Erwin Dweck on Closing $3.9 BILLION Deals, Leading Milbank’s Real Estate Practice, and Starting From the Bottom

Erwin Dweck is a partner at Milbank LLP, where he leads the firm’s real estate practice and serves on the Global Executive Committee, a select group of just seven partners entrusted with shaping the firm’s strategy and steering its global operations alongside their legal work.

His work reflects not only the practice of law, but the business workings behind a firm with over $2 BILLION in revenue and 2,000 employees.

Transcript

Victor M. Braca: You’ve led Milbank through some billion-dollar-plus deals.

Erwin Dweck: Money was a little tight growing up. I’m one of the seven people who run a firm that has $2 billion in revenue. That’s not a small business to run.

Victor M. Braca: How big is your business? Do they teach you that in law school?

Erwin Dweck: None of it. You need to set priorities and you need to grind. When I slept in the office on one of our anniversaries, she understood. And when we got married, I didn’t come home for two more days because I had to work. She understood.

Victor M. Braca: Should people follow their passion?

Erwin Dweck: No. No. If I followed my passion, I’d be unemployed and homeless. One of the biggest mistakes I see young people in the workforce do is…

Victor M. Braca: Guys, I guarantee you, you would not expect a real estate lawyer to have a story this good. Erwin Dweck isn’t just any lawyer, though. He’s a partner at Milbank, one of the top law firms in the world, where he not only leads the real estate practice, but he also helps run the entire business as a member of Milbank’s global executive committee. That’s a $2 billion operation with 1,000 lawyers and 2,000 employees.

And in this episode, Erwin breaks down how he helped PIMCO take a $3.9 billion REIT private, how he became the go-to guy for distressed real estate during the 2008 crisis, and how a risky move from a stable job at an established law firm led to everything taking off. We talk about what it’s really like to be an Orthodox Jew in big law, unplugging every Shabbat, missing key moments with family, and how he balances it all. He also shares his thoughts on whether you should follow your passion, why work-life balance is the wrong goal, and the one quality that instantly tells him whether or not a young professional is going to make it.

I’m Victor Braca, and Momentum is where I dive deep with exceptional leaders to uncover the key decisions, defining moments, and lessons that propel them to success and how those insights can inspire your journey forward. And whether you’re thinking about law, business, entrepreneurship, whatever it might be, or just what it takes to operate at the highest level, you’re going to get a ton out of this conversation. Let’s get into it. This episode is brought to you by Jeff Sitt and the Eli Cohen Insurance Agency.

Erwin Dweck, welcome to Momentum.

Erwin Dweck: Thank you very much. Excited to be here.

Victor M. Braca: I’m so excited to have you. You’re one of the most sought-after lawyers in New York. And there’s so much to cover with you in terms of business, in terms of giving back to the community, and getting involved. So let’s just start at the beginning. Tell me, who is Erwin Dweck?

Erwin Dweck: Erwin Dweck was born in Brooklyn but very quickly moved to Deal, New Jersey in 1977 as a one-year-old. Grew up in Deal in an amazing time. The ’80s in Deal was a fantastic time. A wonderful, amazing cohort of people went to Hillel through 12th grade. Just an amazing group of people throughout elementary school and high school which I think really contributed to just a wonderful environment. You know, everybody played basketball. Everybody was really intelligent, creative, thoughtful—a wonderful environment.

Victor M. Braca: I saw the final championship basketball game on your Instagram link.

Erwin Dweck: Ah, that’s right. That’s right. So yeah, and I was part of the 1993 Hillel Championship team when I was a backup point guard, and we went to the finals in ’94. We lost in the finals my senior year. We won’t talk about that.

Victor M. Braca: We won’t talk about that. So tell me professionally, what’s your role at Milbank? You’re a real estate partner, just tell me a little bit about that.

Erwin Dweck: So at Milbank, I’m a partner in the commercial real estate group. I’m head of the real estate practice—we call it Practice Group Leader. So basically, in charge of the real estate group. I’m also one of seven people who are on our Executive Committee. So think about the people that basically run the firm, the business of the firm. And I’m also head of what we call our Billing and Collections Committee. So I kind of run finances, billing, and collections for everybody around the firm.

Victor M. Braca: Awesome. The firm’s how many?

Erwin Dweck: We have probably a little bit over a thousand lawyers. I think we’re in eight offices around the world: Asia, Germany, the UK, Brazil, Los Angeles, Washington, DC. So it’s a big operation. And it’s a blast. It’s a blast to be able to not just practice law, but to actually run the business of a law firm, which is a pretty cool thing.

Victor M. Braca: That’s awesome. You’ve led Milbank through some billion-dollar-plus deals, which is unbelievable. One of them being you’ve led PIMCO into a $3.9 billion take-private REIT. Did I say that correctly?

Erwin Dweck: Yeah. PIMCO is one of my longtime clients; been working with them since probably 2010. And they were looking to effectively buy a publicly traded office REIT. And so they came to me and said…

Victor M. Braca: And what’s a REIT for those who don’t know? Myself included.

Erwin Dweck: Okay. So, a REIT is a Real Estate Investment Trust. It’s a tax-advantageous structure to hold real estate where you have completely passive income. An office building is a classic opportunity to hold a REIT. It’s tax-advantageous because it is passed through. There are a bunch of publicly traded REITs, so you can buy and sell them on a stock exchange. And PIMCO wanted to take Columbia Property Trust private. So they came to me and said, “We need to do a couple of things. One, we need to figure out how to actually take the company private—the M&A piece of it, mergers and acquisitions—which is a full operating company with employees and offices. But also we had to figure out how to finance that acquisition. So you need to borrow money against the assets owned by the REIT to take the entire thing private.” That was a fun one. Unfortunately for PIMCO, the timing of that was a little not a fantastic time to invest in office REITs. But to this day, even as recently as this weekend, I’ve been working on assets related to that acquisition.

Victor M. Braca: Nice. And that was a $3.9 billion deal. Unbelievable. Did you always know that you wanted to go into law? What did it look like for you in high school and your early college days?

Erwin Dweck: Yeah. So for me, look, I come from a family of six kids. It was important for me in high school to make sure that whatever I did, I was able to pay my bills. Money was a little tight growing up and I looked around at my friends and I sort of said to myself: what I want to make sure is I can always pay my yeshiva tuition bills. I can always pay my expenses.

And so for me, particularly when I went to school… I went to Columbia as an undergrad. I was lucky to get into Columbia. And I started borrowing money immediately. So by the time I graduated college, I had a massive amount of student debt. And the only way to not have to pay back your student debt is to go to law school and take on more debt to push it off for an additional three years. I was like, I had my ears open. I was like, “How do you get your student loans forgiven?”

So, I was again lucky after graduating from Columbia to be able to go to Penn Law School in Philadelphia, which by the way was my third choice. I got rejected from both Columbia and NYU for law school, but I was lucky enough to get into Penn. And from there, once you graduate with even more debt, you really have no choice but to go into work and to start paying down the student loans. So for me, being a lawyer was always about making sure that I had the ability to always be able to pay my bills. And from there it kind of grew and developed. But that was the mindset. How can I get to a professional job where I wouldn’t be… My dad was in retail. My dad had a career change in his mid-to-late ’40s and I never wanted to have that variability. I never wanted to have that risk. So law seemed like the natural place to go. My older brother became a doctor. I became a lawyer.

Victor M. Braca: Did you have an interest in law from a young age or was it really focused on being able to pay the bills in the very tough economy that you were putting yourself into?

Erwin Dweck: I think like most young kids who fight with their parents or argue, people say, “Oh, you should be a lawyer. You have a great opportunity to fight.” I’ve been told that many times. But as I began to learn more about the law, what became interesting to me as a transactional lawyer is that you’re not somebody who goes to court; you’re not somebody who’s fighting and arguing. It’s quite the opposite. When I started to learn in law school that what you’re really trying to achieve is making deals happen and being a facilitator, a connector of people… it was a lot more enjoyable than the “I want to fight, I want to go to court” side.

As a transactional lawyer, at the end of the day, most people are happy because there’s a deal that’s getting done. Whereas with litigation, at the end of the day, somebody’s happy and somebody’s not.

Victor M. Braca: I like that way of looking at it. What I’m getting from you is that you figure out ways to structure a deal creatively so that all parties can go out happy.

Erwin Dweck: As a transactional lawyer, you need to be first and foremost an excellent lawyer. So that means excellent technically in the documents. But to really take that next step and not just be the guy sitting in the office working on documents, you need to be able to be a commercial adviser, a trusted adviser to your clients. They need to come to you and say, “Hey, do you know so-and-so? Can you connect me with that person?” or “How do you solve this tough issue?” The more experience you have and the more commercial-minded you can be, the more you can make transactions happen. But the first thing you need to be able to do is be completely technically excellent as an actual lawyer.

Victor M. Braca: Tell me about law school a bit. I think a lot of people like myself picture law school in terms of a huge grind, pulling all-nighters. Is that what it looked like for you?

Erwin Dweck: So, law school was super easy for me because when I was in college, I had to work four jobs to be able to pay my tuition. And when you get to law school, the first thing they tell you is you’re not allowed to work during your 1L year. So, I looked around and said, “I have four classes and I don’t have anything else to do.”

I knew to get a job I needed to work really, really hard my first semester, get the best grades I possibly could. So for me, I had a singular focus in law school. As I said, I didn’t get into Columbia. I didn’t get into NYU. It was a blessing to actually be in Philadelphia because I was away from the community. I was isolated in a lot of ways. And so that first year all I did was study and play basketball. That first year, the only focus was school. I had a singular focus on school for the first time in my life, which really allowed me to do great things academically my first year.

Victor M. Braca: And tell me a little bit about what it looked like for you after law school.

Erwin Dweck: The way law school worked back then is after your 1L year, you typically had an unpaid job. I got super lucky because it happened to be during the dot-com boom where there were a bunch of law firms that didn’t fill their summer associate classes. So I was one of about 10 students at Penn to actually get a full-paying job at a large law firm in New York called Proskauer Rose. Because I had that summer job at a top-30 firm, it became much easier to get a 2L job. That’s your normal path for big law. Your second summer after your second year in law school, you get a job that will ultimately be your permanent placement after you graduate. Working at Proskauer, I was able to use that as a stepping stone for my 2L summer which was at Simpson Thacher, which is a really large, great firm. I leveraged that for my first job after law school.

Victor M. Braca: And what did that look like for your first foray into big law?

Erwin Dweck: Amazingly, I started on September 4th, 2001. I literally started a week before 9/11. I lived together with Michael Rishty and his little brother Eddie, who was in NYU law school. We had just moved into an apartment. I don’t think we had cable yet. We certainly didn’t have internet. The first week was all training and then 9/11 happened. There was virtually no legal work to do for four to six months in the group that I was in. It was a long time. I actually started in what they called their credit group, which is general bank lending. Right after 9/11 there was no market for that type of lending and so I was able to very quickly pivot into their real estate group. That’s kind of where I landed.

Victor M. Braca: How long were you at Simpson for?

Erwin Dweck: I stayed at Simpson till Passover of 2006. I couldn’t ask for a better place to start your career. I did boatloads of Blackstone work. Blackstone Real Estate was still in its infant days—or I should say early days—but we were doing billion-dollar deals in the early 2000s. But I got to 2006 and I looked around and said, “I can stay here, plug in, and continue doing these same deals over and over again for the same client.” But I wanted to kind of build my own brand. I wanted to bring in my own clients.

So in 2006, I looked around for other opportunities. I met this guy who became my rabbi, Kevin O’Shea, who was working at a firm called Allen & Overy, which is one of the largest international firms. Kevin was the only partner in the group at the time. It was a very small group with massive upside, and I was going to be his number two at a relatively young age. Sometimes you get lucky, but I made that decision and from there Kevin and I built a massive practice together. We eventually made other partners with us and we moved in 2016 to Milbank. We brought the whole team over.

Victor M. Braca: How does it work? You guys build out a team at a particular law firm and then you’re able to mobilize that team and move to a different firm. It’s sort of like entrepreneurship inside a larger corporate entity.

Erwin Dweck: Yeah. We were able to build the brand at A&O, and A&O is a fantastic place, but we almost did it in spite of Allen & Overy, not because of them. The relationships we built were very much our own relationships. The law is a relationship business; it’s not a transactional business. You build personal relationships with people who you follow throughout your career. The clients you get are on the back of referrals.

In 2016, we looked around and said, “Is Allen & Overy actually the best place for our very strong domestic real estate practice?” Brexit had just happened and I was being paid in pound sterlings; that didn’t help anybody. Milbank really didn’t have a proper real estate practice, but they had an amazingly incredible domestic finance practice. They were doing anything you can lend against: aircraft, businesses, you name it. They also had probably the preeminent bankruptcy practice, which fit into what we were doing when it dealt with distressed real estate. And they didn’t have anyone there, so they needed a whole team. It was a super natural fit. November of 2016, we took the entire group up in two days and we moved them over. Our practice in the last eight or nine years has probably tripled or quadrupled in size.

Victor M. Braca: It’s super cool just to hear the fusion of entrepreneurship and working at a large company. A lot of people see it as conflicting, but the individualized teams aspect allowed you to be entrepreneurial.

Erwin Dweck: I don’t think you could be a really successful big-firm lawyer if you don’t have the entrepreneurial bug. I’ve seen some excellent lawyers who don’t have that gene and they’re fantastic and super useful, but they’re not the ones leading practices. They’re not the ones saying, “Hey, my client needs X, I know somebody who can do it.”

As a lawyer you can make a very good career sitting in your office and doing documents, but somebody’s got to be the guy out there building it. There was somebody who once said to me, “Well, you’re a lawyer. You don’t run a business.” And I said, “That’s funny. I work at a firm and I’m one of the seven people who run a firm that has $2 billion in revenue. That’s not a business to run? How big is your business?” I have over 2,000 employees and a thousand lawyers in eight countries. That’s a business.

When I was lucky enough to get elected to the Executive Committee, I’m very much entrepreneurial. I’m very much business-focused because I need to think about the business of law, not just doing documents. I need to think about: do we pay bonuses, who do we hire laterally, how do we deal with whatever the issues are in the big law market from day to day?

Victor M. Braca: Do they teach you that in law school?

Erwin Dweck: None of it. And I was always drawn to the business of law. Kevin actually didn’t like it; he was a deal junkie. So when I joined Kevin, his view was, “Erwin, you go do all this stuff.” It was a win-win. And so from a very young age, younger than probably most attorneys at big law firms, I was heavily involved in all of that stuff.

Victor M. Braca: You mentioned how you’re on Milbank’s global executive committee. How did your mindset shift from turning into a lawyer into more of a businessman? It seems that every year your job becomes less of only law and more of a diffusion of the two.

Erwin Dweck: One of the things that Milbank takes pride in is we have no non-working lawyers. It’s a massive honor to be part of the executive committee—I had to run a campaign within the company. I talked to every partner in the firm and told them why I think I’d be good for the job. But Milbank is a working partnership. The chairman of the firm works; he’s actually trying a case right now. He’s a litigator and so he’s like, “We got to do our executive committee meetings on Sunday.” Everybody at Milbank works. So the job on the management side has not really taken away from the amount of time I need to spend on the actual practice of law. It’s just been additive. It’s not like I magically get to scale back. Now I have to work 18 hours and it’s adding on.

Victor M. Braca: And on that note, with a growing family and trying to maintain some sort of work-life balance… we were originally scheduled for something like 8:00 in the morning and you had to push it off because you had some work calls. Tell me a little bit about that.

Erwin Dweck: The first thing I say when people talk about “work-life balance” is I don’t like the phrase because the phrase suggests equality. When you look at a scale and you think “balance,” you think the two sides are equal. If you want to get ahead in any business, there’s no equality. You need to set priorities and you need to grind.

When I interview kids and they ask me about work-life balance at a big law firm, my immediate reaction is, “Okay, this is not the place for you.” It’s been challenging. I have crazy memories of sleeping in the office. It’s easier now because you can work from home, but you miss important times. You have to make a decision at each place along the way. If you’re going to be Shomer Shabbat, you’re going to need to work virtually every Saturday night, particularly in the winter. If you’re going to take off the holidays, you need to be prepared in advance that your team can carry you through and you better plug in as soon as the holiday is over. I don’t know anybody that’s been super successful in anything they’ve done without fully committing to it. That doesn’t mean you miss birthdays and funerals, but it does mean you need to set priorities.

Every applicant coming in will tell you they’re willing to do it, but they’re not all willing to do it. The people that are super successful are the ones willing to put in that extra time to say, “Well, I could be done at 7:00 at night, but if I spend that extra hour, my work product will be an A instead of a B.” That extra time is really what makes the difference.

Victor M. Braca: I love that comment about balance not having to be an inequality of the two sides, but rather being able to focus on what’s important now. There are times to prioritize work and times to prioritize family, and they’re able to exist in harmony without being a 50/50 split.

Erwin Dweck: That’s completely true. And it’s critically important that the team that you surround yourself with—and I’m primarily thinking about my wife now—is on board. My wife knew what the goal for our family was and she sacrificed a lot. When I slept in the office on one of our anniversaries, she understood. When I told her I need to go back into the office on Saturday night, she understood. And when two days after we got married I didn’t come home for two more days because we were going on our honeymoon a week later and I had to work… I’m not sure she understood. She probably said, “I don’t know what the hell I got myself into.” But that kind of team commitment and shared goal allowed me to really be able to do these things. If she was not on board, it was never going to happen.

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You mentioned that if people are not willing to relinquish their old definition of work-life balance, big law might not be the thing for them. What other qualities show you whether someone is right for it?

Erwin Dweck: For me, there’s one very simple thing. By the time you get into big law, you’re probably smart enough. You’ve done great in school. The most significant factor is: do I care about my work product? Do I have pride in what I do? When I hand something in, is it crystal clear that I did my best and I’m proud of it?

I can very clearly tell when I’ve had associates who care and those who don’t. I’ve had people that are absolutely brilliant—think about Law Review at Harvard or Yale—but they don’t care. That comes through. Whereas you have an associate from a “lesser” law school who really, really cares about the work product; that just comes through like crazy. If you’re not willing to take pride in it, then you probably need to find a different area of the law or something else to do. That’s so easy to see and that’s the key differentiator.

Victor M. Braca: You’ve done recruiting for law firms and interviewing for the community at Columbia. What else have you noticed in standout achievers?

Erwin Dweck: The number one thing is be honest and show intellectual curiosity. Be prepared. Know who you’re talking to and what they do. For the kids I interview going into college, it’s really seeing if they have an intellectual curiosity and an understanding of the world beyond the community. To be successful in business, you have to be able to at least see beyond the community. To be able to have an adult conversation about interesting topics. I don’t expect a 17-year-old to have a deep understanding of sophisticated business concepts, but I do understand if they have an intellectual curiosity. Do you read books? If you’re 17 and not reading books about anything, that’s a “tell” for me.

At the law school level, it’s the same. Have you shown me somewhere on your resume that you are willing to really put the time into something that you care about? We look for team players—that manifests itself in a million ways, like playing on a college sports team. We want to see team players, intellectual curiosity, and a willingness to be an adult in a business setting.

Victor M. Braca: I read the book So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport. He has a concept called “career capital”—the skills you learn and acumen you build to put yourself ahead. What biggest things help people build up their career capital?

Erwin Dweck: I’m not sure if this exactly answers the question, but I will tell you what doesn’t. One of the biggest mistakes I see young people in the workforce do is look ahead. You’re a second-year at a law firm and you’re trying to act like a partner, or your whole plan is to go in-house and work at Blackstone. What those people fail to realize is that the greatest career capital you can build is what’s right in front of you.

If you are not great at what you’re doing as a second-year lawyer—if you’re not all in for that because you’re too busy looking ahead—you’re going to miss everything. Because the greatest opportunities come from what’s right in front of you. If you are the best second-year associate, you will have the best opportunities to go in-house or progress your career. The second you’re looking ahead and not worrying about the now, you’re going to miss it all. You can’t be a partner after two years; it’s just not going to happen. You’re only going to have the best opportunity to work at a big institution if they think you’re great right now.

You do that by being great on the deal you’re working on so people see you. When clients are looking for a general counsel, they can say, “This guy I worked with at Milbank is fantastic.” One of the things I’m most proud about at Milbank is that a lot of the people that have worked with me have gone on to become clients. We’ve been able to help place them at some of our clients. But they wouldn’t have been able to do that if they were looking ahead; they were all really amazing associates who were focused on learning in the moment.

Victor M. Braca: You’ve been through the 2008 crisis, 9/11, COVID, and the current volatility. What has been the biggest setback of your career?

Erwin Dweck: None of those were setbacks for us because we developed our expertise in 2008 as being the number one distressed real estate practice.

Victor M. Braca: How did you turn what was a setback for most people into a revenue multiplier?

Erwin Dweck: 2008 happens, and Kevin and I look at each other and go, “We can be opportunistic here. We can go sell to our client base that we know how to do ‘loan-to-own’.” Loan-to-own is when a client buys a loan with the idea that they’re going to foreclose and get ownership of the building. We went out there and marketed hard. We said, “If you have opportunistic capital and the stomach to spend money in this market, we’re going to help you make money.”

At the time, we did the largest mezzanine loan foreclosure in history. Effectively, we helped a client buy a small piece of debt on the John Hancock Tower in Boston—one of the biggest buildings in Boston. We said we’re going to figure out a way that you own this building. They said, “There’s no way you can do this.” We said, “We can do this.” I wrote a memo that was seven pages long and it was super complicated—it was like a law school exam. I said, “Kevin, do you think this is ever going to happen?” He’s like, “There’s no way it happens the way you wrote it up.”

I said, “Okay, let’s give it a try.” And lo and behold, it went exactly to plan. Our client was able to buy and then sell the John Hancock Tower and they made many millions of dollars. Kevin and I looked at each other and said, “We just did this.” We steered this client through a remarkably rocky situation and that deal made our name in the market.

Victor M. Braca: What has been the biggest mistake you’ve made?

Erwin Dweck: I don’t think there were any big grand mistakes. I’ve made little mistakes along the way that I learned from, like how to manage people on my own team. Early on I learned that you need to motivate people differently—some react to a soft nurturing hand, some react to a harsher tone. That’s something I’ve developed over time.

Sometimes, notwithstanding what I said before, I kind of wish I made more time for myself and my family. At certain points of my career… this one’s tough, but when my grandfather died, he was sick and I couldn’t get off the deal for the weekend. I remember being in the car going back to work on Saturday night when I got the call and I missed seeing him before he passed away. There were mistakes like that where you think about those things. It’s not easy. Hindsight is 2020.

Victor M. Braca: Should people follow their passion?

Erwin Dweck: No. No. That’s a silly thing to say. If I followed my passion, I’d be unemployed and homeless. Do what you’re good at. There were a lot of things I loved growing up—basketball was one of them. In law school I played basketball six days a week. But the joke is that 13 years old is the age where most Jewish boys learn they’re more likely to own a basketball team than to play in the NBA. I think you should do what you’re good at. If you’re lucky enough where your passion is also something that you’re good at, then yes. But I’m more of a pragmatist. I love my job, but I have other passions. I love to play tennis—if I followed a career in tennis, I probably wouldn’t be doing this podcast.

Victor M. Braca: It’s funny because the book I mentioned, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, also says a resounding “no” to following your passion. It talks about how as long as you don’t hate it from the onset, you can learn to love the business as you grow your team and work on complex deals.

Erwin Dweck: For me, there are definitely things I love about my practice—that feeling in your stomach when you’re able to get this crazy deal right on day one. We had a crazy complicated data center finance pitch for somebody on Friday, and it gets your juices flowing because you know it’s a competitive situation. When the deal is closing—this $3.9 billion deal—and it’s the end of months of work and everybody’s over the moon… that’s a lot of fun.

There are plenty of periods where it’s, “Oh my God, I have to read through 150 pages,” but there are a ton of situations where it’s not that way. Now in the management role at the law firm, you have very challenging decisions: hiring a partner, asking a partner to leave, strategic decisions. You find your passion at different places within what you’re doing. I don’t know any 8-year-old kid who says, “I really want to close a take-private of an office REIT.” They want to be the shortstop for the Yankees. Very few people get to do that. Maybe find the passion in what you’re really good at.

Victor M. Braca: Law is a 24/7 industry. How has keeping Shabbat and unplugging weekly—especially when no one else is unplugging—impacted you?

Erwin Dweck: Everybody who works at big law has that first decision to make. I remember I was working on a deal in December and I was in a partner’s office and I said, “I need to leave.” It was 4:00 p.m. and Shabbat was at 4:12. I said, “I have to leave,” and I walked out. I was able to walk home. I set that boundary on day one. I know other people who were not able to set that boundary and they’re regretting it today because it’s much harder to step back from it.

I also happen to be lucky to be in the New York real estate world where there’s no shortage of people who don’t work on Shabbat. It’s difficult, but I tell people who are Shomer Shabbat: you’re giving up that 25 hours, so you better be online on Saturday night. You better make yourself available on Sunday because you need to make up for the people covering for you.

3-day holidays are crazy. But a lot of my clients now know and understand. I’ve had clients tell me, “Erwin, Shabbat’s at 4:12. Get off the phone.” On the Columbia Properties deal, the person I was working opposite was also Shomer Shabbat. He said to me, “Is that your wife yelling that you need to get off the phone?” I said, “Is that your wife yelling you need to get off the phone?”

You will be amazed in New York at the amount of people that have absolute respect for that. Every single person, Jewish or not, looks at me and says, “I wish I could do that.” But I also go out of my way to overcompensate for the people that support me when I’m not working.

Victor M. Braca: How has faith guided you?

Erwin Dweck: I think it’s really challenging to be successful without a firm grounding in family and community. Religion creates a super effective scaffolding for that. Orthodox Judaism does that in spades—you’re always with your family for meals and holidays. It creates a real moral and ethical grounding. I think you have to have a scaffolding, and we’re blessed to grow up with one; you don’t need to go search for it.

Victor M. Braca: Why get involved in community service?

Erwin Dweck: It’s rewarding to give back to something that gave to you. My version of giving back has been interviewing community kids for college and taking calls about law firms. I had a lot of influential people who helped me along my career, and I really enjoy watching kids in our community grow.

I started with the Columbia Alumni Network to interview kids because I wanted community kids to be a part of these amazing institutions where they can meet the future leaders of the world. It was life-changing for me, and I wanted other kids to have access to that.

I remember when I was a summer associate at Proskauer Rose, there was a partner named Myron Rumeld who lived in Deal. On Fridays he used to say, “Why don’t you take the train back to Deal with me?” He didn’t have to do that. I would sit next to him and pick his brain. I wanted to pay that forward. So when a community kid calls me for advice on law schools or firms, I love to help. I’ve even been able to put resumes from community kids in front of partners at Milbank. I love to see kids growing beyond the community and having an impact outside of it.

Victor M. Braca: What I love is that a small act of kindness from someone who let you take the train with him caused a ripple effect. Now you’re paying it forward. How do you advise young adults to network effectively?

Erwin Dweck: Talk to as many people as you can. I’m not opposed to a broad outreach. Be bold, ask people for their time. You may get shut down, but that’s okay. Meet interesting people—you will become a more interesting person.

Victor M. Braca: Ask and you shall receive. Even if you ask 10 times and receive once, you still come out ahead.

Erwin Dweck: Take someone out to lunch, ask them their story. There’s a guy I work with at a private equity fund, Alex, and everybody loves him. I realized it’s because when you talk to Alex, all he does is ask you about you. You’ll walk away from a three-hour conversation thinking he’s your closest friend, and then you realize you don’t know anything about him! People like to talk about themselves and it makes them feel special. Alex is curious.

Victor M. Braca: Have you read How to Win Friends and Influence People?

Erwin Dweck: Not really.

Victor M. Braca: It’s a classic. One of the main principles is just asking people about themselves. There was a comedian, Michael Costa, who said his mother had a tennis ball in the house—every time the ball came to you, you had to ask a question and hand it to the next person. It taught him to constantly ask about others. What are some of your top book recommendations?

Erwin Dweck: I try and read every Saturday. I like books about ethics and I read a lot about Rambam. I also like to read history. There’s a book by Jon Meacham that’s excellent; it talks about how these political moments we think are unique have actually happened a ton in American history. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. It gives context and perspective.

I read a lot about religion. Right now I’m reading Our Crowd by Stephen Birmingham about the great Jewish families in New York—the Lehmans, Goldmans, and Sachs. He also wrote The Grandees about the Sephardic elite in the early 1900s. Reading makes you more interesting and helps with conversations.

Victor M. Braca: I’ve always been a reader. I just started reading on the subway again because the books are compelling.

Erwin Dweck: I drive now, but podcasts can serve the same function. Whether I’m listening to a commercial real estate podcast or a comedy podcast, I keep the brain moving. Shabbat creates that scaffolding where you have more time to read because you aren’t using the phone or TV.

Victor M. Braca: Looking back on your journey, what has been your Momentum Moment?

Erwin Dweck: It was probably when I left Simpson to join Kevin. In 2001 my salary was $125,000 and I never thought I would make that much money. But you’re still a kid. In 2006, by the time I moved, I was married and had my first child. I remember thinking, “Okay, now I have this new opportunity. Now I got to go.” There was this new beginning. I said, “At this moment, this is where I’m going to give it everything. This is where I will have no regrets.” That decision felt right. I knew I was done at Simpson. Trusting your gut was the Single most important decision I made for my career.

Victor M. Braca: Irwin Dweck, thank you so much. It’s so inspiring to hear how working for a big law firm allowed you to be entrepreneurial.

Erwin Dweck: Thank you for having me. This has been a blast.

Victor M. Braca: Thank you so much for listening until the end. Here are my top three takeaways.

First: you can be entrepreneurial in a large corporate company. Erwin didn’t just climb the ladder; he built his own brand within the firms where he worked. He brought on his own clients and even helped lead a team-wide move. Even inside a giant institution, there’s room to build and take risks.

Second: don’t chase work-life balance—chase priorities. Balance doesn’t mean equal time. It means knowing what matters most in each season of your life and being all in on that. The key is to be intentional.

And third: be excellent at what’s right in front of you. This one really stuck with me. Erwin sees many young professionals chasing the next job without mastering the one they’re in. The best opportunities come when people recognize that you’re great at what you do right now.

If you enjoyed this, check out my conversation with Gitta Kaplan. Gitty shares her journey from sleeping on the floor in the office while pregnant to now serving on the City Council and working as general counsel at a major company. Search “Momentum Gitta Kaplan” on any platform. Be sure to subscribe. Until next time.