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Jim Malernee of Cornerstone Research, and “a leech on a maggot”

Cofounder of Cornerstone Research, and an old friend

About this entry

This is Jonathan Hare's account, with its provenance shown. The person or organization named has not yet claimed or corrected it.

Person

Who this is

A cofounder of Cornerstone Research and, with Cindy Zollinger, one of the two people who hired Jonathan Hare into the fourteen-person firm in January 1988. A long friendship followed.

He later dated Jeanne Bayless, whom Hare had worked with at Blyth Software — one of several places in this record where a professional relationship and a personal one turn out to be the same graph seen from a different angle.

The record

Where this intersects the work

Each entry below carries its own provenance — the source, and how it was processed. That is the condition on which this graph can be extended by anyone without degrading.

The trail exists so that people who were there can reconstruct their own memories, recognize what they helped incubate, and add to or correct the record — or forward the few pages that belong to someone they know.

1990s

“A leech on a maggot”

Hare was invited to a roast for Malernee's birthday — colleagues, clients, and a good many people he had never met. The roastmaster, a lawyer, opened by asking what a litigation consulting firm actually is.

His answer: a leech on a maggot.

The consultants were the leeches, extracting millions to build expert testimony for cases that almost never reached trial. The lawyers were the maggots. Hare's assessment, then and since, is that it was entirely apropos and he enjoyed it enormously.

The billing supports it. One case for Goldman Sachs ran to eight or nine million dollars for a single client — the defense of Robert Freeman, the firm's head of risk arbitrage, for which the analysis was Hare's.

Hare's accountHare's account, recorded 2026 — source record S-038
late 1980s–90s

What the firm was actually feeding on

The Boesky prosecutions. Rudy Giuliani, then US Attorney for the Southern District and with an eye on running for office, pursued more or less anyone with a connection to the risk arbitrage business — particularly anyone who had traded with Ivan Boesky or with the man Boesky was paying in suitcases of cash.

That is a great deal of very expensive, very technical litigation, arriving all at once, requiring exactly the quantitative expert testimony a fourteen-person firm full of economists could supply. It is why the practice was lucrative enough to be spun out of its parent, and it is why Hare's résumé landing in the wrong pile mattered.

Hare's accountHare's account, with historical context
The graph

Connected from here

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Provenance

Where this came from

Everything above is a distillation. The primary source is published in full, so that any claim on this page can be walked back to what was actually said — and where the two differ, the source governs.

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What is missing, and how to fix it

This entry is deliberately incomplete. The gaps below are the things only certain people can settle — and settling one is a contribution like any other: recorded, timestamped and attributed to whoever made it.

If you were there

Correct anything wrong, add what only you know, or claim this entry as your own. Write to evidence@qpncatalyst.io and Jonathan directly (both are on the button) — a timestamped confirmation comes back with your submission attached, as your own independent record. No account, no permission, no institutional standing required.

Public contributions earn Publicity Premium; bringing others who were there earns Cascade Premium. Everything is valued retrospectively as outcomes verify, so nothing has to be priced up front.

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