“The journey for me started out more as a detour,” Greenberg Traurig LLP shareholder Shaun Levor said on this week’s episode of Drinks With The Deal. Levor grew up in South Africa and expected to be a trial lawyer like his father.

“From a young age, I would go with him to court,” Levor said of his father. “I would see him cross-examine witnesses. I won’t say every dinner we discussed his cases, but many of them. I was very familiar with what he did and had a huge respect for how he did it.”

But in law school at the University of Cape Town, Levor on a whim signed up to interview with lawyers from Davis Polk & Wardwell LLP when they came to interview. He ended up being hired and starting as an associate in the firm’s New York office. “I thought I would come here for a year or two, see what it was like and then go back to the career that I had planned,” he said. Instead, he fell in love with M&A and gravitated toward private equity because of the sophistication of the clients.

Nevertheless, he sees similarities between his practice and the one his father has. “As a trial lawyer, one of the things you need most is to think on your feet and come up with positions and defend them. You’re not arguing before a judge, but you’re in a live negotiation, so those skills are quite similar.”

And, he added, his father modeled “an incredible focus on hard work. My dad has had a very accomplished career, and he’s towards the end of his career, and yet he still burns the midnight oil, works weekends, is always on calls.”

Listen to the podcast with Shaun Levor below:

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