimson, actually, you would, you might remember better than I do. Used to do a survey every year students and what was your what’s your religious background? I’m not going to remember the numbers correctly, but my guess is probably it was around 20, 25%

 

Will Bachman  07:43

that’s what I was going to say. Like 20% Yeah. Now,

 

Dan Tabak  07:46

depending on, you know what numbers and where you’re looking at five to 8% is more? Is more like it at Harvard and, you know, similar institutions as well. So there was, you know, there was sort of, like a Jewish culture that sort of people who weren’t Jewish would get by osmosis. You know, the odds that you had a Jewish roommate or block me, you know, in our class, were quite high, yeah, yeah. The odds now much lower. And I so, I think that has contributed to fewer people understanding Jews and Jewish life at Harvard. So I think that that’s, you know, that’s clearly and I think it changes the nature of Hillel, where you had a student like me who was, who was Jewish, but I sort of could get my my Judaism, without going to Hillel. And as you get, you know, the smaller Jewish the size of a Jewish community anywhere, whether at a college or somewhere else, the institution that focuses as a center of Jewish life becomes more important to Jewish life in in that place. So that’s and that’s and that’s when, when I joined Hillel, what I was reacting to was to make sure that there was a place where students who kept kosher could have kosher food, students who prayed daily could have a, you know, place for daily prayer. Students who prayed, you know, every Shabbat, can have a place that for that. And students, you know, if you wanted, you only kept the High Holidays and Passover, there was a place for that, and that’s what Hillel tries to do, is to be open to all Jewish students. But you’re right. Well, the percentages have gone down significantly from when we were students. Why do you think that’s the case? You know, my personal view has a couple of components. The number one component, you know, I’m gonna, you know, the same dean of admissions, Bill Fitzsimmons, is still, still there. So I don’t think it’s, I don’t think he suddenly, you know, changed his mind on Jews a couple of the. Presidents when the decline took place, Larry Summers, President Bacow, both also Jewish. So to my mind, I don’t think it was, you know, from the top down. I think there were. One is that within admissions, there became more of an emphasis on call it sort of identities. And personally, I give you diversity in a good way. And this, I understand, sort of plays in at some level to this, to how students are react, or acting and reacting to each other, is they sort of feel like, okay, I’m the, I’m the banjo player from Nevada, Nebraska who got in. So I should be when I come to Harvard, I have to represent the banjo player from Nebraska. And a lot of students come in as I’m the student activist. So I should represent activism in terms of the number and percentage of Jews. I think you go back to the Immigration Act of 1965 which opened the doors to different communities than had been coming to the United States. And in particular, there’s been a very large increase in South Asian and East Asian communities that have very similar overall values of valuing education in the way that the Jewish community has tended to do for for years, and so now you have a lot more students who are who come from families, and particularly immigrant families, which, you know, studies will always tell you, immigrant families tend to value education. They are less prone to crime, less prone to, you know, all the bad things that are. They’re accused of, they’re more, they’re more interested in education, then generation families that have been here for generations as a broad group. Obviously, you know, we’re speaking very broadly here. So all those, I think, combined to where they’re just fewer, fewer Jews, and in general, I looked it up once. I think for every high school student who graduated in 1988 there’s about 1.7 students graduating now, whereas the Jewish community has not increased by 1.7 you know, 1.7 times fewer, fewer high school you know, graduates who are Jewish, there is, you can sort of call it competition with other communities that, in for admissions purposes, have the advantage of being newer to the country, and that also, you know, value education. You know, very deeply it’s, you know, I grew up, you know, with Jewish immigrant parents and that bumper sticker on the back of the cart was going to be significant, yeah, you know. And it took me a while to understand that for some other people, that bumper sticker on the back of the car didn’t mean anything. So you know that I think you have more parents who care about that bumper sticker on the back of the car. Oh, yeah,

 

Will Bachman  12:59

that helps me understand what might have happened. Well, tell let’s, let’s turn to your, you know, career a little bit. Tell me a bit more. You gave us the broadest outlines, but tell me a bit about your career through the law and the kind of law that you practice, and clients you serve, and so forth. So the I mentioned

 

Dan Tabak  13:21

started at Simpson Thatcher, one of, you know, one of the great things I got to do there, it’s, you know, one of the world’s biggest firms was I got to do both work on just general civil litigation. And used to call it like one large company suing another large company. Really, also had the resources in a firm large enough that really my case that was really dear to my heart. My senior thesis I wrote in college was about a school funding decision in New Jersey, and how the courts had gotten involved to ensure that students in New Jersey. It was particularly 30 districts. They called the Abbott districts, because it was the Abbott case, had appropriate funding. And when I was a summer associate at Simpson Thatcher, and there was a collaboration with a group that wanted to bring a similar case in New York. And eventually the case was brought, and I worked on it from my first, probably week at Simpson Thatcher to my to my departure at Simpson Thatcher, which tells you it was, it was a long case as campaign for fiscal equity against the state of New York. We represented school kids in New York City, suing the state to get a sound basic education under the New York State Constitution. There were years of discovery, a trial that essentially went nine months. Yeah, won the decision there. Had to go up through the appellate courts to the New York Court of Appeals. Yeah, we won there again. And then then you get to the hard part, which is the the remedy, and how do you go from there is a right to. Do it to a remedy for something like this. And the remedy, of course, you know, clearly, involves resources and money, and so did to go through another set of hearings of how much was the appropriate amount of money and back up to the Court of Appeals. So it was a large and treasured part of my time at Simpson Thatcher was to be able to do this work on behalf of, you know, at that point, was about a million or so kids in the New York City schools every year, and to work to ensure that they had the educational opportunities that I had in high school in the suburbs, and to help a generation, you know, get education again. You know what? We sort of talked about values, and I’d always valued education was something that my parents taught me was important. So, you know, the through line there was working on an education case, writing about education for my senior thesis, really meant a lot to me.

 

Will Bachman  16:01

At the margin, you, I’m sure, must have looked into this research quite a bit as part of the whole case. At the margin, how much does extra dollars actually matter in a public school system? I think I’ve just casually seen some research, you know, just sort of in blogs or whatever, saying maybe it doesn’t matter that much. Actually, you know, an extra 10% of spending or something maybe doesn’t really move the needle that much. It really, it’s more like family economic situation, and you know, to your point, about the culture of the home, and, you know, do parents encourage education, so forth. So what did you find out? What does the research say about, you know, getting, if you get an extra 10 or 20 or 30% funding, how much does that change the outcomes for the kids? Sure,

 

Dan Tabak  16:53

and I give this with a caveat that the trial was 25 years ago. So I hope there’s new I hope there’s new research. You know, whatever it shows, there was definitely, there’s definitely research for some specific things, like, at that point, class size. There was really robust research showing that class size mattered, and having smaller class sizes mattered. The I don’t know how much you know, it’s hard to sort of unpack all the factors of, you know, dollars. I remember having the analogy at that point where it because the other, you know, the state and the state’s lawyers would say, Well, you know, money doesn’t matter. And you know, at some level, you know, you just wanted to say, like, I know where your kids go to school. I think you think it matters, right? You’re, you’re going to districts that’s, you know, if it’s public school that districts that spend a lot of money, are you sending your kids to private schools that costs a lot of money? You’re, you know, you’re. Your own experience belies what you’re, what you’re saying in court. Yes, you know money. The other thing is that money well spent matters more than money poorly spent. You know, the this the state, which was the defendant, did try to, you know, argue that money wasn’t well spent, and they did not carry the day with it. I always had the analogy in my head of, sure, you know, if you have like a dome stadium, and you put in like a window air conditioning unit. You’re not going to change the temperature inside the stadium. Yeah, you have to have either a different system or more air conditioning units. So, yes, it, you know, marginal money doesn’t matter if it’s not well spent. But overall, you know, money does matter. The other thing that just to generally pull out in that is, you have to, you know, I always it’s one of the things you sort of, maybe, I’ve learned from the case. But people would say, Oh well, New York spends more than other states. And then New York also has a much higher cost of living than other states. You have, you have to, you know, factor those things in, yeah, before you can just say, Oh, look, you know, New York spends twice as much as some other state per student and doesn’t get twice as high schoolers. Yeah.

 

Will Bachman  19:07

Oh, so that’s very cool that you guys won that case, and my kids go to school in New York City, and so thank you for helping increase their funding. What tell us about kind of the type of law that you practice in your when you’re not doing pro bono stuff.

 

Dan Tabak  19:26

So now at Cohen grass, I joked it so it’s more like one mid sized company suing another mid sized company. So I do you know variety of of litigation, work, commercial litigation, the probably the two areas that I focus most on, although I do anything, is financial services companies, and then bankruptcy and bankruptcy related litigation. So I will give you one representation from the bankruptcy and bankruptcy related area. I was, I represented a gentleman by the name of Terry Boley, who you’re more likely to know as Hulk Hogan in the bankruptcy of Gawker and Gawker’s founder. Wait, wait, you were on the Gawker case. I was on the Gawker case in bankruptcy court. All right, so I did not win the 140 $1 million judgment. I helped Terry collect as much as he could out of it, which was, you know, both a lot of fun, great, great to meet Terry. Have to say, wonderful guy. People ask what he’s like and like and like he is exactly who you think he is. There’s not a huge difference between Terry Boulais and Hulk Hogan, but there is a difference in it. I saw it once we were in a conference room as we were having settlement talks, and walk out of the conference room into the hallway, and there’s was a custodian. It’s a law firm’s office. And the custodian, like his jaw literally dropped as he saw Hulk Hogan and I went from a discussion of, you know, terms of a settlement agreement to to Hulk Hogan, you know, introducing himself to this custodian, yeah, which was sort of a, you know, funny transition there. You know that the interesting thing I think about the case is, I know a lot of people will talk about third party funding. At the time that that this case was brought, the Internet was sort of awash with people putting up sex tapes of other people, and it’s now a crime in most states. I didn’t, I haven’t looked I know there was a federal act, I think was about deep fake. But it, you know, before it, people seemed much more, I think, accepting of the idea of putting up sex tapes of other people on the internet and after it, I think that is much more frowned upon. I don’t know, to the extent that the case made a difference in that, but if it did, it’s, you know, an interesting and I think, good byproduct of the case. Yeah.

 

Will Bachman  22:19

I mean, it certainly made institutions much more wary of something like that. Good way to go out of business.

 

Dan Tabak  22:30

You know what I’ll say, because I, you know, I, and I’m, I’m a supporter of the First Amendment, is, you know, you would talk to reporters, and reporters circled around the cases, you can imagine, yeah, a lot of them came in with the institutional notion of, you shouldn’t be suing, you know, media company for something that it, you know, puts out as sort of a news story. Then they heard the back background of what had happened. And, you know, ultimately it was sort of like one editor at the company gets a tape, you know, writes a snarky story and hits send, and these journalists from, you know, various reputable, reputable publications would tell me on the side, like that would never happen at My publication, putting aside the substance of it, the process of one person decides they’re putting something up there, just, you know, was unheard of to them,

 

Will Bachman  23:29

with no sort of editorial oversight, or, you know, second checks or whatever. Yeah,

 

Dan Tabak  23:35

none whatsoever. I mean, it really was, yeah, it wasn’t, I think, the editor in chief, who was the who did it. But there was no, there was no process of people saying, you know, wait a minute, maybe we shouldn’t do this.

 

Will Bachman  23:51

How did that case come to you?

 

Dan Tabak  23:55

It? It came to me. We have to, sort of work back. But I had, I don’t want to go too far, too far back into the story. You know, I was born, but I had worked on a case my my first year as an associate with a law firm in Los Angeles. Years later, I had a case that I needed local counsel in the Los Angeles area. Had talked to some people. Somebody recommended somebody at a firm there. I look up the firm, I’m like, Oh, I think I worked, you know, how many years ago with one of the partners at the firm on this case, you know, that lasted like a week, ironically, was also a media case involving it was a Dick Wolf production called New York undercover that nobody but me remembers, and the stars of the production had walked off the set because they wanted more money, better food and star trailers. And so we you. Got a temporary restraining order, so I worked on it for like, all of a week. And ironically, one of the stars used to live two doors down for me within my apartment building. Thankfully, he’d moved so we didn’t have awkward conversation after but so this, the lawyer in Los Angeles was working for or his firm was working for Terry, and they reached out to me and asked if I could, if I could help with it. I thought the answer whether the answer was yes or no, I knew the answer was yes, so that’s how I got involved. So

 

Will Bachman  25:40

setting all humility aside, what would you say is your like, legal superpower? What are you particularly good at? You know, in the law?

 

Dan Tabak  25:51

Wow, that’s great. That’s a great one. I think there’s probably a combination of every of every possible legal talent. Well, I would say no, really, it’s, it’s the strategizing of how to, how to get from here to there. It is listening to the client is to figure out what the there that they’d like to be getting to is. So it’s not, you know, mindless aggression of going into court and fighting for the sake of fighting, but always having a goal in mind, as to as to how you would like the case to end. And then I think I’m a good writer as well, which helps, can convey, you know, what I’m thinking. Ironically, early in my career, I would say oral arguments was something that I was not particularly good at, or certainly less developed than the other skills. And I remember the first time I had was preparing for an oral argument, in a case my poor wife had to listen to, I think for like three days, had to listen to what, you know, what the argument was going to be. And I probably didn’t sleep the night before getting into court, extremely nervous and and I remember, I went through it and it all survived. And, you know, I live to tell another live to tell another tale. And at this point, I prepare enough, but I don’t over prepare the way I did then. And I don’t, you know, I can sleep the night before the knots in my stomach as I sit in the courtroom waiting for our argument are far less, and I feel like I’ve gotten a lot better at it. And really had some arguments where I persuaded judges who started off going in the other direction.

 

Will Bachman  27:41

Give us an example, and you can be sanitized. I mean, we don’t want to know your your clients names, unless it’s public. But give us an example where this part about listening to the client and helping the helping your client figure out what they really want. Maybe you have an example where the client came in and they thought they wanted x, and by really listening to them, you got them to the point where they realized that they’d be, you know, happy settling for y or, you know, or Z would be, actually maybe better for them. Give us an example of how that played out.

 

Dan Tabak  28:16

You know, the examples that come to mind most are pro bono clients. Okay, sure, yeah, so somebody with an employment case, and they come in and they’re really angry at the, you know, the former employer, and they, you know, they’re more interested in justice than, you know, than in than in achieving a result. And it’s, it’s a process that sometimes takes some time of getting, getting them to, you know, where we can get a settlement we, you know, we get a settlement offer and tell them, you know, what’s, what’s going to happen if you don’t take it. You know, you look, you can’t guarantee a win or a loss, but here’s, here’s what can happen if you do take it. That’s that’s often one where they start off in a different place as to where they think they want to go and end up. And I will say, the ones who’ve taken the settlement usually end up very happy about it. And and I, to be clear, I can’t tell them, I don’t, can’t, and don’t tell them to take it. I have to have them understand why I, you know, might think it’s in their best interest to do so, and what the alternatives are. And if they don’t take it, they don’t take it, that’s, that’s, that’s up to them. But I find often they they do end up taking the settlement offer, if it’s if it’s a good enough offer, and in a sense that that gives them the vindication that they were looking for.

 

Will Bachman  29:52

Yeah, I guess it’s often the case when you’re in the legal world, particularly litigation, that you know emotions can. Really be driving it. And it’s like that ultimatum game where you have to split the $100 and it’s 6040, 8020, or something. And someone could be very emotional about it, but you need to get to a place where you have to work through that and get more rational and say, Look, you know, do you want to walk away with $20 or zero? Right? You know, I know it kind of is, you know, a bit of a bummer. But, and then think about, okay, what’s the implications if you do end up suing them and going to court, you know, what’s it going to be, the impact on your family, how much it might cost, what’s your reputation, all this kind of stuff. And so you’re kind of almost the therapist of getting people to realize that maybe they should just, yeah, like the benefits of just, you know, taking the offer instead of trying to get some emotional satisfaction exactly

 

Dan Tabak  30:49

with corporate clients, it’s, it’s often like the sort of different thing is just making sure that you listen when they tell you at the beginning, where you ask them, you know, what is, what do You want to get out of this? Because often, what they may want to get is a working relationship with the party on the other side. You know, for example, of a contract and a win can be, at some level, a win, win for everybody, because you get to keep doing business with each other. And it’s important to get that so that you don’t come into court, you know, and burn bridges, and, you know, end up with a situation where they they can’t work together, because it’s something that you said in court, or you wrote in your court papers. So that’s a, you know, sort of a different function of listening to, you know, what your client is really trying to get out of the case.

 

Will Bachman  31:43

Was it purely on the job, or is there some place where you feel that you’ve or, I mean, does legal education at any point give you that kind of more therapist negotiation skills, like thinking about what you really want, and, you know, as opposed to strict What’s the case and the precedent and our legal strengths here. But did you get any training around that more, you know, negotiation skills and listening skills, and talk to me about that piece, like, how did you learn that skill?

 

Dan Tabak  32:21

So I’m going to tell you will I have spent since we since I first saw the 92 report, I have spent until this moment not realizing what, how I’m going to answer the question of, you know, what courses did you take that that impacted you? Okay, it took your question for me to remember. I did finally come up with other answers. But I took a course from Roger Fisher with the Harvard Negotiation project. He wrote one of the authors of the book, Getting to Yes, getting to yes, yeah. Great Book, and that was far more helpful in negotiation and negotiation strategy than than anything I learned in law school. Law School, at least for me, and at least you know, 30 years ago, was really much more about hear what the cases say, here’s what the law is, and a lot less about the emotional intelligence, the negotiating strategy and the rest of the picture. And I did not take clinical courses. Clinical courses can give a lot more of that. So a lot of it was, was really on the job training. The other piece, you know, which very sensible in law schools, they aren’t sort of teaching. This is how to manage. And as you start in a law firm, you start, you know, as a first year associate, but you’re managing paralegals with no training as to how to do that. And I think a lot of that is you watch how you know people interact with you, and pick up the things that you like and discard the things you don’t like, and, you know, but be aware of them. And, you know, in that sense, I don’t know that. I don’t know if legal education today is better than it was back then in dealing with those areas, but it really, at least, my experience was all about, you know, here’s the big book of cases, and you have to, you know, you’re learning the substance of an area of law and less about how to practice law.

 

Will Bachman  34:29

Tell us about any key inflection points in your career where either a chance remark or a useful introduction or, you know, some kind of, you know, yeah, either a lucky break or some chance thing shaped your career and set it off in a different trajectory. Does anything come to mind?

 

Dan Tabak  34:54

So it would say the the Hulk Hogan thing, you know, certainly comes to mind and changed a little bit of of you. Yeah, of my practice certainly, ironically, ended up at the same time doing work for Howard Stern on a case with, you know, a very different set of what they were looking for. So it’s a case that nobody’s heard of because we gave it no publicity whatsoever, but I got a an action against Howard dismissed over a phone call that had been recorded on his show at the time. And I joked at the time that my niche was, at that point, was 64 year old celebrities who were six foot, six or taller, describe both Howard and and Terry Boley, who also were people that I, either, you know, watched or listened to in my teenage years. So they, you know, what I find is that there’s a lot of there’s little inflection points, and being a lawyer who brings in businesses a lot, a lot about luck. I mean, there’s definitely some skill involved. People don’t, you know, refer cases to somebody they don’t think is going to do a good job with it. But it is, you know, who was your office meet when you were a second year associate. And what, what are they doing now? And can, you know, can they give you work, or introduce you to somebody who can give you work? So there were just a lot of, you know, happenstances where it happened to to meet the right person to work with, work with somebody as a first year associate, who, you know, couple decades later, you know, had a matter that that would be interesting. Still, I don’t know that there was, for me, that there was any one specific one, but I’m grateful for all of the small ones that are out there

 

Will Bachman  36:41

outside of the law. We already talked about your work for Harvard. Hillel a bit. Tell us just sort of about anything else outside work that you’d like to share about with your classmates.

 

Dan Tabak  36:55

I would say it’s interesting. And I think I wrote this on one of our class reports years ago that I had thought, if you asked me, what, you know, if I wrote one of those reports, I would start with what I was doing, and then go to family. And it’s definitely the flip now that that what I care more about is the family and the people around me, then then the work, and then I care about the work. And I, you know, for those, for those interested, I do care and try and do a great job, but the my family means, you know, means everything to me. So I think that’s, that’s probably, that’s where I focus my energies.

 

Will Bachman  37:37

You were anticipating this question. So tell us a bit about any courses or professors that you had at Harvard that continue to resonate with you, if any.

 

Dan Tabak  37:46

Sure so. It turns out that that course on negotiation does resonate with me, because I spend a lot of litigation in particular it’s settling is trying to figure out, you know, what’s the other side’s, you know, best alternative to a negotiated agreement, and that’s even just, you know, settling an extension on a motion, or, much less, you know, the full case. So that definitely gave me, you know, skills that are useful. I think I took a constitutional law class with HW Perry, and the centerpiece of the class was that there would be some lawyers and some Supreme Court justices, and you would have it wasn’t just one moot court, there were a few that happened over the course maybe a week, a week or two or so, and so I, I know I was in the first of the arguments the year that I took the course. I can’t remember if I was the appellant or the appellee, so I don’t know. I don’t know if I was the first or the second person ever to argue in front of justice, ketanji Brown, obviously, now, actually, she was Chief Justice at the time, so sorry to say she got demoted from our class. But it was, you know, obviously, a class that taught me a lot about how to read legal cases, how to understand constitutional law, and gives me the side benefit of saying that I may have been the first person to ever argue a case in front of Justice Jackson, so that that one’s great, the and another one. And I, I am not usually a shameless, you know, celebrity name dropper, but I just have to do it for this was, I remember it took a course in government about American government, and the the thing I took out of it was that the President has one piece of legislation that they can really focus on in their first few weeks in office and get that through. And everything else. Else, you know, ultimately, sort of withers on the vine, usually. And so you could see, for example, President Obama with the Affordable Care Act, and never really was able to get some of the environmental legislation that he wanted to pass. Yeah, so I attended a fundraiser for Cory Booker, yeah, who’s his girlfriend at the time was Rosario Dawson. Oddly, nobody else in the room seemed to want to talk to Rosario Dawson during sort of the chatting time. So I chatted with her, and I’d asked that question during a Q and A about Senator to Senator. Booker, about, you know, if you become president, what, what would be the first piece of legislation, major legislation you’d focus on. So I ended up talking to Rosario Dawson about how this question came out of a Harvard course that I had taken, or college course that I had taken. I’m not sure I dropped the age name at that point. Yeah. So yeah, the and then the other again, like little tidbit I remember was from an Intro to Psychology course about the concept of idiosyncrasy credits. Basically, as you spend time in an organization, you you earn credits that allow you to be idiosyncratic. So you know, you don’t necessarily want to. You know, on your first day in the organization, you know, be the the person doing everything different from everybody else. But at some point, you know, you spend enough time there. You can be the you can be the person who doesn’t turn on the overhead lights because you like the natural lighting. You know this, this is now different from when I started, you know, I started practicing law. Every you know, male attorney wore a suit, you know, five days a week, if you, you know we’re going to do casual Friday back then, yeah, you, you would have been the oddball, but maybe you had enough idiosyncrasy credits to do it. Or, I knew there was one lawyer I worked with who worked from home a lot, and I guess he had the idiosyncrasy credits to do it. And now, now you don’t need the idiosyncrasy credits to work from home a lot. Yeah, so it’s just a concept that always stuck with me. And

 

Will Bachman  42:08

how are you spending your idiosyncrasy credits?

 

Dan Tabak  42:13

That’s a good question. I think probably I don’t just work from home, but what I started doing in the pandemic was got some Wi Fi extenders and started working for my back deck, nice, which just, they love just being outdoors. It’s, it’s just much more calming to work from the outdoors. I did at one point. It must have been the the winter of 2020, there was a snowstorm that dumped, you know, 18 inches or so on us. And my poor wife agreed that if I would go outside and sit on the deck with with a laptop and pretend that I was working for my deck during a snowstorm, she was willing to take a picture that I could put out there.

 

Will Bachman  43:01

That’s cool. Dan, thank you so much for joining today and sharing all these stories for listeners that wanted to you know, find you online. Where’s the best place to go? Do you want to share a link to your LinkedIn or to your firm’s website or

 

Dan Tabak  43:20

so if you actually don’t know my LinkedIn name, I would just, you know, look it up. But if you want to find that that snow picture on my deck, I know it’s on LinkedIn, yeah, along with my, my, what I called my home court advantage, my my basement courtroom that I used for oral arguments in 2020, and early 2021, and then the law firm is Cohen and grasser. So if you go to Cohen grasserdotcom you can, you can find me there.

 

Will Bachman  43:50

All right, we’ll include those links in the show notes. Dan, thank you so much for joining today. Thanks

 

Dan Tabak  43:55

so much for having me. And again, thank you so much for doing this. It’s really very much appreciated.