Soul Soldiers On ala Old School Legal Giants

Letter to Romans: When you’ve lived a full life as Darryl A Van Duch & another as Davd Soul, it can get confusing which is your pen name. But what’ll always remain gratefully embedded in this attorney's brain will have been working for 3 of the greatest lawyers & law publications …

The Holy Trinity of lawyers I still marvel over has to start as media manager for Jenner & Block’s late chairman Jerold Solovy who, along with his many US Supreme Court appearances, open door policy & unfailing handshake for foe & friend alike epitomized the word “gentleman” in the cutthroat reality of Big Law. Successor Anton Valukas was not only a great federal prosecutor & renown corporate corruption investigator, but as genuinely a stickler for truth as 'Ol Abe was president. Can I ever forget the time he suspected I, also as his PR consiglieri & ex-NLJ muckraker, was the source of sensitive leaks to the Chicago Press? Slamming the door to his office shut & standing over me with his best Chicago PD Hank Voigt glare, the ex-US Atty for Chicago demanded the truth. I gave it to him. Tony was so chagrined at being wrong that I wound up consoling HIM. Enter “Big Jim” Thompson, the 4-time governor of Illinois & chair of Winston & Strawn. Evolving into a masterful politician, he had also served as a heralded US Attorney for the Windy City. Gov. Thompson ran for president only to unsuccessfully fight the head winds from the home of Capone. Yet, how much can one man accomplish in a lifetime? Let me testify he was always generous to his flawed media guru & family.

No Soulful story would be complete without tales of my successive 7-yr stretches working as writer, editor, manager &/or Bureau Chief for CCH’s Federal Tax Guide, the National Law Journal & ALM’s American Lawyer Magazine. Going from print to largely digital formats, perhaps these legendary legal publications don’t quite retain all the glitter I enjoyed around the turn of the century. The technology revolution transformed them, like it did all the nation’s publishing companies. Still, they soldier on as the gold standard in their respective lanes if not quite in the Jerry/Jimmy Finkelstein Empire’s entrepreneurial tradition. Frankly, what remains saddening is how finances not only killed the newsrooms’ “family” atmospheres, but unquestioned “Old School Journalism.” I can at least revel in the honest “truth” I tried to publish with them & urge my successors to likewise soldier on.

Davd Soul