Men Still at Work: Professionals Over Sixty and on the Job (13 page)

Now that his children are out on their own, Walter has mixed feelings about continuing to work. “If we won the lottery, I’d love to travel with my wife or write a book instead of writing proposals, policy papers, and official reports. But right now, after the Great Recession, I’ve got to keep working and probably will continue to do so, as long as I stay healthy and still enjoy the work. I’ve had a couple of bouts with cancer, but so far, so good; so we’ll see how it goes for another five years or so. We are a two-income family, so whatever I do will be a joint decision for me and my wife.”

In his twenty-four years in intellectual property law with Weil, Gotshal and Manges LLP, Steve Kahn had plenty of time to plan for mandatory retirement at age sixty-nine. He had been working pro bono for Save the Children-USA for several years, so becoming part-time general counsel there seemed a good fit and a logical next step. Until it wasn’t. After a few months, Steve and the CEO realized that the organization really needed a full-time general counsel, so he stepped down. He soon was in discussion with another organization that needs his expertise. If it is stimulating and useful work, that’s for him.

Profile: Stephen D. Kahn

Scarcely twenty-four hours elapsed between Steve Kahn’s retirement from Weil, Gotshal and Manges LLP, the large Manhattan-based international law firm where he had worked as an intellectual property/litigation partner for twenty-four years, and the phone call inviting him to become general counsel for Save the Children-USA. Fully aware that Weil, like most law firms, enforces a mandatory retirement policy at the end of the year a lawyer turns sixty-nine, unless he is still actively involved in a case, Steve had been preparing for retirement by gradually cutting back on his workload. And the call from Save the Children did not come out of the blue, since Steve had already been working pro bono for that not-for-profit organization for several years in addition to his main responsibilities. Pro bono service was part of the culture at Weil—the firm has a pro bono counsel and Weil lawyers are expected to provide at least fifty hours of pro bono service per year. Yale Law School, where Steve got his degree in 1968, had also encouraged pro bono service, and he has always enjoyed it along with intellectual property law.

“I was lucky in choosing IP as my area early on. I know many lawyers working in less interesting areas who are bored. The significant difference between IP law and older areas is that IP law deals with subject matter that is constantly new, so the law itself is always in flux and is useful in advancing many aspects of our lives.” Steve offers two good examples. The first is the sudden explosion of computer software as a core technology in the 1970s. No existing body of law instructed courts in the United States as to how they should protect the assemblages of ones and zeros against blatant copying, semi-blatant copying, or outright theft—misappropriation—of the ideas they contained or the way they were written. Biotechnology, another rapidly developing field with which the courts were unfamiliar, came into being about a decade after software. The law is still trying to determine appropriate protections for developments in that industry. Through the 1980s and 1990s, judges struggled to make sense out of such emerging technologies and to encourage creativity and the growth of computer science without allowing industrial competition to run amok. Steve was immersed in and fascinated by issues of technology-related public policy and copyright, trade secret and patent law. “If you enjoy dealing with developments in science and technology and public policy, as I do, it’s hard to imagine a more interesting career. When I had a patent case involving the technology of a wastewater treatment plant, I had to learn enough about that industry to run the plant if I had to! I have also taught IP law for the last few years, and for the same reasons find that great fun.”

One of the cases for which Steve was lead counsel became famous:
Computer Associates International, Inc. v. Altai, Inc.
, which was the first to determine the extent to which nonliteral elements of software (e.g., the structure, sequence, and organization of a program) are protected by copyright. (Previously, judges did not know how to rule regarding copyright infringement of software because it was so new.) Known for the “Altai Test” which was developed and applied by the US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in its 1992 decision, the landmark case is still taught in law schools today and applied by courts in the United States. Prior case law said that all aspects of a computer program except the highest-level abstraction of the idea underlying it were protectable. The Second Circuit, however, deemed that too broad a test for evaluating the protection to which a program was entitled and for determining the degree of similarity between protectable aspects of programs. To replace prior law, the court devised the three-step process that is still applied today. Once defendant Altai’s computer program was separated into its constituent parts using the three-step test, it was found to have infringed on plaintiff Computer Associates’ program to a lesser degree than would have been true under the facts when measured against the former test. Thus, though Computer Associates’ claim did prevail, it obtained a smaller recovery than would have been obtained under the prior test. The Altai case introduced a new, and still enduring, standard for protecting computer software from the theft of intellectual property it contains.

As mentioned earlier, Yale Law School encouraged pro bono work and Steve has continued to devote time to it throughout his career. Early on, he joined a young lawyers group called the Council of New York Law Associates that was formed by, among others, Carol Bellamy (who went on to become New York City’s first female City Council president and the head of UNICEF) and two other Yale Law graduates, named Tim and Nina Zagat. Under Mr. and Mrs. Zagat’s influence, the young lawyers shared recommendations about good restaurants when not discussing legal business. The mimeographed lists of restaurants were the first step toward the Zagat publishing empire. Also in the early 1970s, following the first Earth Day, Steve cowrote a report with two other young lawyers, Clifford Case and Myron Kaplan, which argued to the City Bar Association that law firms should help the environment by using recycled paper. Naturally, the paper industry trade association did not like that idea, and it quietly tried to quash the report at the association. Fortunately, a neighbor of Steve’s, James MacGregor, then a reporter for the
Wall Street Journal
, heard about the situation and wrote a full-page feature article about the impasse for the newspaper. The City Bar Association reviewed the report, found it accurate, and soon the Bar Association was distributing the report to all law firms in the city whose copy machines then began using (and getting jammed by) recycled paper!

Steve loves the mission and the staff at Save the Children. According to the organization’s website,
www.savethechildren.org
, in 2011 alone the organization reached 185,000 vulnerable, underserved, and often forgotten children in this country through education, health, and resiliency programs, and 92,000 mothers, fathers, grandparents, and caregivers. Around the world, the website states, when disaster strikes Save the Children steps in with food, medical care, and education and remains to help communities rebuild through long-term recovery programs. Not only does it quickly respond to tsunamis and civil conflict, it also works to resolve the ongoing struggles poor children face every day.

However, Steve dislikes the long commute from his home in Brooklyn, New York, to Save the Children’s headquarters in Westport, Connecticut. In addition, what was supposed to be a four-day-a-week job actually requires a full-time commitment. Consequently, Steve and the CEO have concluded, in an entirely friendly way, that he would be replaced by a full-time general counsel. “Save the Children was pretty close to a perfect fit for me, so I step down with some regrets.”

Steve credits his wife, Betty, with encouraging him five or so years ago to plan ahead so that, when the time came, he would not leave the law firm cold turkey. She advised him to arrange a smooth transition from Weil to whatever he chose to do next. This advice was especially timely because Steve’s father had died suddenly, his brother was going through significant life changes including a divorce, and Steve was shouldering extra-heavy personal burdens. He recalled the way his father had retired from the insurance business. “He walked out the door and never looked back. That was not for me. I hate golf, don’t like to fish, and do like work so long as it is stimulating and useful. Betty knows me well enough to realize that I need something to do or I will get antsy. She would like me to turn the knob back a bit toward relaxation so we can visit our children and grandchildren more often and do more traveling. We went hiking with friends in the mountains of Montenegro this year, and we would like to do more of that.”

Fortunately, a new opportunity has arisen for Steve to apply his expertise in intellectual property law. He is not willing to discuss this opportunity for publication, but it involves using environmentally clean, renewable sources to provide energy to communities in which live tens of thousands of people. This work would at once be stimulating, exciting in many ways, and useful to many people around the world.

Unemployment is the pits. Unemployed men and women of all ages can identify with the sentiments expressed by a forty-eight-year-old advertising manager who has been out of work for more than six months: “Your whole life your job defines who you are. All of a sudden that’s gone, and you don’t know what to take pride in anymore.”
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In the words of a discouraged sixty-one-year-old man who was laid off four years ago when the company he worked for closed and is still out of work: unemployment “affects your vision of yourself; it affects your outlook on life; it affects your motivation at times. You start questioning—‘Had I done this, had I done that.’”
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To help maintain a sense of “purposeful engagement” in unemployed older workers and recent retirees, the Tufts Health Care Foundation is funding a nonprofit organization called ReServeInc that matches older adults with part-time jobs in schools, government offices, and community agencies in New York City and Boston and pays them $10 per hour. One ReServist, the former chief economist for New York City, spoke for many when he said, “If there was no compensation, it would mean I’m not worth anything.”
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Sequestration, the automatic across-the-board federal budget cutting that took effect on March 1, 2013, is targeting federal, state, and local government employees with cascading job losses and furloughs. The companies in the private sector that rely on public spending are expected to follow suit. A month before sequestration, at the end of January 2013, the total unemployment rate—7.9 percent—reported by the BLS was relatively unchanged from the previous year. It dipped to 7.7 percent in February. When it dropped to 7.6 percent in March, economists were quick to attribute the change to more people dropping out of the labor force (they are neither working nor looking for work) rather than more people being hired. Furthermore, hiring is not only proceeding at a sluggish pace, it is also generally paying low wages and offering temporary or part-time work with little or no job security.
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At 6.0 percent the unemployment rate for older people specifically (i.e., men and women fifty-five and older) was also relatively unchanged from the past year. According to AARP’s Sara Rix, unemployment for all age groups is a “much greater problem” than it was at the start of the Great Recession, and for older people, while not quite as dire as for younger people, it is “up sharply”: nearly 2 million older people were unemployed in January 2013, an increase of approximately 115,000 from the previous year alone.
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