Recently, my colleague Sujit Indup has been spending a lot of time inside a courtroom in downtown Manhattan.

It has been like quite a spectacle.

Sujid is the FT's Wall Street editor.

In the case he's been watching pits the two founders of a powerful investment bank against their former star banker.

In the courtroom, these otherwise high-powered Wall Street finance people who have been

effectively at war for literally a decade, they are finally getting the chance to confront

each other in court and settle this blowup from 10 years ago.

Yep. You heard that right. Ten years of bad blood. This trial, Sujit told me, has been offering a rare peak inside the inner workings of a firm that's brokered the sales of some of the

biggest companies in the world.

I mean, investment bankers are very discreet people, though how they actually work is

mysterious.

What happens in boardrooms is mysterious.

What advice they give to clients is mysterious.

And then how they manage their firm and all their personalities within the firm. The case has thrown a harsh light just on these internal

rivalries and dynamics. This decade-long conflict has raised major questions about how power

and pay are metered out within this pocket of high finance. Every major firm is grappling with this issue of how do you retain talent, motivate talent,

but then how do you also get them to fit into a culture?

And from the banker's point of view, how do you meet your own personal goals in a large group,

or do you have to go start your own firm or go to a smaller place?

And those are universal dilemmas.

And this case is really the scenario when all that doesn't go right.

I'm Mikala Tendera from the Financial Times.

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