I have always loved the idea of the antique lawyers book case.
I was always fascinated by how much I had to do in the process to make it work, but the idea seemed so absurd that I was reluctant to invest in it.
I wanted to build a real, physical thing that would take my attention away from the things I really cared about.
But then, in 2007, my friend, lawyer and disability lawyer Laura Kesselman told me that she was selling the case to a private equity firm and that she had won a total of $1 billion in disability lawsuits.
In this conversation, Laura tells us about how the story of her case came to be and how it was one of the best investment decisions of my life.
(1:20) The story of the bookcase The idea of selling antique legal cases started when I was working as a lawyer in San Francisco.
In 2004, my firm had been representing a woman in the state of California, a woman with cerebral palsy who had been in a coma for more than a year.
The woman had been sued by her own insurance company, the woman’s attorney, a hospital, the police department and her own family for $30 million, for having no access to a wheelchair.
The case was about to go to trial and was about three years old.
Laura was a partner in a firm that had just purchased the case and wanted to sell it for the first time.
I called Laura and said, “I have a bookcase that you want to sell to the firm.”
I said, I’ve always been interested in the book case idea, but I’m really interested in how you sell it.
She said, Yes, it’s a big, beautiful bookcase.
She told me I should make it a personal property and sell it at the fair.
So I said okay, you know, I will do this.
She took a photo of the case for us, I took a video of it and I sent it to Laura and she gave me a call.
She was like, “You’re going to sell this bookcase at the San Francisco Fair?”
She told us she would do everything she could to get us the case, including taking it to court.
But she said, If you are not going to take this case to trial, we will go ahead and sell the bookcases.
I got her to call her lawyer, and I called the insurance company.
I told them I would pay them a lot of money to get the case.
And they gave me the money.
I sold the book cases for a few thousand dollars each.
We sold them in the fair and Laura took a little bit of profit on the sale.
But Laura and I were still in debt.
She couldn’t afford to pay the insurance bills.
I think she thought, Oh, my God, I’m in financial trouble.
So we sold them at the Fair, at a big sale that attracted a lot more people than we anticipated.
We made about $10,000.
And Laura was able to retire from the firm.
I did my best to keep up with her.
I took on the case with a small group of friends and we got to know each other well.
And we began to plan out the next stage.
I had Laura on the phone for hours about what to do with the case at the next fair.
We had a very good idea of what the fair would look like, so I started thinking about what the next steps would be.
And then, after a few months, Laura came to me with an idea for a different kind of event.
We would build a large, colorful, glass-fronted bookcase for the Fair.
Laura wanted to do a book fair for people who have had a hard time accessing legal services.
She had always wanted to have a fair for her own disabilities and her husband, who is blind, as well.
Laura’s story is an amazing story, and we had a wonderful time helping her sell the case in a very unique way.
The first day of the Fair Laura had to get her case to the Fairgrounds because she was moving.
The Fairgrounds is a lot bigger than the fairgrounds because of the fact that it has to get to the South Beach area.
Laura and her friends wanted to go downtown.
She didn’t want to have to drive up from her home in the Bay Area.
Laura got the case out of the storage area in her car, and she and her pals built the case into a giant glass-covered bookcase about 12 feet high, three feet wide and five feet tall.
The bookcase was about five feet long and three feet thick.
It had two huge bookcases, a book case with an old wooden handle, and a big rectangular case with the handle and a small wooden case with no handle.
Laura had a book and a