For those of you who never watched Boston Legal, my all-time favourite television show about lawyers, Denny Crane was the senior partner of Crane Poole & Schmidt.
Tag: articlingstudents
Obviously, it would be utterly impossible to comprehensively address the topic of ‘Why I Hate the Law Society’ in the depth that it so richly deserves while complying with the LinkedIn limit on the length of a post. So, I will try to just hit the high points.
So, what exactly do I hate about the Law Society? Primarily its arrogance, and the high-handed nature of its decision making.
I suppose that the initial reaction of a law firm client to the question of how they can be a great client may be, “Why should I care?” I certainly met my fair share of clients who could not possibly have cared less about whether their lawyer thought that they were a great client.
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Lawyers Know Everything
Since lawyers tend to think that they know a great deal more than they do about just about everything, they often choose to do things themselves rather than pay money to experts to do them.
One of the things that lawyers typically do poorly is performance reviews.
Bob, Ted, Carol, and Alice own a company. They have a shareholder’s agreement. The only divorce mechanism is a right of first refusal (“ROFR”).
Bob wants out. He goes to Ted, Carol and Alice and asks them to buy his shares. They refuse. They tell him to use the ROFR.
When I was young, so much younger than today, I completely bought into the fairy tale that the best and brightest lawyers are all at the large law firms and that everyone else is just not that good. After all, they practically teach you that at law school, although they never quite say it aloud, so I imagine that they have plausible deniability.
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The Hat
My father had a rocky start to his career. There were many years at the outset of his working life when he did not make much money and struggled to pay his bills. When creditors would call, he would explain to them about the payment hat. He would tell them that once a month he turned his fedora upside down and put all of his monthly bills in the hat. He described how he would then mix the bills up and pull them out and pay them until the money ran out.
Finally, he would warn the creditors that if they kept calling him and annoying him, their invoices were not going into the hat.
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The Quebec Shuffle
Many years ago, Maurice called me to complain about a legal bill that he had received. Fortunately, it was not me who had drawn his ire, although I was his primary legal counsel.
Maurice’s accountant had convinced him to go to a meeting with Peter, a very sophisticated tax lawyer, to discuss something called the ‘Quebec Shuffle.’
Back in the 1990’s, the Standard Chartered Bank out of the UK opened a subsidiary in Canada called the Standard Charted Bank of Canada and set about making commercial loans.
One of the Bank’s customers was a client of mine who I will call Sol. Sol had a line of credit for his business of about $3,000,000, back when $3,000,000 was a lot of money.
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Dancing Close to the Ethical Line
Since I moved to the country after spending most of my life in the big city, I fashion myself as something of a country type. I drive a pick-up truck and I listen to country music. So, it should come as no surprise that I am drawing inspiration for this story from Johnny Cash who proudly proclaimed that “I Walk the Line.”