Sheep get sheared; pigs get fat; hogs get slaughtered.
- Theodor Geisel (1904-1991)
The minute I opened the email I got a sick feeling in my stomach - an immediate recognition this was just the beginning... The first little move that would set a chain reaction in motion, destroying everything I'd worked on for the last few months.
From: _______@______________.com
To: ________@______________.com; ______@______________.com
RE: Statcorp Settlement
Statcorp is refusing to assume the liability on any future claims arising from the Global Processing venture. Their counsel simply refuses.
No shit he refuses. I'd refuse as well, on principle - on the basis I wasn't about to go back and run through days of due diligence for a pointless, gratuitous demand.
Our client didn't have any risk of litigation accruing from the Global Processing venture. It was barely involved, and the project barely got off the ground. Hell, it was our client's refusal to go forward with its duties under a broad agreement with Statcorp - including the Global Processing venture - that caused Statcorp to sue it in the first place. Statcorp's complaint was an ironclad defense to any future claim. If anyone was wronged as a result of something Global Processing did, all we had to do was hold up Statcorp's own allegations, stating our client had refused to put a drop of sweat equity, let alone a single red cent, into the thing.
Still, Ellis, the partner assigned to finalize the settlement with Statcorp, pushed forward with the demand, putting the whole thing at risk, for no good reason. They'd sued our client for millions and we were getting rid of the case for nickels - barely nuisance value - and here he was, laying the proverbial straw on the camel's back, seeing if there wasn't some way he could muster defeat from the jaws of victory.
A few years before, when I still thought law was a rational trade, I'd have lost my mind - flipped out and gone running down to Ellis' office, begging him to lay off, capitulate... think of the minimal upside and the enormity of the potential loss. "Damnit, Ellis, if you keep pushing these people they're going to call the whole settlement off and roll the dice in court." Not now. Now I just smiled, laughed to myself and ran the odds in my head. Sixty/forty the settlement implodes. If Ellis and opposing counsel get bitchy with one another, trying to prove who's smarter, seventy/thirty.
Ellis was brilliant - a master of the mechanics, the law, and the art of structuring agreements. The problem was all that focus on the technical details blinded him to the practical realities of the negotiation. He didn't seem to understand, no matter how much leverage you think you have, there's always a point of no return - that one step too many, straight off a cliff. Some people get it. They understand that whether it's haggling over the price of landscaping services, a new set of tires or a multimillion dollar corporate dispute, if you get ninety five percent of what you want, but your opponent refuses to buckle on that last little bit of your demand, you take the deal and run. Some people don't. They only know what they want - all of what they want - even if they don't really need it, and they'll put their ninety five percent gain at risk just to push for that last little bit of gravy.
This allergic reaction to compromise is common in litigation, or any business involving zero sum games and rampant neuroses. People get locked into the idea of beating the other side so badly they forget that any resolution where you're doing better than the opponent, even by the smallest increment, is a "win." Once things are moving in your favor in settlement negotiations, the battle isn't between you and your adversary anymore. It's between you and your ego, greed or insecurity - finding that line where you've clawed all you can from an opponent without frustrating him to the point that he says, "Fuck it. You're an asshole. Let's just try the goddamn case."
Most of the lawyers who know how to find that line would credit the ability to mentoring or experience. But that's not all of it. Most of it comes from a sixth sense, knowing when you're pushing things too far, when you're on the edge of collapse. It's like that rapid drop in air pressure you feel in the moments just before an initial burst of lightning kicking off a sudden thunderstorm. Remember when you were a kid playing baseball and a voice came out of nowhere saying "Put down the aluminum baseball bat" seconds before a bolt crashed into center field? Sort of like that. Sure, some of it's acquired. A partner can school you on the nuanced ways to "find the line" in the world of litigation, but chances are you already had most of the basic skill set before you were eighteen. The only trick was having the good sense to listen to your instinct. Maybe you learned to follow that the way I did - at high school keg parties.
* * *
"Shit!" I felt the car's undercarriage grinding against the rocks as the nose dropped into the ditch.
"What are you doing?" My friend Nolan appeared at the window a minute later.
"I can't drive stick."
"You're kidding, right?"
He had a point, I guess. If you're going to steal a car with a manual transmission, it's probably a good idea to know how to drive one.
"I didn't know it was a fucking stick until I got in it."
"That doesn't explain why you drove it into a drainage rut."
"I pushed the wrong pedal. It got away from me."
"You thought the fucking clutch was the brake?"
"I don't know. The lights were in my eyes."
"When that pedal didn't stop the car, you didn't think 'Hmmm, maybe I should hit a different one?'"
"Here, you drive it. Wear these." I started peeling off the driving gloves on my hands and getting out of the car. "No fingerprints."
"No way. You've probably ground up all the fucking gears in the thing. It won't even move."
"Fuck it. Get out of the way." I slammed the gas and threw the car into the first gear that grabbed and gunned it out of the ditch. The combination of gears crunching together and the underside shredding along the ridge of the gulley made a horrible sound, but the wreck eventually leapt forward, bucking its nose into the street, back onto the blacktop. "Meet me in the next parking lot, wherever it is." I screamed out the window.
"Grab that tape!" Nolan yelled back.
"What?"
"The INXS tape that was playing in the car. I love that record."
"Right! First thing on my list!" You fucking idiot. We'll be lucky if the cops don't come around the corner and pull us over on principle, just for driving away from that fiasco up the road. I turned up the tape deck in the car. Sure enough, "Kiss the Dirt" came out of the stereo. He's got sharp ears. I wonder if he already hears the sirens.
We were running from a keg party up the street, at the house of a girl I'd been seeing at the time named Chelsea. Her parents had gone away and left her home alone, assuming a seventeen year old was adequately responsible. They were wrong. She promptly threw a keg party. Half my high school showed up and as they always tended to, a huge brawl erupted.
I remember standing in the kitchen, sipping a beer and bullshitting with a buddy when I heard this amazing crash and suddenly all the glass in one of the sliding doors off the family room was falling to the floor. Apparently some students from a local community college had crashed the party, and one of them grabbed some munghead's girlfriend's ass. The munghead, one of those goons who went to parties looking for fights, threw a bottle at the college student, missed him and took out the plate glass door. Realizing they were grossly outnumbered by the munghead and his friends, the college student and his buddies jumped through the shattered glass and ran for their car outside. The goons chased them across the huge rolling yard, catching up with them just outside a garage fifty yards down the driveway. Then the beating ensued.
Normally a fight wasn't a big deal. Every high school had a couple big, angry assholes who'd get loaded and pummel a dork or two at every party for some trumped up reason ("disrespecting" somebody's girlfriend; cutting in line at the keg or "cracking wise" when the mook accused the geek of giving him a dirty look). It was a ritual - a form of expected entertainment. No matter how dull the party was, you'd always get to see at least one good beating before the end of the night. Looking back, it was probably a Pennsylvania thing - desperate, drunk douchebags in a hick state with no other avenue for anger expulsion.
But this fight -- this was different. Nobody knew these college kids, so nobody felt sorry for them and stepped in to get their back, to break the melee up after a few black eyes and some battered self-esteem. I remember watching the group of meatheads knock two of the college students to the ground, then form a ring around the poor bastards, stomping and kicking them as they shielded their faces. No, this wasn't a standard high school fist fight. This was a Rodney King battery, with all the broken jaws, shattered eye sockets and broken noses that go along with a crazed mob attack. The breaking point for me was hearing two of the goons pass by, talking about chasing one of the college students who'd escaped into the woods around the property. "I have a flashlight in my car, and a baseball bat. Let's get the fucker."
"We have to get out here." I turned to Nolan.
"But the keg's not done."
"This thing's going to get busted." At the time, probably because they nothing better to do, local police had a habit of breaking up high school beer parties. Their standard procedure was to block the entrance to the property with one patrol car and post another just up the street, to arrest anybody driving away. No matter the town you were in, the rule was always the same - if you heard the sirens and saw the lights, you were done.
"No it's not. We're in fucking the middle of nowhere." Geographically, Nolan was right. On its face, based on the surroundings, there wasn't a chance in hell of the party getting busted. The house was set back in the woods, at the end of a long winding driveway, and the property was ringed with huge trees, blocking any view of the dozens of cars and trucks parked inside. But that was just the obvious empirical evidence. Nolan was missing the elephant in the corner... Somewhere in the woods a college student was sprinting for his life -- scared insane, wired on adrenaline and racing from a certain, horrible beating. The mungheads chasing him were loaded. They'd tire and he'd get away, and once he got loose we were cooked. He'd run into the nearest house or business in town, panting, babbling to the first people he saw about maniacs chasing him through the woods and pummeling his friends in a drunken frenzy. They'd immediately call the police. The sirens would come; it was only a matter of time.
"Doesn't matter. One of those kids escaped, and he's going to get to a phone sooner or later."
"It's a long walk to town. I'm getting another beer."
"He's running. Make it fast."
To Be Continued...
Posted by PhilaLawyer at 9:05 AM