This post at the  New York Lawyer is one of the funniest, and truest, I’ve ever seen.  In the universe of big money and status, the very tip-top of the Biglaw stratosphere fetches for the Wall Streeters.  And it’s a hoot to watch.  Not being amongst the lawyerazzi who need to swing a part of their anatomy to prove their manhood, I’ve spent some time watching the “well-to-do” do what they do.  And believe me, lawyers are so far down the ladder that they aren’t even in the game.

The first part of this article, about the private school auction, tells it all.  And if you haven’t been to one of these shindigs, let me tell you:  It is the most shocking thing you will ever see.  I remember the first one I went to, where one of the items they were auctioning off was the use of a parent’s private jet for a weekend.  The parent was a big name fashion designer that everybody knows. 

The guy sitting next to me bid.  And bid again.  And bid some more.  And won the jet for a weekend for $139,000.  That’s the right amount of zeros.  So I turned to my dinner neighbor and said, “I hope you have someplace to go.”  Hahaha.  I’m such a card.  He casually turns to me and say, “I wouldn’t fly in his piece of sh*t if my life depended on it,” and then took a sip of wine.

What?  You didn’t like that story?  Then try this one.  In the silent auction preceding the big live one, there were 4 tickets for a poptart superstar at Jones Beach.  My daughter would really like this, I thought, so I bid.  My bid (in my humble opinion) was pretty high, but it was a good cause.  Cut to the end of the silent auction.  Not only did I not win, but the winning bid was 10 times my bid, and my bid was 10 times the value of the tickets. 

But the story isn’t over.  The next day, my daughter gets a call from one of her best friends at school.  “Would you like to see [poptart] with me?  My daddy won tickets last night at the Gala!”  How much better could it get for me?  Her daddy, but the way, was an investment banker.

There are a lot of investment bankers around where I live.  They only talk to me when they need a question answered or one of their kids gets nabbed for being a very important kid of an investment banker.  Other than that, lawyers are just beneath their dignity.  Even my neighbor, Mel Weiss, is too small potatoes to be worthy of talking to.  We are the hired help.

I could have been a investment banker.  Except, I never even knew such a thing existed until college, and didn’t have a clue what they did until after law school.  Nobody in my lower middle class Jewish neighborhood had ever heard of investment banking.  We’re all still scratching our heads, trying to figure out how that could be.

So when we, the lawyers of the world, look at the Biglaw partners as sitting at the top of the financial pyramid for lawyers, at least we can take comfort in knowing that the law pyramid is merely the footrest for the hedge fund managers, who look at Biglaw bonuses as lunch money for the truly well-paid.