"Reid Snellenbarger's Lazard firing raises a heap of questions"

efinancialcareers.com:

It's rare that an investment bank pushes the ejector button quickly, but last week, Lazard managed to do an investigation, fire a managing director, and pump out an all-hands email signed by the incoming CEO announcing his defenestration between Friday evening and Sunday afternoon. Impressive. 

What did he do wrong? To be clear, I have no personal knowledge of Reid Snellenbarger, or the incoming Lazard CEO, Peter Orszag who sent the email. Nor do I know what allegedly happened at the private party over the July 4 weekend, where Snellenbarger allegedly engaged in inappropriate touching among Lazard colleagues. But based on my own experience of working on Wall Street and being hired by various firms, I know that this kind of alleged behavior has become very unusual. 

Twenty years ago, that wasn't the case. Pre-2000 and perhaps pre-2010, it was common for older male employees in finance to proposition female employees with varying degrees of seriousness and persistence. Christmas/holiday parties and summer outings with the interns at a beach/pool/lake or an after-softball-game beer bash could be a petri dish for bad behavior. Drinking, dancing, once-a-year imagined «opportunities», could all take flirtatious banter over the line. A lot of firms stopped holding parties as a result. 

Times have changed. In 2023, it's incredibly hard to imagine why a senior banker, who just got a huge reputational promotion by moving from Houlihan Lokey to become head of restructuring at Lazard, with potentially a lot of restructuring business coming up in the next few years, would decide to take a risk by inappropriately touch someone among his colleagues at a party. If such an alleged event occurred, I would think that would take a lot of