Playing both sides of the street.

• Position: Lawyer Patrick Daugherty

During his nearly four years at the Securities and Exchange Commission, Charlotte lawyer Patrick Daugherty got the inside scoop on Wall Street's insider trading.

Daugherty was an associate at a Wall Street law firm in 1986 when he landed a job as counsel to SEC Commissioner Edward Fleischman, just a few months before the first major insider-trading charges were brought. [The post] was regarded by everyone as a plum assignment," he says. "It turned out better than I bargained for."

His job was to advise Fleischman, one of five commissioners appointed by the president to steer the agency. Over four years, SEC investigators (who report to the commission) worked with the Justice Department in nabbing more than 100 investment bankers, lawyers and arbitragers, including their flashiest catch, Ivan Boesky.

Daugherty's stint at the SEC didn't sour him on the fast-track financial world, though. "I don't blame Wall Street for any of the scandals that developed," he says. "Even some of those indicted and convicted - [Drexel Burnham Lambert financier] Michael Milken in particular - have done vastly more good than bad." (Milken virtually created the market for risky, high-yield junk bonds.)

Daugherty also served on the crisis-management team pulled together to handle Black Monday Oct. 19,1987, the day the Dow Jones industrial average dropped 508 points. "I remember it almost minute by minute," he says. He and other staffers stayed on the phone all day to the large brokerage houses, whose computers at the time were more advanced than the SEC's, and they met with Congress members well into the night.

Raised in small-town Sacketts Harbor, N.Y., Daugherty was the first person in his family to go to college. He graduated from Northwestern University in 1978 and Cornell Law School in 1981. After a year as a law clerk to the chief federal judge in New York, he joined the Wall Street firm Shearman & Sterling and practiced corporate law. He worked across the street from his father-in-law, Peat Marwick Vice Chairman Cliff Grace, now retired.

Daugherty decided to return to private practice last year, but he wanted to stay out of the shadow of his influential in-law. "It was a version of go West, young man,' he says, except he headed South to practice corporate law at Parker Poe Thompson Bernstein Gage & Preston in Charlotte.

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