u- ate of Harvard Law who was still boyish-looking well into his thirties, had helped try the I974 antitrust case as one of the youngest partners in the history of the venerable Sidley & Austin law firm, AT&T's out- side litigation counsel. Zeglis moved to AT&T after the suit was settled and swiftly became the company's general counsel, overseeing its law department and government affairs. Few outsiders understood the nuts and bolts of Tough Calls the telephone business better-he had literally studied engineering diagrams of the telephone network in his trial preparation. He ab- sorbed the intricacies of arcane regulatory accounting with the relish of the champion Trivial Pursuit player he is. And he approached de- bate with all the enthusiasm of the brightest kid in the class. As the ultimate gamesman, he calculated that it was time for AT&T to stand for something and not simply be against anything that the Bell compa- nies proposed. (No one knew how much longer Greene-then seventy years old-would be on the bench, and the company's opposition to any kind of telecom reform legislation had begun to sound shrill and whiny.) AT&T would be for getting back into the local phone business it had been forced to leave when the Bell System was dissolved. And once it was in local telephone service, AT&T had no objection to letting the Bell companies into long distance. But not before. AT&T's chairman at the time, Bob Allen, was decidedly skeptical about the whole idea of getting back into the local phone business. Among the top officers of AT&T in the mid-1990s, he alone had actu- ally run a local telephone company. He knew how complicated it was, and he also knew that its profitability depended on cross-subsidies that would never survive in a competitive market. But as a tactic for postponing the inevitable, he was willing to argue for breaking the Bells' bottleneck on local service. So Zeglis and his lobbyists managed to turn the Bells' efforts to win permission to offer long-distance ser- vice into a legislated checklist