Michael Katzke is back in the compensation game, but this time on the side of individual executives rather than companies. The 50-year-old lawyer joined the Law Offices of Joseph E. Bachelder LLP as of counsel last month. The move came almost three years after Katzke shocked the executive compensation bar by leaving a partnership at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz to study at the Columbia School of Social Work.

In both cases, changes in Katzke's life helped drive those in his career. His first wife died of cancer in 2000, which inspired Katzke to take on considerable volunteer work as he continued to practice at Wachtell. In 2004, he married Susan Roth, an equity analyst who covered financial institutions at Credit Suisse Group. The couple had twins in the next year. Roth left CS in April but hopes to return to the financial services world at some point.

"With my kids in school from nine to three, I wanted more flexibility than social work could provide," Katzke says, "and Joe and I have been talking over the course of several months."

Bachelder's 10-lawyer firm is perhaps the country's most prominent boutique specializing in negotiating pay packages for senior executives, but it should afford Katzke significantly more control over his schedule than he had at Wachtell, where his work was driven by the firm's M&A clients.

"They're very different practices," says Eric Hilfers, an executive compensation partner at Cravath, Swaine & Moore LLP in New York. "On the individual side, you have short-term, discrete projects to work on. The transaction-related employment agreements are part of a much bigger, fast-paced process and have demanding time frames. It's much harder to do that on an ad hoc basis."

A graduate of the State University of New York at Stony Brook and New York University School of Law, Katzke was an associate at a predecessor firm of Morvillo, Abramowitz, Grand, Iason, Anello & Bohrer PC; White & Case LLP; Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP; and Sullivan & Cromwell LLP before joining Wachtell in 1997. He says he didn't consider returning to a large law firm. He talked to TARP pay czar Kenneth Feinberg about working for the U.S. Treasury but did not want to move to Washington or commute.

As he was studying at Columbia, Katzke says he kept abreast of statutory and regulatory changes that affected executive compensation. "Obviously, the current climate for executive compensation is a little bit difficult," he says, "and in some ways that makes it a much more fascinating and interesting time than it was four or five years ago." Now that he's back at a law firm, Katzke hopes to continue volunteering at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and reading to underprivileged children, a practice he began shortly after the death of his first wife.

"Michael is an extraordinary person and an extraordinary talent, and he can really go in whatever direction he chooses in executive compensation," Bachelder says.