Five years ago, law firm Ohrenstein & Brown had its offices on the 85th floor of the World Trade Center's North Tower, just eight floors down from where an American Airlines jet sheared into the building in the first terrorist attack of Sept. 11, 2001.
Like other former tenants of the ill-fated towers, Ohrenstein & Brown partners have expressed pride at how their firm, which lost two members of its support staff, dealt with the experience. In an interview with Newsday marking the fourth anniversary of the attacks, founding partner Michael Brown said of the experience: "You find out how resilient you are and how resilient the people in this office are."
But now three former Ohrenstein & Brown partners are charging that, far from being a unifying experience that strengthened the firm, Sept. 11, 2001, set in motion a chain of events that ultimately tore the firm apart, resulting in departures that shrank the firm from a high of 60 lawyers to 24 today.
In a suit filed Tuesday in Manhattan Supreme Court, former Ohrenstein & Brown partners John R. Sachs, Annmarie D'Amour and Philip Touitou charge that the multimillion-dollar insurance payout the firm received for its claimed Sept. 11 losses provided an unprecedented windfall, one which five of the firm's partners conspired to keep mostly to themselves.
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