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H. Bruce Bernstein will be retiring as General Counsel for the Commercial Finance Association on December 31 of this year, but he has no intention of retiring from the practice of law.
In fact, he plans to expand his activities with clients while cutting back on administrative work. He will remain on the executive committee of the international law firm of Sidley Austin Brown & Wood, but has dropped off the management committee to cut back on time-consuming administration. In a recent interview, he said that administrative work had taken up about 60 percent of his time, leaving only 40 percent for working with clients. Now he can spend more of his time on the law practice. "I've always enjoyed the practice of law," he said. His specialty is handling secured loans, restructurings and insolvencies and he notes, "we're very, very busy."
He added that he will continue to report for work between 7 and 7:30 in the morning and leave sometime between 6 and 9 p.m. "In my 33 years with the firm, I've only once taken a vacation longer than one week." However, he admitted to taking long weekends for golf trips with Janice, his wife of 34 years. He also plays on weekends - Saturdays with the boys and Sundays with Janice.
Mr. Bernstein has been General Counsel for the CFA only since 1995, but his work for the Association goes back much further. He worked for years with A. Bruce Schimberg, his predecessor as CFA General Counsel. He attended his first CFA convention in October 1968 at the Waldorf Astoria in New York and has missed only one convention since then. "That was in Dallas, and I don't remember why, but I'm sure I would have been there if it were at all possible."
He noted that through his attendance at the conventions and other work with the CFA he has developed many lifelong friendships. His wife also has made many friends through the Association and "she loves the conventions," he added.
"In my first project with the Association, I was assigned to work on an amicus brief in the Grain Merchants of Indiana case which involved the validity of the floating lien. We won. It was a total victory...