3 Lessons From Lawyer Bob Arum

What can we learn from this former federal prosecutor, law firm partner, and influential sports personality?

Bob Arum (Photo by Ethan Miller/WireImage)

had the great pleasure over the long Presidents’ Day weekend to listen to a riveting podcast conversation between legendary boxing promoter Bob Arum and the Ringer’s Bill Simmons. The two spoke for over 90 minutes, with Arum regaling a rapt Simmons with stories about his promotional efforts on behalf of everyone from Muhammad Ali to Evil Knievel. As interesting as the sports stories were, however, I was most interested in learning about Arum’s colorful legal career and path to his current net worth, estimated in the range of $2-300,000,000. Not bad for a kid from Brooklyn, son of a religious Jewish accountant, who parlayed his academic success to attend Harvard Law School in a class that had only eight women and one African-American student.

Yes, Arum is a creature of an earlier time. But there is still much we can learn today as IP lawyers from his experiences, particularly with respect to how he transitioned from a then-Biglaw-level legal gig to a legendary career in a sport that he had to learn to like over time. Before his boxing success, Arum was a young lawyer in the SDNY’s U.S. Attorney’s Office, working under Bobby Kennedy — and eventually becoming head of the tax division. In that capacity, he prosecuted Roy Cohn, a boxing promoter who plotted to evade taxes with the purse from a heavyweight championship fight between Sonny Liston and Floyd Patterson. While Arum learned about boxing from that case, at that point he was more focused on his legal career, and looked to cash in on his government experience with a profitable private law firm. In the grand tradition of lawyers leaving the SDNY’s USAO, he eventually joined a Wall Street firm, Phillips Nizer, where he practiced tax law. He continued his practice even after his career as a boxing promoter started to pay off.

So what can we learn from this former federal prosecutor, law firm partner, and influential sports personality? There is a lot, but for purposes of this column I want to focus on three things. All of which are relevant to IP lawyers, while being based on insights about his career that Arum has shared publicly, including on his recent podcast interview. To start, we should pay attention to how Arum got his start in boxing, even though as a kid he was much more of a baseball fan and never cared for the sport until after years in the business. As with many success stories, there was an element of serendipity in how Arum was introduced to Muhammad Ali by football great Jim Brown, whom Arum had hired on behalf of one of his legal clients in the closed-circuit television business. But there is also a lesson for us in seizing opportunity, especially when our legal work leads us to interact with interesting people in other fields. I am not saying that every patent prosecutor should start hitting up their inventor clients for jobs. At the same time, however, there are times where lawyers can and should think bigger than just the particular matter they are engaged on, and pursue relationships that could lead to more lucrative opportunities outside of — or in conjunction with — their existing legal practices.

Second, Arum’s story teaches us the value of being fearless, in work and in life. From his work as a younger lawyer researching the JFK assassination, to his later career as boxing promoter, Arum was consistently put into positions where lesser men would have cowered. Perhaps it was his Brooklyn upbringing, but there is something admirable about a tax lawyer who at various times in his career had to face up to both the Nation of Islam (which had to sign off on his relationship with Ali) and the mob (which apparently feared him because of his experience in the U.S. Attorney’s Office), on top of promoting fights in overseas locales that often proved less-than friendly. But each time, Arum made the most of his opportunities, even if it meant having to flee from Germany on a train to avoid arrest or having to promote Knievel, who told Arum to his face that he hated “lawyers, Jews, and New Yorkers.” Of course, Arum ticked all three of those boxes. Our lives and careers may not be as action-packed, but facing up to any challenges we encounter courageously is something we can all emulate Arum by doing.

Finally, perhaps the best answer of Arum’s entire podcast interview came when he was asked why he was still working at his advanced late-80s age. His response was along the lines of, “Work? I am having fun,” which is about as healthy a perspective one can have about their career as can be. I understand that it might be easy for someone with a few hundred million in the bank to profess having a grand old time at their work. But Arum’s answer seemed sincere, leaving me at least believing that he actually does enjoy what he is doing. Even though he didn’t really care for boxing to start. We can all learn the lesson that our professional preferences can change over time, and we can learn to love things that right now are of little interest to us. In short, Arum teaches us as lawyers that taking a flexible approach to our work will serve us in good stead in the long term, hopefully to the point where we can look back on what we did and say that despite all the setbacks and challenges, we had good fun along the way.

Ultimately, there is always something we can learn from successful people in every field. Those lessons are heightened, however, when they are imparted by a former lawyer, especially one who found success by seizing opportunities courageously, while keeping an open mind about the work they were doing. It may be unlikely that we have as colorful a professional ride as Bob Arum has had, but that doesn’t mean that there aren’t a few things we can learn from Lawyer Bob anyway.

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Please feel free to send comments or questions to me at gkroub@kskiplaw.com or via Twitter: @gkroub. Any topic suggestions or thoughts are most welcome.


Gaston Kroub lives in Brooklyn and is a founding partner of Kroub, Silbersher & Kolmykov PLLC, an intellectual property litigation boutique, and Markman Advisors LLC, a leading consultancy on patent issues for the investment community. Gaston’s practice focuses on intellectual property litigation and related counseling, with a strong focus on patent matters. You can reach him at gkroub@kskiplaw.com or follow him on Twitter: @gkroub.

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