Seth Lipner: Investors Need His Counsel
Seth Lipner is an attorney, a teacher, and, most recently, a columnist for Forbes.com. He has been on the Baruch College faculty since 1982 and considers teaching his primary career and true calling. Unlike many legal experts, he enjoys explaining the law to laymen, especially to those in the business community, and to Baruch students planning to enter the business world. “How do you negotiate a good contract? It’s the kind of thing business needs to know. It’s not neuroscience,” he says of the law. Just now, Professor Lipner’s legal specialty, securities arbitration (the subject of the biweekly Forbes column), is keeping him extremely busy. “I try to represent people who’ve been victimized by Wall Street,” Lipner says, adding, “these days they’re coming in droves.”
Although he characterizes his legal work as “narrow,” Lipner’s resume belies this. He admits that in recent years he has been talking to the media on issues where Wall Street and Main Street converge. Over the years, he has also published books and articles on the “grey market” in consumer goods, on international antitrust laws, and on corporate mergers—to say nothing of poetry. Poetry? (Would you think that your broker was some kind of weirdo/If he told you the interest on your Notes was now zero?) goes one recent ditty contributed to the website www.wallstreetpoet.com. Ogden Nash, move over.
