Back in law school, my criminal law professor told us that our job would be to use every bit of our intelligence, ingenuity, and strength, and to work tirelessly, to deliver the best possible outcome for our client. “But,” he told us, “if at the end of the day, someone has to go to jail, make sure that it is your client.” He was warning us not to become so zealous in our representation of our client that we crossed over the ethical or legal lines.
“Don’t tell me what you value, show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.”
~ Joe Biden.
It used to make sense to me to try to scare businesspeople into wanting to pay legal fees. I would tell them one of my many stories about clients who started a business without including an adequate budget for legal fees.
I liked some of my partners all of the time; most of my partners most of the time; and one or two, almost never. I suspect that my partners, as a group, had similar sentiments about me.
The first thing to know about being a partner in a law firm is that you do not have to like all your partners all the time, but you are supposed to pretend that you do.
By Maureen T. Mckay
In an earlier article in our series, Murray Gottheil quoted these words from Leo Tolstoy: “all happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
The sad truth is that there is unhappiness in all families, and many families do not like to share their secrets. Working with these families on business succession requires professionals to be trusted, and, as Arthur Ashe said, “Trust has to be earned, and should come only after the passage of time.”
By Maureen T. McKay
One upon a time, I had a client named Jack, whose mother had granted him a Power of Attorney (“POA”). Some years later, Mom’s capacity became questionable. Jack’s sister, Jill, wanted to have Mom create a new POA in her favour that would terminate Jack’s POA. The future of a family business hung in the balance. Someone was likely to come tumbling down the hill. The dispute made quite a few family members unhappy, and quite a few lawyers a lot of money.
“A dysfunctional family is any family with more than one person in it.” ~ Mary Karr
In an earlier article, I wrote about taking responsibility for planning for the succession of our personal and business affairs and threatened that Maureen McKay and I would write subsequent articles to explore this topic.
My wife, Maureen McKay, is the love of my life, so it is only natural that I want to be sure that she will be well taken care of when I pop off. And since I am now 70 years old and she is quite a bit younger than I am, it only makes sense that I would try to put some things in order to make it easier for her to go shopping when I nod off for the last time.
Sometimes when I consider what tremendous consequences come from little things, I am tempted to think there are no little things.
~ Bruce Barton
I used to ask my litigation partners how it felt to issue a Statement of Claim and ruin someone’s day. Mainly I wanted to annoy them, but I also thought that it was a useful reminder that the things that we do as lawyers can have serious consequences for other people.
There was once a mid-sized law firm that wanted to develop a specialty in a niche area of litigation.
At the bottom level of that specialty, there were general commercial litigation lawyers who wrongly thought that they knew enough to be competent. One step above, there were lawyers with a decent reputation who gave good, creative, advice and achieved decent results most of the time. And then there were the Tier One superstars. Big reputations, high billings, and in demand for the most difficult assignments.