Leadership1 publisher2 min readPublished
Cantor Fitzgerald's relief fund keeps a president and a general counsel 25 years after 9/11
The Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund's 25th-anniversary anthology records how the firm built its duty to 658 families into job titles, an annual service and one interview question, and puts no figures on the cost.
The Board Room · Leadership desk
What happened
- Cantor Fitzgerald lost 658 employees on the morning of September 11, 2001, more than any other company, after the first hijacked plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Center.
- The Cantor Fitzgerald Relief Fund has published "The Families: 9/11 Anthology of Love, Loss, and Lessons of Resilience" to mark the 25th anniversary of the attacks.
- The book is edited by Edith Lutnick, the fund's cofounder, president and executive director, and Caroline Aiken Koster, the fund's general counsel.
- Koster interviewed with General Counsel Stephen Merkel while the firm was moving out of donated temporary space into offices at 57th Street and Lexington Avenue.
- The firm's annual memorial service ends with a video in which hundreds of 2001-era photographs scatter and then reconfigure into the words "Always Love" and "And Remember."
Compiled by The Board RoomSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- cost The anthology puts no dollar amount on the profits sharing, the fundraising or Charity Day, so a firm treating Cantor as a template for supporting bereaved families has no price to plan against.
- constraint A duty that outlasts the tenures of the people who incurred it has to be carried by hires who were not there, so continuity rests on staff whose connection to the loss is second-hand.
- decision The only screening standard in the record is whether the candidate cares. Any firm standing up a comparable function has to decide what it can test for consistently.
- precedent A relief fund still carrying a president and its own general counsel a quarter century on sets the expectation that corporate response to mass employee death is a standing function with officers and a fixed annual date.
Forty-eight minutes is how long the reading takes. That is what Cantor's annual 9/11 service needs to hear the names of the lost and see their photographs, and 2,880 seconds divided among 658 people comes to about 4.4 seconds a name [14][17]. Koster writes that when the reading ends, nobody leaves their seats [14].
Her essay sets out why no rescue was possible. Cantor's headquarters occupied the 101st through 105th floors of One World Trade Center, American Airlines Flight 11 struck at 8:46 a.m., and the offices were above the impact zone [2]. "No assistance could reach them," Koster wrote [2].
Cantor and the Relief Fund share her. She is a senior corporate lawyer for Cantor and its public companies, and general counsel of the Relief Fund [12].
She dates the overlap to her arrival. When she started, all efforts, among them fundraising, profits sharing and Charity Day, "were directed at rebuilding the firm for the purpose of supporting those families," she wrote [16].
Keeping the fund's counsel inside the firm's legal department ties the obligation to the business that pays for it, and it makes continuity depend on individual tenure rather than on a separate institution with its own staff.
An obligation this long has to be handed to people who were not there. Koster joined by July 2002, roughly ten months after the attacks [6][18]. A colleague warned her the job "would be like working in a graveyard" [8]. Her friend Arlene Fried, a law firm colleague who had become in-house counsel at Cantor, died that day [9]. The screen she describes was one question from then-chairman Howard Lutnick: "Do you care?" [10] "I care," she said [11]. The question she now gets from strangers is "Were you there that day?", and her answer is that she was not, that her tenure is 24 years and not 25 [13].
Koster names fundraising, profits sharing and Charity Day without a dollar amount, a count of families, or a term of years [19]. What the account does support is narrower: the duty was written into two officers' titles and one fixed annual date, and it has held for the 24 years she has worked there [4][12][13].
What to watch
- Whether the Relief Fund's public disclosures attach figures to the profits sharing, fundraising and Charity Day that the anthology leaves unquantified.
- Whether the fund's leadership passes from its cofounder and its 24-year general counsel to people with no tie to 2001, and what hiring standard replaces "Do you care?"