Investing In The Great Wealth Transfer: Masters in Business with Adam Frank

Adam Frank (0:02)

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Barry Ritholtz (0:07)

I'm Barry Ritholtz. You're listening to Masters in Business on Bloomberg Radio. My extra special guest this week is Adam Frank. He is the head of wealth planning and advice at JP. Morgan. Previously, he held the same job at Bear Stearns before JP. Morgan acquired them.

The group manages about $1.4 trillion in specializes in sophisticated family business and succession planning, estate and gift tax management, philanthropy, estate litigation, taxation and employee stock option analysis. JP. Morgan's combined asset and wealth management business, including global institutional private bank and retail, is over $7 trillion.

Adam Frank, welcome to Bloomberg.

Adam Frank (1:06)

Barry, thanks. It's great to be here.

Barry Ritholtz (1:07)

It's great to have you. That was a mouthful to get out.

Adam Frank (1:10)

I'm glad... That and $3 will get you on the subway.

Barry Ritholtz (1:12)

That's right.

So before we delve into what you do at JPM, let's talk about your background because it's really very, very interesting. You earn a bachelor's in psychology at University of Pennsylvania, then a JD at Yale. I'm guessing the original plan wasn't wealth management.

Adam Frank (1:31)

It was not. The original plan was practicing law because it was either that or being a doctor.

Barry Ritholtz (1:37)

One or the other.

Adam Frank (1:38)

That was what my mom told me.

Barry Ritholtz (1:41)

You didn't just practice law. You begin your career as a law clerk to judge Jacob Mishler in the Eastern District of New York, a legendary court, and then you end up working with him for a year and a half, two years, full clerkship. Tell us what that was like.

Adam Frank (1:59)

It was very interesting because he was a senior judge at the time, so he got to generally choose his own cases. He wasn't really in the criminal wheel, so he mostly had civil cases.

It was fascinating to watch him on the bench, or watch him on the bench, objecting on behalf of parties because their lawyers weren't quick enough, and encountering and thinking, watching him think through or talking with him and understanding his thought process of how he would get to a conclusion, and then doing the research to back up that conclusion, or sometimes tell him why I thought the conclusion was not right. But the biggest benefit of the fact that he was senior, he and his wife had a condo in Lauder Hill in Florida. And so every year he would write to the chief judge, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, who would appoint him to the Southern District of Florida in Miami, where he would sit for four months. And each of his clerks, there were two of us, got to go down to Miami on combat pay from the government. So it was a nice gig. And that was a very interesting court as well, because he was in the criminal wheel there.

Barry Ritholtz (3:11)

And I don't care how much you like or dislike Florida, there are worse things in the world than Miami in...

Adam Frank (3:18)

In the winter. Yeah. In the winter. And it was the winter of 1993, and there were seven or eight ice storms in New York. So my wife kept planning to come visit me in Florida, and she kept not being able to, because the airports were closed, and the weather was so bad, and I felt a little bit guilty, but not that guilty. No.

Barry Ritholtz (3:38)

So after you clerked your first year at Sullivan and Cromwell, and then you were at Schulte Roth and Zabel, two highly regarded firms, you're focusing on high net worth clients and closely held businesses. Tell us a little bit about that practice. You can see how your progression is moving you towards wealth management.

Adam Frank (3:59)

Well, it was interesting when I was in law school, my third year, I just took a trust in the states class because it fit into my schedule, I didn't want to have classes on Fridays, and the T&E course was Tuesday, Thursday.

It was fascinating because it's a casebook, and it's stories that the judges have written about the litigants in front of them. It was all of the families fighting over who mom loved best, using their money or their business or their restaurant as a proxy for that.

It was fascinating to me because it was a psychology major as an undergrad, and I didn't want to go to grad school, which is why I ended up in law school. And I just thought it was a great intersection of law and property class, which I really enjoyed, and the psychology. And it was very human as opposed to a corporate practice or a litigation practice, both of which are great if you're interested in them, but I wasn't in particular. So being at Sullivan, I did a bunch of work on estate litigation actually, and it was the same thing. It was families fighting over who mom loved best. One of the people in the case that I worked on had found out about a year and a half before her mother died that she was adopted.