Photography by Wesley Law
For lunch at Westwood Country Club, Michael Lowenbaum likes the big round table in the back corner. And don’t bother with the basket of mixed breadstuffs; just bring those little bagel slices with melted cheese. His boys used to love those little bagels, he says fondly. But he’s munching away, and his sons are grown and nowhere in sight.
That’s a sore point, actually. Scott is an artist in New York; Max works at Groupon in Chicago. Lowenbaum always figured they’d settle here, in the city he eats, lives, and breathes. Maybe when grandkids come along… Across the room, a man in a well-tailored suit nods and waves. “That’s Ted Isaacs,” Lowenbaum says. “I used to babysit for him.” Another man, older, approaches the table, smiling. “He’s one of my mentors,” Lowenbaum murmurs. “I have four or five 80-year-old guys who are mentors.”
Lowenbaum runs his own law firm, and he’s as much a businessman as a lawyer—but he never could have survived a typical corporate job. Not if it meant constant transfers. His life, like St. Louis itself, is anchored in family, old friendships, and shared history. “Nine of the 11 people who were at my first birthday party were at my fiftieth,” he announces, “and that has made all the difference.”
He stacked new circles on top, piling them up like the rainbow-colored rings of a toddler’s toy. Friends from college, law school, Congregation Temple Israel; his wife’s friends and family; his kids’ friends and spouses; The Lowenbaum Partnership’s clients. He starts a list: the Saint Louis Zoo, Enterprise Holdings, Ameren, MasterCard, BJC HealthCare, Emerson…
A Westwood staff member stops by to chat. “I represent Westwood, too,” Lowenbaum explains when he leaves. “They all want to talk to me ’cause they want to ask me legal questions.
So my deal is”—he flashes a 12-year-old’s grin—“I try to make my bill to them higher than theirs to me every month.”
He also represents the St. Louis Blues, and he represented the St. Louis Rams for a time, and he’d love to rep the Cardinals. So he likes team sports? “Nope. I’m a baseball fan, but I actually love horse racing, because the horses don’t have agents,” he says. He runs his fingers over a pink tie covered with tiny Secretariat wannabes. He owns at least 150 horse ties and wears one every day. One of his horses ran in the Kentucky Derby; another won Kentucky Oaks. He talks with misty fervor about Thetaloveandmine, says he let the Kappa Alpha Theta sorority sisters who worked at the stable christen the filly. “First race, they couldn’t get her in the gate. She was in post position, and she ran straight into the fence. Then she turned straight and started running like you have never seen a horse run. Next time, she goes out, takes the lead, wins by eight lengths, and just keeps going.”
It’s kind of his life story.
But the next time we meet, he’ll be even more excited about Samlam, a new horse who’s about to run in a stakes race. Lowenbaum doesn’t mind long odds. He flew out to California to see two guys he grew up with in St. Louis, and they went to the Del Mar Thoroughbred Club’s track. “I won $4,500 for my 50-cent ticket,” he brags. “I picked the first five horses in exact order, one of them with 13–1 odds. Most people play the favorites. I’ll play the longest shots I think have a chance.”
Twelve years ago, at that half-century birthday party, his wife, Lecie, set up a casino at Westwood. She calculated odds on the 100-plus gerbils she suited up to race, each bear-ing the name of a horse her husband had co-owned.
He’s since scaled way down. He says he owns a piece of a dozen horses, then realizes he’s fudged; he didn’t count the fillies. “I have…more horses than Mrs. Lowenbaum would like me to have.”
Mrs. Lowenbaum is ready to kill him anyway. His other favorite sport is cycling, and he’s been training for the 100-mile Bike MS fundraiser by riding 15 miles on the stationary bike in their basement at 3:45 a.m. every day.
It’s his usual wake-up time. He forms his cool legal strategies with sweat running down his face and makes it to the office by 5:30 a.m. On Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays, he goes in, works three hours, and is home before his wife even wakes up. Even on vacations, he stays in motion, racing downhill or trekking on safari.
Why?
Lowenbaum grew up easy, first on Westmoreland Drive, then in Ladue. But as soon as he was old enough, he started baby-sitting for 50 cents an hour. He cut through his back yard to Dromara Road to baby-sit future restaurateur Danny Meyer. (“He was a funny kid. I didn’t know he wanted to cook!”)
Summers meant a break, swimming and canoeing at Camp Thunderbird in Minnesota, founded by two St. Louisans. St. Louis journalist Bob Duffy was one of the counselors. “Mike had a high, squeaky voice,” Duffy remembers, “and he was very funny.” Another camper was Lowenbaum’s cousin, Bob Lesser. He says Lowenbaum has re-created himself since childhood. “The tenacity—I never really saw that growing up. He grew up gangly, without much confidence. We’d go to ThurtenE [Carnival] and he never wanted to go on the scary rides.”
Those summers at camp started the metamorphosis. Lowenbaum describes Honey Altman, one of Camp Thunderbird’s co-founders, as “a Catholic Jewish mom. She just loved you. You could leave your cabin anytime and go get a cookie and tell her how much you missed your mother.” A beat. “I never missed mine.”
Take it with a grain of salt—they’re still close. But his mother, Barbara, is a charming, brilliantly successful realtor; she might’ve been short on cookies. And “there’s some family history that’s not so pretty,” Lowenbaum says, talking as fast as a speedboat on choppy water. “I was an adult when I was 9. My father’s business went bankrupt. My mother was one of the first women in real estate in St. Louis. I think I was concerned about my own future.”
Ralph Lowenbaum was an artist in the tra-dition of Ernest Hemingway, as harsh and unfiltered as a pack of Marlboros. He loved to paint and sculpt and build things and fish, and so did his younger son, Eddie. Michael, scrawny and nervous, was a puzzle piece that didn’t fit. In an effort to pound him into the right shape, Ralph raised a hand to him more than once, Lowenbaum says. “You want something to cry about? I’ll give you something to cry about!’” he quotes, mimicking his father’s flashes of temper.
In recent years, they reconciled. Sick of Ralph talking to his grandsons about booze and sex, Michael told him to talk about what he made, the art and woodworking. So Ralph did. And now Scott’s an artist. The day before Ralph died, he and Michael were sitting on the deck talking. Drained of the old piss and vinegar, Ralph told his son he had only one complaint left. Michael braced. “I don’t get to spend enough time with you,” his father finished.
Michael gave his father one of the most searingly honest eulogies ever spoken. Ralph would have loved it.
Now that the raw force of that personality is gone, Lecie sees her husband affected in ways hard to describe. “It’s coming to terms with the limits of your control in life,” she says slowly. “While it’s wonderful to have this focus and this game plan for life, there are also things beyond that, and they’re what make us human. Michael’s always been aware of that, but his motor runs so fast…”
"I have the greatest life of anyone,” Lowenbaum announces. “Every morning when I get up, I’m excited. Every single day I make this list of all the people I need to call.” He waves his supersize Samsung Galaxy phone in the air. So far today, he’s called an Anheuser-Busch exec to wish him happy anniversary and texted happy birthday to three friends. Other people’s special occasions crowd his calendar.
He also writes an unusual number of consolation notes, because despite his rubber-ball resilience, he feels loss deeply.
He pauses and runs his hand through his dark brown hair. He wants to tell me about the tragic death of his sister-in-law, Joan Dankner, six years ago. She’d taken their springer spaniel outside and was standing under an umbrella waiting for the dog. Lightning struck an oak and felled it instantly, crushing her.
“She was my best friend,” Lowenbaum says.
He means it—he’s been taking her kids on trips and outings ever since her death, and grief’s still thick in his voice. But he also refers to the two people who run his idiosyncratic but acclaimed law firm as his best friends. And the nine people from his first birthday party are all his best friends, too.
Other people have one best friend; it’s a measure of exclusivity. For Lowenbaum, it’s a measure of enthusiasm. He throws off energy and rakes in affirmation. He may not kick back long enough for reverie or a deep, meandering conversation, but he’s picking up data as he goes, forming loyalties by the dozens.
“He loves to begin each recollection with the tag line ‘This is the funniest story you’ve ever heard,’” says Buz Rosenberg (one of the nine). Even when Lowenbaum’s settling a lawsuit, he sneaks in a little stand-up. Ken Newbold, a client who owns Newbold Toyota and Newbold BMW, remembers Lowenbaum negotiating union contracts with Teamsters tough as leather. He tried a joke: “How about a 5-cents-an-hour increase?”
The man cussed him out for five minutes straight, finally pausing to catch his breath.
“Well,” Michael said, “is that a yes or no?”
He chose law because his father’s best friend, the late Morty Bearman, was a lawyer—and because his grades at Tulane University, shaky after freshman year’s science courses, had improved enough to make law an option. “I majored in crawfish, oysters, and crab,” he says. “I love seafood—I like the activity of opening it, cracking it. And I love barbecue—I majored in barbecue at UMKC.” He finished in the bottom half of his class at the University of Missouri–Kansas City School of Law, but it wasn’t because he was scarfing down ribs. He was racking up real work experience.
“I’ve worked every day since I was 14,” he says. “I was a Fuller Brush salesman as a kid. They dropped me off in north St. Louis every morning, and I’d have to go stick my foot in people’s doors. I think it helped me be a lawyer. It helped me be aggressive.”
He chose employment law because it was a new specialty at the time, and he wound up head of that department at Thompson & Mitchell (now Thompson Coburn). Sixteen years ago, he started The Lowenbaum Partnership. He wanted it to be different than the usual law firm. There’d be no frantic ascents to partner, crushing your colleagues’ vertebrae as you climbed. He’d treat everyone as an associate, and that included the secretaries and para-legals. There’d be no minimum billable hours, so people wouldn’t be penalized for doing pro bono work. He’d hire no one new until every lawyer in the firm had met the individual and wanted to work with him or her. His motto would be “Hire no assholes.” “Do you know how difficult that is in the legal profession?” he quips.
In 2006, the St. Louis Business Journal reported that nine lawyers—one of them a senior partner—had left their firm to join The Lowenbaum Partnership. In November 2012, U.S. News & World Report named The Lowenbaum Partnership a “Best Law Firm” in employment and labor law.
In January 2013, the tables spun. Lowenbaum came back from lunch to find that five of his lawyers had resigned to work for Ogletree Deakins. Three more left that summer. It was the first time he’d ever had lawyers leave to go to another firm.
The defectors are too politic to tell a reporter why. “The reasons they told me,” Lowenbaum says, “were that they wanted to be partners, but I think it was just that I had too much control.”
Later, I ask Lecie how it hit him. “Talk about a time of insight,” she says. “You have to realize that this is your philosophy and that others might not share it. He responded the way he always responds, which is to throw energy at it.”
First, he affiliated with FordHarrison, a national labor and employment firm. “They wanted to merge,” he explains. “They said, ‘We like to date before we merge.’ I said, ‘We can date with no kissing. I’ll be your St. Louis office, but I’ll be The Lowenbaum Partnership. I’ll take your top lawyers and bring them to St. Louis whenever I have a big matter, say for BJC or Ameren. When that’s over, they will go back. I won’t hire anyone, and I won’t keep the fees.’ I don’t want to grow. I don’t want the guy with the ego the size of this”—he spreads his hands a foot wide—“telling me how to run the firm.”
Three weeks into the new affiliation, he had its future envisioned. “We represent Master-Card everywhere in the country. So when Master-Card has matters in Europe, I want to handle it from here. I’ll be talking every day to lawyers in Shanghai and India, and when their clients have matters in St. Louis…”
One of the lawyers who’d left asked to come back, saying he’d made a terrible mistake. Lowenbaum said sure.
He didn’t screen applicants for the other vacancies, just interviewed 70 lawyers himself, usually early in the morning at the Break N Egg diner on Forsyth Boulevard. “Breakfast is the best time for meetings,” he explains, “because if it’s somebody’s first destination, they are going to come. You can control the first thing you do.”
He’s moved beyond employment and labor law, adding lawyers with expertise in immigration, employee benefits, commercial litigation, and healthcare law. Thanks to FordHarrison, he’s representing a company from South Korea that’s opening a factory on the East Coast and two Mexican businessmen in Nevada who are buying 13 grocery stores. There’s nothing yet in Shanghai.
President and partner Chris Lissner of Acro-polis Investment Management, another longtime client and friend, tells a story of Low-enbaum going to Chicago, grabbing the wrong shoe for a run with other lawyers, and making the entire run in two left sneakers. “It’s just a deep desire to be in the game,” Lissner says. “The whole game—business, physical, personal, family, everything. I don’t know anybody else in the entire world who is as intellectually strong and has as much energy. I feel I’m just one of many people and we are all there to tire him out so he can go to sleep at night.”
Lecie’s another. “He comes home at a very high pitch and will gradually deflate,” she says. After four decades, she’s still bemused by her husband’s fever pitch. “He thinks that’s what makes him a worthy person, to be productive,” she says, sounding dubious. Either she’s not sure that’s his motive, or she’s sure it’s unnecessary.
She insists on quiet time. They’ll sit out on their deck in the evening—her deep in thought, him with his email and occasionally a novel. “I like these chick books—Good Girl,” he says. (It’s Gone Girl, and it’s about a murder.) When he and Lecie go on walks, she notices birds and trees, breathing in their calm. He checks his Fitbit.
For Lecie’s fortieth birthday, Lowenbaum orchestrated a surprise trip to New York, then—whoops, her plane wasn’t flying back to St. Louis. It was flying to New Orleans, for another dinner party, and her husband was there, too, along with 25 other close friends, and then—surprise!—the next plane flew her to San Antonio…
For her sixtieth birthday, she’s begged for 10 quiet days alone with him in Hawaii. That will be much harder for him to pull off, and she knows it.
Lowenbaum doesn’t do trial law. He nego-ti-ates to stay out of the courtroom, pro-tec-ting his clients from lawsuits or penalties, brokering deals and settlements. They turn to him for business advice and, on occasion, to sort out extracurricular messes (one guy wanted a “love contract” to prove his affairs at work were consensual) or family tangles (divorces, kids on drugs or expelled from school).
He’s seen human nature at its finest, its grimmest, its silliest, its sleaziest. He remembers a long-ago case in which five women were suing a car dealership’s general manager, alleging that they’d gotten fired because they stopped having sex with him. “And two men said they got fired when their wives stopped having sex with him!” Lowenbaum says. “At the deposition, they started to ask the receptionist questions: ‘Were you ever a victim of sexual harassment?’ ‘No.’ ‘Did you ever see any sexual contact?’ ‘Sure. We had this program, if you referred someone who bought a car, you got $100. I referred three people. He said, no, you’re the receptionist, that’s your job. But if you give me a blow job, I’ll give you $200.’ They said, ‘Didn’t you think that was sexual harassment?’ And she said, ‘No, it was a business deal.’ The court reporter couldn’t go forward. Her face was bright red, and her fingers just locked.”
More recent cases, he can’t mention. “I’ve said some things to people that made them mad at me for a long time,” he says. “Some of them have thrown me out of their office, screamed at me, told me I’m going to ruin them. But even when I’ve had these tough conversations, they’ve come back later. People who do things they shouldn’t do and then deny it are in much more trouble. My job is getting people to own up. And if I think they have done something wrong or they tell me they have, I work quickly to get rid of the case, to settle it quickly behind the scenes without any fanfare.”
Is that a disservice to the rest of us, that the peccadilloes of the powerful never get publicized? “I’ve never thought about it like that,” he says mildly. “I don’t know if people need to know about it. Maybe they do. But why should it be in the news just because they are famous? These are not really terrible criminal cases.”
Even if they were, he’d treat them calmly.
“He’s such a flatliner,” says Jay Zygmunt, former president and general manager of the St. Louis Rams. “He’s always under this complete control, regardless of the chaos around him. And his negotiations are never personal; he never gets emotional.
“It’d be hard to be a client and not become his friend,” Zygmunt adds. “He’s one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. He’s so comfortable with just being him. It’s not this pretense of being some sophisticated lawyer that always has to be so serious.”
At “Lowenbaum University” client seminars, Lowenbaum tackles serious issues—Obama-care, violence in the workplace, immigration, how to terminate an employee lawfully—but includes plenty of schtick. “I say the deck’s stacked against you and give them playing cards. I say, ‘We are doing a lot of travel’ and give them luggage ties. If you don’t keep people entertained, they don’t learn.”
Mary Ann Sedey, a plaintiff’s lawyer for 35 years, usually sits on the opposite side of the table. But she admires Lowenbaum’s pragmatism. “He’s a realist, a guy who wants to cut to the chase and do what’s in his client’s best interests as quickly as possible,” she says. “He’s also an honorable man. If he tells you something, you can take it to the bank.”
What’s remarkable, with all the chatting and texting and joking and zooming from here to there, is that Lowenbaum faces trouble square on. He might be relentlessly upbeat, but he doesn’t deny or ignore or skate over the sadnesses. He pours them out—his coping mechanism is talking. Not just to Lecie, but also to anybody he trusts. And at the end of each disclosure, he says, “But I have a great attitude about it.”
The first test was Lecie’s struggles with severe diabetes. Then their son Scott was born prematurely and struggled through school because he had dysgraphia (a learning disability that makes it hard to recognize words and numbers). He also was something of a savant, it turned out, and could pinpoint the provenance of an antique as accurately as its catalog entry. He made enough money dealing antiques to pay for his Washington University tuition and extra tutoring time. And he turned out to have, exponentially, his grandfather’s artistic ability.
Early on, Michael bought 14 of Scott’s canvases to tide him over financially. Later, after Scott’s career took off, somebody offered Michael 15 times what he’d paid. “I figure if he’s offering me that, I’m not selling them,” he says.
In 2008, Scott married his partner, “a gay Roman Catholic vegan neurosurgeon from North Dakota,” Michael says. “And none of the neurosurgeon’s family or friends were there. Lecie and I were walking these boys down the aisle, and I said, ‘Are they not here because the boys are gay or because we are Jewish?’ and Lecie said, ‘Both.’”
Max married his girlfriend this fall. Maybe they’ll have kids soon. Maybe they’ll move here. “Scott and his partner will never have kids,” Lowenbaum says glumly.
They could adopt, I point out. But that’s not what he means. “They’re too self-absorbed,” he says. His son and the famous contemporary artist Helen Frankenthaler trade paintings, for God’s sake. “A curator from The Met came to their apartment and cried because Scott’s work was so beautiful.”
Scott’s an artist. Michael gets it. But he still hates that Scott’s not in St. Louis. So Michael calls him three or four times a day. He calls Max, too. And Lecie. She might sigh over his frequent absence, but she can’t say he forgets her.
He doesn’t forget anybody. He knows what it’s like to feel scared about your future; to feel not quite good enough even by your own dad’s measure; to watch people you love suffer. Memories crack the whip, urging him forward. He gets his friends’ kids jobs; signs up for the charity races; helps pay for a counselor in the aftermath of events in Ferguson. His heart goes out 100 times an hour, and he’s sensitive enough to register need—or gratitude—at a gallop.
“Whatever faults he has,” Duffy says, “the generosity outweighs them.”
