Legal News

Jim Cramer on the Spitzers: ?Silda is Poised; Eliot is a Maelstrom?

By Dan Slater

That’s a line that Mad Money Jim Cramer (pictured, right), a law school friend of Eliot Spitzer and his wife, Silda Wall (pictured, left), gave to the NYT in a 2006 article about Wall’s new job as the first lady of New York.

What else do we make of Silda Wall, the woman who stood by Eliot yesterday during his public statement? In the NYT piece, Spitzer said: “I rely on her very much as someone to talk to in order to resolve a tough issue. What length of sentence to ask for, how severe a fine should be. They come down to questions of what is just and fair.” Wall, a North Carolina native, graduated from Meredith College, before heading to Harvard Law. In 1982, after her second year, Wall was married to Peter Stamos, a fellow law student who was also a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford — for 29 days. The reason for their separation was never made public.

Wall, who worked at Chase bank, and then at Skadden, told the NYT about her time at the law firm: “It was a very exciting time to be doing mergers and acquisitions, the whole poison pill era.” As a Skaddenite, Wall says she routinely billed about 3,200 hours a year. She recalled her share of successive all-nighters, and trying to catch an hour’s sleep underneath a conference room table, “because you couldn’t turn out the lights in the office.”

Loyal LB’s: Here’s a story from today’s New York Post about how Wall sacrificed her career for Spitzer. But we wonder, is giving up a 3,200 billable-hour-per-year job and nights spent sleeping under conference tables all that much of a sacrifice?

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on March 11, 2008 (boomark / email).