Herb Cohen, the author of ‘You can Negotiate Anything’ and once labelled ‘the world’s best negotiator’ tells a story about negotiating the purchase of his own house. Apparently, his family was so intent on acquiring this particular home that he feared being divorced and having his children never speak to him again if the deal did not close. As Herb told the story, since walking away from the deal was not an option, he was unable to negotiate even a nickel off the purchase price.
Tag: attorneys
Happy Law, Sad Law
I often find myself speaking to law students and young lawyers who are having difficulty deciding what area of law they should practice. I also hear from older lawyers lamenting their original choice and thinking about making a change.
For a bunch of smart people, many of us lawyers choose how to spend most of our waking hours in some pretty dumb ways.
Leverage
Early in my career, I represented a franchisor of retail bakeries. As is commonly done, my client leased premises from commercial landlords and subleased them to its franchisees.
Since my client was not particularly good at what they did, they frequently made mistakes. On one occasion they missed the deadline to give notice to renew a lease.
The Big Picture
At one stage of my career I did a great deal of work for a franchisor of bakeries. If the truth be known, my client was not exceptionally good at the franchisee selection process. The franchisee qualification process consisted of providing evidence of a bank account and a heartbeat.
Professional Negligence 101
Once upon a time, one of my litigation partners had a field day suing a very senior partner of a reputable law firm in the Toronto area. I will call that defendant “Max.”
The crux of the matter was that our client, who I will call Sue (appropriately, because that is what she ended up doing to Max) was involved in the sale of some shares of a corporation to the other shareholder. When Sue did not get paid, she came to see if we could do anything about it. When my partner asked Sue whether she was represented by counsel in the sale transaction, she identified Max as being her lawyer.
Spouses often both own shares in a corporation that operates a family business, sometimes because they are both active participants in the business, and sometimes as part of an income splitting or creditor protection plan.
I once had a partner who was a “heads down, get your work done” type of guy. Knew his law. Billed like a fiend. Not much of a people person. Let’s call him Ken.
Few lawyers would disagree with the statement that “law school does not teach you what you have to know to be able to practice law.” I imagine that the general public would find that to be surprising. It is called “law school” after all.
I have many thoughts about family business succession. Here are a few of them:
Many of you will be familiar with the old saying (sometimes attributed to John Adams and other times to Winston Churchill) to the effect that “if you are not a socialist at age 20, you have no heart, but if you are still a socialist at age 30, you have no brain.”