“You can’t imagine how scary it is to go from going 120 miles an hour for 25 years and enjoying it to sending out an email that says I’ve retired and waking up the next morning and saying, ‘Oh my God, my career is over. Am I going to be bored? Is my brain going to rot away?’” Mark Lebovitch said on this week’s Drinks With The Deal podcast.

Lebovitch stepped down as a partner and the head of the governance practice at Bernstein Litowitz Berger & Grossmann LLP, a practice he launched in 2006. He became enthralled with Delaware corporate doctrine as a student in the late 1990s at New York University School of Law, where Lebovitch studied the subject with William T. Allen, who had just retired as chancellor of the Delaware Court of Chancery. Allen suggested Lebovitch clerk for then Vice Chancellor Stephen Lamb, and from the first time he saw lawyers at oral argument before Lamb, Lebovitch said, he knew he wanted to be a trial lawyer.

Lebovitch built an elite practice as a lawyer for shareholder plaintiffs, but that success came at a cost, as he describes on the podcast. When he retired, he said, his wife told him, “I would never push you, but I always had a fear that you would work until the day you died, because you would always rationalize the negative parts away because you loved the positive so much.”

Lebovitch is teaching a course on corporate law at the University of Pennsylvania this spring with Vice Chancellor Lori Will, and he plans to stay involved in the world of governance in other ways.

“I have the blessed luxury of being able to take the time to figure out how to get that balance I’ve touched on, of how to get the most out of my love for Delaware law and the world of corporations with the best possible environment for doing so,” he said.

Listen to the podcast with Mark Lebovitch below:

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