February 23, 1996

A State Senate committee backed a bill yesterday intended to protect New Jersey motorists from tougher motor vehicle emission standards until other states in the Northeast also impose tougher standards. The bill, approved by the Natural Resources and Economic Development Committee, says New Jersey should not put tougher standards into effect until three of the four neighboring states of New York, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and Delaware (or both New York and Pennsylvania) also enact tougher standards to meet the Federal Clean Air Act.

Reed Smith Shaw & McClay, a 118-year-old Pittsburgh law firm, had consciously avoided the costs and competition in New York. Last year it hired an international lawyer, Alan A. D'Ambrosio, away from the New York firm of Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis and put him in charge of a new Reed Smith office in Manhattan. "We realized that we could never get a reputation in the international arena without a New York office," said David W. Christopher, Reed Smith's chief administrative officer. Pitney, Hardin, Kipp & Szuch, a 150-lawyer firm in Morristown, N.J., opened a tiny New York office two years ago to serve one domestic client. Now it is expanding that office, in hopes of wooing foreign business. "Offshore clients won't even consider you unless you are in New York," said Clyde A. Szuch, a partner.

WHAT, other than unrealized Presidential ambitions, could Jesse Jackson and Ross Perot possibly have in common? Sympathetic phone calls to Felix G. Rohatyn, it seems. Independently of each other, those two political mavericks from opposite poles commiserated with Mr. Rohatyn, the New York investment banker and public watchdog, after he was forced to pull out of the running for the No. 2 seat on the Federal Reserve Board. "They both said, 'We're terribly sorry that you're not going to be there because you could have made a difference, but we understand why you withdrew,' " Mr. Rohatyn recalled in the Rockefeller Center offices of Lazard Freres, where he is the managing director. "Now, these are clearly not men with the same philosophical point of view. It is, I think, a terrible indictment of the system."

Until this week, Jamie McDermott seemed to be on a straight and clear path toward becoming the programming chief of a major television network. And she was moving fast. She may still be on that path, but it is no longer so straight.

Clinton Renames Greenspan And Fills 2 Fed Vacancies President Clinton renominated Alan Greenspan to a third term as chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and filled two other vacancies with appointees considered unlikely to strongly dispute the chairman's strategy of slow growth to control inflation. One is the budget director, Alice M. Rivlin, nominated to be Fed vice chairman, and the other is Laurence H. Meyer, an economic forecaster.