MAY 1, 2025 – (Cont.) After a lunch conversation during which we traded accounts of various quandaries that we’d faced in our legal careers, Jeff cleared the table and directed me to get my “stuff together” so that we could hit the ground running after he finished washing the dishes.
As he ran the water and waited for the suds to build, Jeff said, “I’m not sure I was all that good a lawyer.”
“That right there, Jeff,” I said, “is evidence that in fact you’ve been a very good lawyer.”
I then told him the story from my first year of practice when I learned from Dave Forsberg, head of the litigation department, who was also president of the firm—the esteemed, old time-old school firm of Briggs & Morgan—one of the most valuable lessons of my career. Having agonized all day long over a procedural issue that a senior partner had asked me to research and resolve, I approached Dave, explained the problem and asked if my proposed solution was crazy or not. “The hell if I know,” he said, whereupon he pulled his copy of the Rules of Civil Procedure off the shelf, flipped around for a few minutes inconclusively, and said, “Ya know, I think ya go with what you’ve come up with.”
I have no memory of the problem or my solution, but far more important was the lesson I learned at the feet of the master: one of the most critical attributes of a good lawyer is confidence, and a sure sign of confidence is the lawyer’s ability to say, “The hell if I know.”
Jeff was always a good student intellectually, but what’s especially unusual about him is his emotional quotient. He is superb at reading people, and along with confidence, his ability to relate to people is extraordinary. I’ve never observed his work (aside from overhearing a client conversation he was having in the car on our way somewhere during one of my visits to Cape Cod many years ago), but I know Jeff well enough to conclude unequivocally that his clients are exceptionally well served. To have him on your side is to have the wind at your back and the sun on your face.
So it was in tackling demanding projects at the Red Cabin. By his own reckoning, Jeff has two speeds: “on” and “off.” The latter mode, I observed, kicks in at around 8:00 p.m. If he’s sitting in a comfortable chair after that hour, the odds are excellent that Jeff will nod off no matter how much inflection you inject into your voice. But so would I if I’d started my day at 5:00 a.m.
Jeff is by no means hyper-active, but when it was project time, I discovered, he expected all gears—mental and physical; his and mine—to be fully engaged. If in the absence of pressing exigencies, I have a natural tendency to defer and procrastinate, Jeff doesn’t know the words “defer” or “delay.”
His “get it done now” trait was full displayed at the Red Cabin. I’ll never forget three examples: the post, the pot, and the paddleboat.
THE POST:
At the top of the staircase of the landing, I’d constructed last spring a somewhat whimsical post-and-railing system out of white pine poles I’d collected from the surrounding woods. The structure was mostly cosmetic and quite flexible to be easily adapted to the stairs and railing down to the dock, the exact location of which varies from year to year depending on what the ice has done to the berm on which the stairs have to rest. Last fall, to pull the staircase up and over the berm for the winter, I had to remove the end-post to which the “post-and-railing” system was attached. Though Jeff and I had completed re-installation of the dock—that is, the third installation effort after the ice floe last week and the windstorm this week—I’d not yet gotten to the aforementioned end-post. There’d be plenty of time to address this ahead of the boat being delivered out of storage and before anyone boards the pontoon from the landing dock.
Jeff didn’t see it this way, however. In his mind, the job wasn’t complete until the post was installed, so . . . away we went. His mission on this front coalesced nicely with an ongoing effort to get me to clear out lingering debris that he viewed as clutter and I viewed as potential project materials—mostly of a whimsical nature. One such item of “debris” was a 16-foot white pine pole with each tier of its branches cut off about six inches from the trunk. In this form and properly debarked, sanded and varnished, the pole (along with many others I’ve saved over the years and stashed here and there on the grounds) could be turned into a perfect clothes stand.
When Jeff asked in an impatient tone, “Can I toss this?” as he brushed a few years of oak leaves from the pole, I “saw” it as the perfect post for the landing. Forty-five minutes later, the pole was properly trimmed down to size and firmly installed. As I followed Jeff back to the cabin, tools in hand, I told him that this was yet another thing that would not have happened without his initiative.
But he was hardly about to stop with the post. (Cont.)
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© 2025 by Eric Nilsson
