Conversations With Jerry Oshinsky
By JOHN RYAN As a litigator, Jerry Oshinsky is already at the top of his game. He is generally considered one of the top practitioners in the field of insurance coverage and chairs the largest practice in the country – about 90 lawyers – devoted exclusively to representing policyholders in disputes with their insurance carriers. His clients have included dozens of Fortune 500 companies, including the likes of AT&T, General Motors, Pfizer and Merck. But the Dickstein Shapiro partner feels that his skills are, in fact, improving at this stage of his career thanks to his side work as an actor. His decision to take acting classes at the Theatre Lab in Washington, D.C., back in 2001, quickly blossomed into a full-blown passion. He has acted in 15 plays and in several dozen staged readings. He also has produced a handful of plays and many readings through his own production company, DIJO Productions Theatre Company. “In acting, you have to emphasize the words better, and more clearly,” Oshinsky says. “I think I have benefited as a lawyer because it’s slowed me down, which I think is a good thing. It makes you think about what you’re saying.” Oshinsky, 65, rose to prominence as a lawyer more than 25 years ago during his representation of the Keene Corp., which faced lawsuits over asbestos-containing products and wanted its insurer to cover the legal costs. His victory in Keene Corp. v. Insurance Company of North America, before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, established the doctrine known as “continuous trigger,” meaning that asbestos-related legal claims trigger policy coverage starting from the time of a person’s exposure to asbestos through the discovery of the injury. His insurance-coverage practice took off after the landmark case, and it’s been full-steam ahead ever since. Oshinsky still handles asbestos litigation, but some of the hottest work these days is in the area of professional liability: representing corporate directors, officers and accountants who are accused of wrongdoing and face disputes with their carriers over coverage. Oshinsky’s team also has represented companies in insurance coverage disputes resulting from Hurricane Katrina and in business interruption matters that followed the Sept.11 terrorist attacks. Oshinsky runs Dickstein Shapiro’s national insurance practice from his home in Santa Barbara, Calif., having ditched his longtime base in Washington, D.C., where the firm is based. He and his wife bought a home in the area as a hotel of sorts to stay in when visiting their two children, both of whom are married and raising their own families in Southern California. The beauty of Santa Barbara and the fun of having four grandkids nearby led the Oshinskys to make a permanent switch in 2005. Oshinsky regularly visits the firm’s Los Angeles office, which opened that same year when Dickstein Shapiro acquired Pasich & Kornfeld. Oshinsky also runs DIJO Productions from home. Its latest production was “The Love Song of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” which ran at the Victoria Hall Theatre in Santa Barbara from Nov. 13 to Dec. 1. Oshinsky played five roles, including Isidor Rabi, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist who was friends with Oppenheimer, the conflicted physicist who led the Manhattan Project. Oshinsky prefers historical plays that have a public-interest component. Lawdragon: How did this last play go? Jerry Oshinsky: Great. It was a lot of fun. Very physically demanding, doing 15 shows in three weeks. At one point I had to do seven costume changes in 10 minutes. It’s like a trial. You spend so long getting ready for it, then when it’s over you miss it. It’s a part of your life that’s gone. All of a sudden the cast disappears and everybody is off doing something else. LD: How did you get involved with theatre? JO: I’ve always been interested in the theatre, even back in high school, but when I was growing up in Brooklyn you either became a lawyer, a doctor or a teacher. Thinking about the theatre was not really within our realm of reality back then. But I always had it in the back of my mind. When living in the D.C. area I wondered how one gets involved in the theatre. One day I saw an ad in the Washington Post for the Theatre Lab having acting lessons so I decided to take lessons, and I became hooked. The reason I remember vividly when that occurred is that the first improv lesson was scheduled for Sept. 11, 2001. Needless to say the class was canceled that night. I’ve told people at the Theatre Lab that they really changed my life by opening up the acting part and make all of this possible. LD: What was your first role before an audience? JO: When taking lessons we did a student production of “Ghetto,” by Joshua Sobol, a leading Israeli playwright, about the Vilna ghetto in Nazi-occupied Lithuania that was a mecca for Jewish actors. I played a German soldier who is in charge of the ghetto. LD: Were you nervous and do you still get nervous? JO: No. Just like being an attorney, I prepare extensively. I’m never really nervous, but always apprehensive. You don’t know exactly how it will play out or how the audience will react. Every night is different. Some nights the audience is laughing and responsive and really digging it, other nights they just sit there and you wonder what’s going on. A friend of mine who’s a prominent director in Los Angeles came up for a play during which nobody laughed at the funny parts. He told me, “No one in the audience gave us permission to laugh.” You have to have somebody in the room who starts it. It’s like being the first person to ask a question during a seminar. The actors can really sense the energy from the audience, you can really tell if the audience is with you. You’re not doing improv, but the way you do it can vary from night to night, exactly how you deliver the lines. It really depends on what the actors are doing. LD: Do you have a favorite role that you’ve played? JO: Two, actually. In “Hannah and Martin,” I played Karl Jaspers, the famous German philosopher who was a mentor to Martin Heidegger. [Heidegger also was a philosopher whose reputation suffered as a result of his support for Hitler. The other title character, Hannah Arendt, was Heidegger’s lover and student.] Jaspers was blacklisted during the Nazi era because he had a Jewish wife. Jaspers never forgave Heidegger for never going to bat for him. Heidegger’s excuse was that there was nothing he could do. On some nights, I swear I could feel Jaspers there. I could sense he was in the theatre. The other favorite role I did recently in “Fifteen Rounds with Jackson Pollock” as Clem Greenberg, the art critic who made Pollock. They were very close and Greenberg supported his career. Clem and I shared a lot, both growing up in Brooklyn and having East European Jewish ancestry. On some nights I really felt, “This one’s for you, Clem.” He was the most important art critic of his day and a lot of people today don’t know who he was. I felt I had a mission to let people know who he was. LD: You mentioned how acting helps your presentation skills as a lawyer. Did being an attorney help prepare you for acting? JO: I don’t think so. It’s so different. As an attorney, I’m me; as an actor, I’m another character. You get into the character and just lose yourself. It’s like getting ready for an appeal, but it’s much more difficult than working as an attorney because you’re working with someone else’s words. I’ve done speeches in front of a thousand people, but in a play you’re working with someone else’s words. The secret is making it fresh every night. The actor knows what’s coming next but the character doesn’t. The character has no idea what the next words will be. You have to make it appear like the character has never said the words before. It’s very difficult. It has to be fresh every night. When you think about some of these actors doing the same character two years in a row… LD: Why did you get into producing plays? JO: I’m an organizer. I like to make things happen. It enables you to structure the thing and put it all together. It’s time consuming. It’s just like in my firm – I can’t wait for things to happen. I’m a self-starter. Or a maniac. [Laughs.] I used to be normal. LD: Are you practicing law less now as a result of the theatre work? JO: Actually, more. It just makes my days longer. I’m busier now as an attorney than I have ever been. There’s something wrong with me, I guess. It just never seems to end, which is great. But all the people who work under me are great. Most of the cases I supervise are being managed directly by other people. Attorneys call me up if they have an issue, but for the most part I don’t need to see what’s going on on a daily basis. I can’t be. It’s too much. I’ve always operated that way, always had a great team of attorneys with me. There are a lot of lawyers my age who can’t let go, but I’ve been letting go for a very long time and let other people run their own matters. LD: Is it hard working from Santa Barbara? JO: In today’s world, it’s not so hard. Ten to 15 years ago, it probably would not be possible. But people don’t like to travel much these days, it’s gotten so difficult. Clients don’t expect you to be in their office tomorrow because they know how difficult it is. They’re ready to accept an electronic relationship, and most of the time it works pretty well. With video conferencing it really feels like you’re in the same room with the other person. Santa Barbara is terrific. I hate to leave it. Whenever I do, I get pangs of remorse. LD: What’s next for DIJO Productions? JO: We’re looking into doing the oldest play in Western civilization, called “The Persians.” It’s by the Greek playwright Aeschylus, but don’t ask me to spell that off the top of my head. For the spring we are looking at “12 Angry Men.” Actually, it’s now “12 Angry Jurors,” with both men and women on the jury. Page: 1 of 1 pages for this article
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