I have very close relationships with our clients. This dynamic allows me to implement decisions on how best to serve clients quickly and cost-effectively. I devise solutions to deliver the best service possible to our clients and can adjust more quickly to our client’s changing needs. If and when there is a legal problem facing our clients, our thorough knowledge of their business and the industry they work in provides us with the edge to provide effective analysis and legal advice. Our Outside General Counsel Services is unique in the legal industry. I enjoy being proactive to prevent problems rather than reactive to problems that have already arisen.

Practice Areas: insurance litigation, corporate counsel, transportation business law and transactions,  employment law, intellectual property, trademark law, workers' compensation law, personal injury/liability defense.

Specialties: Representing all aspects of the For-Hire Vehicle industry in New York City

Information not intended to provide legal advice.

PATRICK and LISA. Their marriage lasted 34 years. Fifteen of those years, he was drinking himself to death.

Lisa Niemi was fourteen when she met eighteen year old Patrick Swayze. They were just kids. But something started that day that would define both their lives. 

They married in 1975. They had nothing but dreams, a beat-up car, and an unshakeable belief in each other.

For years, they struggled. Patrick took whatever work he could find. Lisa danced, taught, supported them both when auditions dried up. They were broke, exhausted, and absolutely certain they'd make it.

Then 1987 arrived. "Dirty Dancing" exploded across America. Suddenly, Patrick Swayze wasn't just an actor anymore. He was a phenomenon. A sex symbol. One of the biggest stars in Hollywood.

And their marriage began to fracture. Fame didn't create Patrick's demons—it amplified them. The drinking got worse. The late nights multiplied. The distance between them grew wider.

Lisa fought for their marriage. But you can't fight someone's addiction for them. You can only decide whether to stay or save yourself.

There were separations. Conversations that ended in silence. Nights when Lisa wondered if love was enough.

But Patrick made a choice. Not once, but over and over again. He entered treatment. He went to therapy. He did the brutal, unglamorous work of getting sober and staying sober.

It wasn't a Hollywood transformation. There was no single moment where everything became perfect. Healing took years. Lisa stayed. Not because it was easy. Not because the pain disappeared. But because she saw him trying.

Lisa loved the boy she met in the dance studio too much to abandon the man fighting to come back to her. They created together again. 

Then January 2008. Pancreatic cancer. Stage IV. The kind of diagnosis that leaves no room for hope. Lisa became his full-time caregiver. No assistants. No nurses taking the night shift. Just her. The girl from the dance studio, now a woman holding her husband's hand through the unimaginable.

She fed him when he couldn't eat. Bathed him when he couldn't stand. Read to him when the pain was too much for conversation. She stayed.
September 14, 2009.

Patrick Swayze died in their home with Lisa holding his hand. Thirty-four years of marriage. Through fame that could have destroyed them. Through addiction that almost did. Through illness that took everything but love itself.

After he died, someone asked Lisa how they'd lasted so long when so many Hollywood marriages crumbled. Her answer was simple: "We never stopped choosing each other."

Not once. Not when it was hard. Not when it was easier to leave. Not when death was coming and staying meant watching someone you love disappear. They chose each other.

This is the kind of love where happily ever after doesn't mean perfect. It means being present.

#romanolaw #shankerlaw

Steven J. Shanker, Esq.

Counsel to the NYC Insurance & Transportation Industry. Outspoken/Honest & Proud of it.

Counsel that brings VALUE | Chair of Corporate Law | Lawyering with Purpose, Achieving Excellence

James McQuade

SING WITH ALL YOU HAVE. Jim Croce wrote “Time in a Bottle” at two in the morning in a cramped Pennsylvania kitchen two years before a plane crash would make it prophetic.

It was 1969, and his wife Ingrid had just told him she was pregnant. Jim sat down with a guitar, a cup of cold coffee, and a heart full of panic and awe. The song poured out in minutes. “If I could save time in a bottle…” he sang softly into the dark. It wasn’t a hit then. It was a private prayer from a man who finally had something to lose.

For years, Croce was the definition of almost. He worked as a truck driver, carpenter, and teacher, playing bars where no one listened and driving home with just enough gas money to make it to the next gig. “Every song I write is a little movie,” he said. “Only mine end in diners and bars instead of sunsets.”

Everything changed in 1972 when You Don’t Mess Around with Jim hit the radio. America fell in love with his storytelling — the hustlers, losers, and dreamers who sounded like people you actually knew. 

Operator (That’s Not the Way It Feels) made men cry. Bad, Bad Leroy Brown made them laugh. By mid-1973, Croce had two Top 10 hits, a new baby, and a tour schedule that never let him breathe. He wrote to Ingrid from the road, saying, “I’m tired of being away from you and the boy. When this tour ends, I’m coming home for good.”

He never made it back. On September 20, 1973, just after a concert in Louisiana, Croce’s small charter plane hit a pecan tree during takeoff. He was killed instantly, along with five others. He was 30 years old.

Three months later, the song he’d written in that quiet kitchen — the one about wishing for more time — became the number one song in America. It was the last thing he ever recorded.

Jim Croce sang about ordinary people trying to outrun time. In the end, he couldn’t.

 He proved that a man doesn’t need a long life to leave a long echo. All you need is a few true words, sung with everything you have before the music stops.

#romanolaw #shankerlaw

Counsel that brings VALUE | Chair of Corporate Law | Innovating with Purpose, Achieving Excellence

Michael Craft, CFA

THE ATTIC. Anne Frank’s father, Otto, revisits the attic entrance where he and his family hid for two years before their betrayal.

In 1960, Otto Frank returned to the small attic in Amsterdam where his family once clung to hope in hiding. The father of Anne Frank was the only member of his immediate family to survive the Holocaust.

After their arrest in 1944, Anne, her sister Margot, and their mother Edith all perished in concentration camps. Otto, liberated from Auschwitz in 1945, would carry their memory forward for the rest of his life.

This image captures Otto standing at the entrance to the secret annex behind a bookcase in the building at Prinsengracht 263. It had been over 15 years since he last stepped through that doorway, once the threshold between survival and discovery.

The visit was quiet, personal, and deeply symbolic, not just of his own loss, but of the millions murdered during the Holocaust. Otto later helped publish Anne’s diary, which has since become one of the most enduring records of the human cost of Nazi persecution.

REMEMBER: Humanity saw one the darkest chapters in history with the murder of over six million Jews during the Holocaust. We have a responsibility to never forget and ensure the events of the Holocaust are never repeated. We must be reminded that it is our collective responsibility to combat hate in all its forms. 

#romanolaw #shankerlaw

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